How Does Your Garden Grow? Depends on the County.
First, I will admit that Colorado vegetable gardening is probably way easier than most other states'. We don't have a lot of bug, pest, or moisture problems. We've been supremely lucky here in that we can spend a full day planting stuff, then spend minimal time maintaining it, and yet we still get a really good yield. It's very nice.
Sure, we could do a lot more and possibly get better results, but our hands-off approach has worked so far.
The bad thing, of course, is that our growing season is so short. We can't plant until May, and our first freeze occurs in late September or early October. We get three less growing months than most other regions in the country.
Since we've decided - or more correctly, when I overruled Anna's motion to have a fire-pit - to start planting veggies I can say that we've learned an awful lot about food, plants, and farming. I can tell you why cilantro is a pain in the butt, yet so inexpensive to purchase. I can tell you ten different ways a tomato plant can fail. I can tell you that cucumbers grow like weeds, even if you don't water them. If you like tomatoes, there is nothing better than going to a cherry tomato plant that grew naturally from the seed of last year's batch of cherry tomatoes and eating them fresh off the vine. I can tell you that Plants that attract bees guarantee garden success. I can tell you how to make excellent compost, and how having foxes that visit your backyard are very helpful in gardening endeavors.
I can also easily say that during our summer and spring months, we eat much better in that we eat so many fresh fruits and vegetables. It doesn't seem like there's much of a downside to having a vegetable garden, unless you factor in the risk that it could completely fail. It hasn't happened to us yet, but it would definitely be maddening to have a spring's worth of effort yield zero results.
I would fully support any educational program that taught kids how to garden, how plants grow, and where vegetables actually come from - and how much work it can take! It's useful knowledge - probably more useful than a lot of the stuff they teach kids in school these days. The only downside here is that vegetable growing requires patience, which a lot of kids don't have. But those that stick with it - I can imagine a child cradling a tomato all the way home to show mom and dad.
So when I read an article that features a quote like this:
"As you know," she wrote, "food-bearing plants attract pests. Maryland law restricts the use of pesticides on school grounds. Therefore, planting of food bearing plants is prohibited by MCPS."
I laugh. Any chance at learning is ruined by the chance that what... a rat could show up? And then possibly bite someone and then the school district could be sued? Our society is ridiculous.
The Unsurprise of Wal-Mart
A long time ago, I wrote about the phenomenon that occurs when people buy things. It seems that a person who spends more money on something will be convinced that it is better - simply because it was more expensive. I obviously tend to believe this study because we don't generally buy expensive things. Clearly I'm biased.
This morning I read about Wal-Mart's attempt to ... go green by supporting local farmers and produce.
This was then followed up by an article by a foodie, Corby Kummer, who has an unfortunate name but writes for The Atlantic.
He has a lot of the same contempt for Wal-Mart that seems to befit people who identify with the progressive, left side of politics. Or should I say - he had. He was impressed enough with Wal-Mart's offerings to actually hold a blind taste test between them and organic, local produce from Whole Foods.
This is probably my favorite quote from the article:
“They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.
I think that's true of a lot of people and businesses.
In Which Meat is Discussed
It's time to renew our farm membership!
We joined Monroe Organic Farm in 2008 - and apparently just in time. Members are grandfathered in at their original price when they joined, which means that for $200, we get a constant, weekly supply of more veggies than we can eat from mid June to late October. Now that I've learned how to can, and Owen is morphing into a grade-A vegetable consumer, this is a great thing.
But, before you call me a liar, let's get to the meat! They're offering sides and quarters of beef. For the sake of this particular rant, I'm going to assume that our family of two-and-a-half omnivores will not be able to eat two-hundred pounds of beef in a year, and so a side of beef will not be discussed further. But a quarter of grass-fed beef? I'm tempted, even though in order to facilitate this, I'd have to find a butcher, and buy a bigger freezer.
It's tough to calculate value on this, since cattle vary in size and weight, and you're not necessarily going to get formulaic X strip steaks, N filets, etcetera. But if I assume that a quarter of beef yields a meager ninety pounds of deliciousness at a cost of $450, which I am not sure covers butchering. That's $5 a pound without butchering. Let's say that the butchering fee is $300 - which seems about average in my initial research - ninety pounds of healthy, grass-fed beef is $8.33 a pound, and that includes ground meat, roasts, steaks, tips - all of it. That isn't a bad deal, other than it's more than the two dollars a pound we used to pay for pre-ground meat. Grass-fed beef at King Sooper's (which is Kroger) is about eighteen dollars a pound for strip steaks - it seems like you make out pretty well in this deal.
They also do hogs, or as is the custom today, they are called "free range pork". This pork is more marbled and has a lot more fat - and hence more flavor. It's only $250 for a half hog - a half hog yields twenty pounds of pork loin, a five pound pork butt, ten pounds of bacon, sixteen pounds of ham, four pounds of spare ribs, and fifteen pounds of pork sausage. That's $3.50 a pound, pre butchering costs. That would support one hell of a barbecue!
The foodie and hippie in me wants to do it, but this is all ignoring the fact that we don't have a freezer that can store 160 pounds of meat. Yet. I feel like I should start saving up.
Forest for the Trees
On 5 December, we went with our friends the Adams's to get our first family Christmas tree.
For the first few years we lived here, Anna and I went to a tree farm to get our tree. It was a small farm, and they usually had coupons that came in those mailer things that you can't stop getting even if you opt out. You know, the one with all the pictures of babies on vent and HVAC cleaning ads? Because everybody knows if you don't get your vents cleaned every day, your child could possibly inhale something.
