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I just took a footprint quiz. If everyone lived like I do we would need 2 1/2 planets! It’s because I eat meat and don’t have access to public transportation. So I wanted to know, what can I do to be a better person? Well, I can eat less meat and visit this website and start buying their environmentally friendly products… like disposable diapers.

Hey. As long as we’re all on the same page.

I borrowed Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest from a neighbor nearly a year ago and only just started reading it the other day. Its a book I’ve been aware of for a while as a gardening classic and now I know why it is so loved and recommended. If you are even a little bit interested in growing your own food you’ll be ecstatic about it after you read this book. Okay, maybe you have to be a little more than a little bit interested to reach ecstasy but I’m pretty excited. If it weren’t so darn hot today I’d probably be outside laying out garden expansions. Perhaps I will simply peruse some online seed catalogs and make plans for my late summer and fall plantings.

Actually its a little hard for me to sit on my hands right now because I want to put all of the Coleman’s (his wife, Barbara Damrosch, is also a writer) practices into use right now but I’d have to destroy my current crops in order to do that fully and I’m not giving up all of those promising green tomatoes to do it. Plus, that would just be silly and its not the intention of the book to force you to start from scratch. If you are starting from scratch they give you some excellent plans to follow for doing that.

I am going to stop pulling the clover out of the beds. If I could find seeds quickly (and for free at this point in the month) I’d be out there throwing down more seeds so that the entire bed could be covered in clover. Clover is a ‘green manure‘ that organic growers use to protect soil. Clover stores nitrogen and can later be turned for soil improvement. I think the term used for the practice of planting it along with your vegetables is ‘under cropping.’ Farmers who are certified organic are required to use clover or other cover crops for overwintering their fields.

Basically by using this practice in your garden you are choosing a weed you and your tomatoes (for example) can live with which in turn helps to keep other weeds at bay and improves your soil at the same time. I actually saw a picture in a magazine of some tomatoes under cropped with sweet alyssum which was lovely and apparently there is a pest that the alyssum keeps away as well. I don’t know alyssum would actually improve the soil in any particular way though - I haven’t found anything outside of pest control which is no small matter by itself (I wonder if you could mix alyssum and clover and have the best of both worlds?).

So, get yourself a copy of Four Season Harvest or head over to Four Season Farm. The book has been around long enough that your local library probably has a copy.

A lot of people feel (well, know) that the term ‘organic’ doesn’t mean what it used to since the government got a hold on it. Many small scale farmers have turned their backs on the word since the government has started making exceptions (organic sugar is above $3/lb? That’s okay, buy the regular stuff and we’ll still call it organic). I noticed a new term the other day… ‘authentic food.’

‘Authentic’ could mean a lot of different things when it comes to food. I suppose it would depend on to whom you were talking. There is a company called ‘The Authentic Food Company‘ but their shtick seems to be authentic as in authentically Italian, or authentically ‘oriental’ (yeah, that ‘oriental’ thing is a topic for another post). What I think the term means in the context I originally saw it in is the same thing that organic used to mean. It used to mean that you didn’t put chemicals on your crops or in your chickens and you didn’t raise anything in a way that was destructive to the environment.

Words lose their weight when you dilute their meaning. ‘Organic’ has become white noise. The only thing I can count on when I buy organic bread now is that it doesn’t have high fructose corn syrup listed in the ingredients. But I wonder if they can put that in when regular sugar is too pricey??

The kids and I worked on some garden maintenance this afternoon before Coleman’s baseball game. Since the spinach had gotten overgrown and isn’t really good for salads anymore I’m chopping it in my food processor and freezing it in little blocks like you can buy at the grocery store. I added chopped spinach and garlic to some alfredo sauce and it was a big hit, even with Scott who is still not the greatest vegetable eater ever.

I stumbled across this great blog by Kenny Point. Veggie Gardening Tips is all about Kenny’s organic, ornamental AND edible garden. There are scads of postings on plants that are beautiful as well as edible and, of course, tips on how to grow them. His Top Ten Reasons for Growing Vegetables is a lot of fun (and more encouragement for those just getting into food production).

I planted okra this year. Mostly because I got a packet of seeds as a gift, but also because it makes me think of my Uncle Clifton. Okra is a southern favorite and I think Uncle Clifton was probably as southern as you could get in Northwest Indiana (it’s my understanding that it was his dream to return to Kentucky to live). Seeing my uncle bring okra in from their huge vegetable garden is my only memory of okra from childhood. We certainly didn’t eat it at my house - I would have instantly turned my nose up at it. My only actual experience with okra was deep fried from Brown’s Chicken with LOTS of ketchup. It was pretty mediocre as far as culinary experiences go. I’ll be more daring with it at harvest this time.

After reading Kenny’s entry on growing okra I’m on my way out the door to see if I can transplant mine. Somehow I missed that it grows 4-5 feet tall! It would make a quick and lovely screen to hide anything unsightly. I realize now after looking at some pictures online that this is the same plant that I marveled over planted out in front of the Rennselaer Dairy Queen once.