Harvest time again!

Last year by this time, I was harvesting and storing as fast as I could go, listening to "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" on cd to keep motivated, and delivering bags of fresh produce to the local food bank every week.  But, if you read my spring posts, you know we had delays and frustration, and the weather was very cold during early summer.  So, we are definitely eating lots of yummy fresh food these days, but not giving much away. 

Here's part of the veggie garden, looking toward the pumpkin patch.  You can see that we harvested and tilled two of the raised beds, and the last one was just planted with winter broccoli.

The bees have been working all over our garden, but the honey super is empty.  We removed the queen excluder, hoping they would start building some comb on those frames, but it seems like we might not get honey this year.

If you look carefully at this shot, you can see that our tomato plants are laden with beautful GREEN tomatoes.  If they do finally turn red, it will likely happen all at once, so I'll be trying to find ways to use and store all of them.  My fear is that they will just begin to go bad, without ever ripening.  Everyone I know has had the same tomato trouble this year, blaming it on the cool early summer temps.

One new thing we did this year was to hand-pollinate our cucumbers and squashes.  Anouk learned to do it very well, so she helps to keep on top of it.  I feel like I have a much more intimate relationship with my vegetables.  It's interesting to see the female flowers open, waiting eagerly for some action, then to look for the male flowers, with their very male anatomy, and to intervene on their behalf.  Sometimes a plant will have a ton of females, with no males in sight, and other times it's the opposite.  And it is always sad to see the withered fruit of a female that was never pollinated; a loss of potential food.  Since we started hand-pollinating, we have so many more cucumbers, it's amazing!  And they are absolutely delicious.

I thought I would end with a photo of one of our Romanesco Cauliflowers, because this has to be my favorite thing growing in the garden right now.  Isn't it fantastic?

More thoughts on meat...

While dismantling a chicking this morning, I was thinking about our transition to eating meat. Mike was a strict vegetarian until about 3 years ago. He was the kind of snobby vegetarian who would throw a fit in an Asian restaurant if he found out that the delicious soup he had just eaten was made with chicken broth, and who only ate gelatin-free yogurt and rennet-free cheese. I was a "flexitarian" who would occasionally eat meat in a situation where all other choices were unappetizing, especially in other cultural contexts. Our first trip to Europe was miserable for Mike. There was virtually nothing he could eat. To them, "vegetarian" meant that meat was not the main focus of the meal, or that it contained vegetables.

I began adding small amounts of meat to my diet more deliberately after finally seeing a naturopath about my tendency to black out on an almost daily basis. I had come to accept this condition as part of life, thinking it was probably a residual side-effect of semi-starving myself for 8 years as a young woman. My naturopath discovered that I was low on a kind of iron that we build in our childhood, and it comes only from meat (I hated meat as a kid). When I began to include trace amounts of meat into my diet (at first, I just drank a small cup of broth each day) the black-outs disappeared. I no longer experience the dips in my energy that I did before.

We had both chosen our levels of vegetarianism based on environmental, animal rights, and health issues. Raising our own livestock solved all of these questions, except when it comes to actually killing your meat. This part is still hard to accept, but it has become a very small part of our lives. When you raise animals at all, death becomes a part of your reality. We do our best to protect our chickens, ducks and turkeys from raccoons, but we lose quite a few each year to those ninjas. I find feathers everywhere, body parts strewn about, and I can't help but imagine the terrifying experience of that bird as it was chased and dragged to its death. We lose far more animals to this predatory demise than to our, relatively, more humane methods.

Last year, we lost over half of our chickens and a whole flock of runner ducks to predators. One of our goats became ill and died, another goat got his head stuck under the manger and broke his own neck, and our two longtime canine companions both died - one of old age and the other from the sudden development of Addison's Disease. Compared to the abundance of unexpected deaths we had to process on our farm over the last year, the one afternoon that we quickly dispatched 5 of our turkeys seemed, well, not quite so awful.

To some extent, it probably sounds like I'm trying to rationalize our meat consumption. This morning, I was doing one of my least favorite chores. After we roast a bird and eat most of the meat, I boil it to make broth and strip all of the rest of the meat from the bones. I find it really disgusting. But today, I realized that I was a bit less grossed out than in the past. I was aware of how the tendons connected, the structure of the bird, and less sensitive to the fact that I was handling the flesh of an animal. I guess I'm becoming desensitized.

The fact is, we still eat far less meat than most Americans, and I think it is plenty. We bought 10 organic, free-range chickens from Barnyard Gardens this fall and kept two of our butchered turkeys. These will last the year. Each time we pull one from the freezer, we have one special meal, some leftovers, and then broth for soup. Poultry raised on our small farms does not deplete resources the way factory farms do, they contribute organic matter for our gardens rather than adding devastating amounts of untreated sewage into the environment, they live happy and healthy lives, they are killed as humanely as possible, and we eat meat that we know is free of hormones and chemicals, and is actually far more nutritious than store-bought meat. (That's because our birds eat bugs and slugs and weeds and vegetable scraps.)