Last year, we went to our tree farm to find out that it was no longer there, and instead there was a shiny new shopping center. We did what any normal American would do in this situation - shopped in the new shopping center. Then, afterwards, we went to one of those parking-lot tree sales places and got a pretty good tree for not too much money. And it was alive, too!
This year, we did something really cool: on a tip from the Adams's, we purchased a permit to go into Pike National Forest and cut down a tree. We got a baby carrier from Craigslist, strapped the boy to my back, and hiked into the forest about twenty feet and a climb in elevation of about twenty feet before starting to pant heavily. Not only am I horribly out of shape, but Owen is also quite heavy.
The tree we got - not really sure what it is. It's pine of some flavor, with pinecones as a natural ornamentation, and no squirrels or birds in it. It's a little less thick than some of our other trees we've had, but it's cool because the whole family hiked into the forest to get it. Would do again - pictures here.
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Pictures in July
Weekend mornings are Anna's chance to catch up on some sleep. I usually take Owen first thing in the morning and spend a few hours hanging out with him. At about eight o'clock he falls asleep in his swing and I get some morning quiet time, where I usually catch up on e-mail or survey the garden. This morning I took the camera out and took a few pictures of the garden.
Last weekend, however, we learned we had a family of foxes living in our back yard. I knew we had at least one at some point over the winter - now there are four foxes living in our backyard. One morning when I was watching Owen, I looked out through the window to see two fox cubs playing on some of our rocks outside. One of them had caught a mouse and they were playing with it. Then, one of the cubs went into my vegetable garden, and that's when things got less friendly. At that time we thought there were two - then later last week, Anna saw three cubs and a possible mama outside. It's fox central!
Colorado has the "coexistence" policy, so animal control won't do anything until one of them attacks a person or does something otherwise threatening. These guys are pretty shy - if I open the patio door, they go scurrying away over the fences. I would list "digging in my vegetable garden" as a threat. It will be at that point when I go buy an air rifle and sit out in the backyard in sniper gear. But for now, they keep the bunnies away and they aren't hurting anything, other than certain spots in my yard where they pee. But in other spots, they poop, which helps! So - yeah.
The garden is doing pretty well now that manbearpig has managed to string together a bunch of warm days in a row. You may be a little surprised at how tame our garden is this year. Here are some comparison pictures: in 2007, 2008, and 2009. The first year was an experiment that went very well, the second year was ... overenthusiastic, and the third year, well, we'll see how it goes. So far, so good.
Owen is really starting to grow into a little man. He's talking up a storm, he's large, and he likes trying to stand up. He's also very, very, very loud. Like air-siren loud.
Things and Such
Been a bit busy lately.
We've had a very non-Colorado spring and early summer - it rained every day for about three weeks with 60-70 degree temperatures. This has affected our veggie garden - you'll note that there is no veggi-blogging!
In the past week, however, we've had some ninety degree days, which the veggies have loved. The funny thing is that this year, we put down black plastic over the soil which has a dual purpose. First, it means we don't have to weed, except for the areas around the plants. Second, it means that it heats up the soil and traps moisture, creating a mini-greenhouse at the soil level. According to the Colorado State Extension, this can increase our yield up to 50%, and increase our growing window by a full month.
Unfortunately, because we had such a cool May and early June - the things I've done to increase yield will probably just bring us to where we'd be if we'd had a normal season and I hadn't put the plastic down. Oh well.
So that's a garden update.
In other news, the other seed we planted is:
Garden Update
The garden has gone a little nuts!
Our tomatoes have easily breached the tiny gates of our cages and are all over the place. In hindsight, we planted them a little bit close to each other. We have probably a hundred green tomatoes on the vine and one retarded tomato that is bright red. On Saturday we picked eight squash, a zucchini, some jalapeños, and about four large cucumbers.
Oh, and we're still getting stuff from the farm - more stuff than we can possibly eat. Over the past two weeks we've gotten 28 ears of corn, more potatoes and onions, more squash, and more cucumbers. We also get other stuff we're not growing, but there's still a lot of stuff. We've been pretty vegetarian this summer. I hear that's kind of good for you!
Mega Italian Squash
Got our next farm shipment yesterday. Included in the farm shipment is a squash the likes of which you've never seen. Oh - you wish you've seen something like it - but we both know you haven't:
An Alien Plant
"What the hell is a Kohlrabi?"
This is:
We started getting out farm shipments yesterday. We joined Monroe Organic Farms. We got butter lettuce, some other kind of lettuce, some fresh peas, some onions, and ... kohlrabi? Imagine being on an alien planet and being handed a plant that has purple bulbous growth and these weird purple spaghetti-stems. We honestly didn't know what to eat, the leaves or the root!
Turns out you can eat both, but you're only really supposed to eat the root. So we peeled the purple off of the root and cubed it and put it in salad. Not too shabby. It tastes cabbage-y, but maybe a bit sweeter. Neat.
I think this picture works a little better, because you see it as it grows - how weird is that? What dude went up to this plant and was like "ARR NUMM NUMMMM!"
Garden Update
We babysat Alex when we were gardening. As such, when we were planting the garden initially - and by we I mean me - there were not many pictures of the planting part. There are, however, tons of the littlest Jones.
So this afternoon I went out and took a bunch of pictures of the garden as it stands. It's doing well - we have a lot of seedlings that took off, and a lot of seedlings that died almost as soon as we put them in the ground.
We also have bonus plants - seeds that grew up that I tilled under at the end of last season. So not only are we going to have a lot of tomatoes this year - we're going to have a lot of tomatoes.