Vegetarianism is perfectly sustainable, as long as people are good at balancing meals, and making sure they choose organic, non-GMO sources. For those who choose to eat meat, I encourage everyone to avoid factory-farmed meats of any kind. The conditions are nightmarish, the environmental cost is not factored into the lower price (nor are the tax subsidies), and it is an inefficient way to grow food. With growing concern about food shortages throughout the world, we really need to eat sustainably. The population is growing, biodiversity is diminishing, and food scarcity is a reality in many places, and spreading.

Read Jane Goodall's "Harvest for Hope." The first chapter is pretty depressing, but she does offer success stories and ideas for action later in the book.

Michael Specter - Denialistic?

I listen to NPR in my studio each day while I'm working. It keeps me informed, inspired, and incensed. Yesterday, I heard that author Michael Specter would be interviewed about his new book, "Denialism; How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives." This sounded very compelling, as I am so stymied by mainstream denial of things like climate change, poverty, injustice, health care issues, nutrition, and problems associated with our current agricultural methods. I expected Mr. Specter to give everyone a good lashing.

Instead, he denounced any relationship between immunizations and autism, made a stink about people who take vitamins, and stated that we might solve world hunger by embracing genetically modified foods and reducing emphasis on organic farming.

Now, it has been six years and I have gotten rid of all of my "Immunization Research" file, but when Anouk was born, I read extensively about vaccinations. It is a very emotional subject when you are trying to make the best decision for the health of your child. I recall that every study I read was funded all or in part by an Autism research organization or pharmaceutical companies or insurance companies. Depending on funding sources, conclusions varied dramatically, so it was important to read through it carefully. Most compelling to me were papers and articles explaining how immunizations work when they enter the body, and that there are inherent, measured neurological effects. I found an excellent pediatrician who is informed on both sides of the issue, who took time to help me with this huge decision, and we worked out a vaccination schedule that I feel good about. My daughter is immunized against the major diseases (not chicken pox) and will be protected when we travel to other countries, but she was never administered a "cocktail" where they give up to 5 shots at the same time. Her doctor's main argument is that he sees far more children getting diseases from lack of immunization than children who have been affected by Autism. So, it's a crap shoot, but parents are usually making this choice after serious research, not out of deliberate ignorance.

As for vitamins, who cares? Maybe they help, maybe they don't. I personally believe that we have far better results from eating a good diet, so I rarely take supplements. My husband takes a handful of vitamins every day, and has been seeing his cholesterol improve steadily with no other lifestyle change. If he thinks it helps, I support it.

Now, the organic food question is one that gets me all steamed up. I'm no expert, but from all that I've read and heard (on NPR, of course), our stupid agricultural methods are part of what has gotten us into this mess to begin with. More and more food is grown on high-production farms, using pesticides, sold for bottom dollar. Scientists believe it is a contributing factor to the loss of about 1/3 of our commercial bee population, which then results in lower crop yield, and we are anticipating future decreases in food supply from bee shortages alone. Pesticide run-off enters our water systems, causing environmental degradation and affecting the fish we have also relied on for food. Food can be grown locally, in people's yards, on rooftops, in raised beds - I even heard about a CSA in New York where the food is grown in a truck bed. Small, organic, community farms are being cultivated in some poverty stricken areas, providing good food for the local people. (I heard about it on NPR!) Michael Specter's suggestion that we create synthetic foods with little inherent nutritional value (I believe they add vitamins) to feed to poor people strikes me as very "Soilent Green."

When a caller questioned the author on this topic, he started talking again about genetically modified foods solving the hunger problem, rather than answering her question, which gave me the impression that he has not fully researched this topic. I think he has an opinion and he's sticking to it. That's denialism, buddy.

While genetically modified food is not necessarily the same as non-organic food, I recall reading an article that explained how one affects the other. An example described two adjacent farms, both growing corn, one genetically modified to resist a pesticide and the other organic. By creating a corn variety that is not killed by this pesticide, they can spray it liberally by plane, killing the weed or bug or whatever they are trying to eliminate, but not hurting the corn. But, the pesticide doesn't just go away. The nearby organic farm gets a good dose of the spray by proximity, which takes out a portion of their non-resistant crop. The pesticide also enters the water table, so everyone else in the neighborhood gets to drink it, water their crops with it, and wildlife get their share as well.

So, obviously, I am not a scientist or an expert of any kind, and I'm writing this from memory without siting sources. But, I swear, the original sources were reliable. For Michael Specter to claim that everyone who reads the same information, yet does not draw conclusions in agreement with his own, is in denial seems superbly arrogant.

Now, if he had just made statements that I agree with, I'd say he was right on the money!