Preserving...

I grew up in a household that canned: Every fall, my mom dragged out the pressure cooker and canning kettle, and went to work on the tomatoes, corn, and peppers from my father's large kitchen garden. (He was an excellent gardener, but never saw fit to include children in his past time.) Reading this article brought to mind those steamy August and September afternoons helping my mom in the kitchen, but it also dug up memories of my grandmother's root cellar, located in the basement of the wash house on her turn-of-the-century farmhouse where she lived the better part of five decades. When she died, the shelves were still full of large, half-gallon jars with produce from her small plot out the back door. The smell down there was always odd but not unpleasant: the mineral scent of the limestone that provided the foundation and floor, the sourish smell of pickles and sauerkraut, the scent of fabric softener and bluing from upstairs.

No real need for a root cellar here in Florida, except for making beer. Actually, I think if we had one we'd use it more in the doldrums (August and September) than the winter, when there's plenty groing fresh in the garden.

Food Storage as Grandma Knew It
The Worleys, like a number of other Americans, have made the seemingly anachronistic choice to turn their basement into a root cellar. While Ms. Worley’s brownstone basement stash won’t feed the couple through the winter, she said, “Ithink it’s a healthy way to go and an economical way.”

According to a September survey on consumer anxieties over higher fuel and food prices from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames, 34 percent of respondents said that they were likely to raise more of their own vegetables. Another 37 percent said they were likely to can or freeze more of their food. The cousin to canning and freezing is the root cellar.

Supermarket Chains Narrow Their Sights

The trend deepens and broadens...

Supermarket Chains Narrow Their Sights - NYTimes.com: "Some independently owned, small-to-medium-size chains have been selling extensive lines of local seasonal fruits and vegetables for years, lines they are now expanding.

For the largest supermarket chains, though, where for decades produce has meant truckloads transported primarily from the West Coast, it’s not always easy to switch to the farmer down the road.

But soaring transportation costs, not to mention the cachet customers attach to local food, have made it more attractive not just to supermarkets but to the agribusiness companies that supply them.

Growers like Dole and Nunes have contracted with farmers in the East to grow products like broccoli and leafy greens that they used to ship from the West Coast. Because of fuel costs, in some instances the cost of freight is more than the cost of the products."
[...]
Hannaford Brothers, with 165 stores in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts, has always sold local produce, but in the last two years its customers have pushed it to offer more. “There’s been a 20 percent increase in sales” in the last year, said Michael Norton, a company spokesman. “Our research tells us consumers have about five or six reasons for wanting local: freshness and taste; keeping farmland in the community and having open spaces; a desire to be close to the food source and know where it comes from; support of local farmers and keeping money in the community. Embedded in all of this is concern about food safety. All this creates pretty powerful interest.”

Since the advent of modern grocery, retailers have dreamed of getting rid of produce altogether. Veg and fruit present all sorts of difficulties from a perspective of efficiency and cheapness, and what's more, the markup was minimal if not a net loss for the store. A shift in perspective on the part of the consumer could, perhaps, change all that. Local food has a cache and character that industrial food lacks. That added value, combined with higher transportation costs forcing retailers to source locally, might do communities a world of good. I might be accused of mercantilism or autarky, but our mantra, for everything from energy to broccoli, should be:

Shorten. The. Supply. Chain.

Anarchy!

Path to Freedom:
"Since the early 80's the Dervaes family has slowly transformed their ordinary city lot into a self sufficient urban homestead.

View an eco-pioneers life on an urban homestead as this family shares their homegrown revolution, being the change they wish to see by living the solution."

Queering the front yard...

I spent a long, hot Saturday helping my friend Mark transform his front yard into an edible landscape. We have something like a labor cooperative -- everyone shows up for a few hours on a weekend, and pitches in on a project. Company makes the drudgery into a pleasure.

We had some help from Tony, who started it off with a few layers of newspaper to defeat the St. Augustine. Tony minces. The girls have no idea what to make of it.



Then a thick layer of pine bark nuggets in the sunniest part of the yard, for a small fruit grove.


On the east side of the yard, which gets just a bit less harsh Florida afternoon sun, we put a yard of mushroom compost.


A civilized break. Guava pastries, espresso, and lots of cold beer.


We also put up a fence to give the yard some structure. In the grove, we planted Persian Lime, Meyer Lemon, Red Dragonfruit, and a Dwarf Cavendish banana... oh, and some dwarf, weeping mulberries.



Mark loves Caribbean cuisine, so we put in my idea of an island summer garden: Sweet potatoes, lots of hot peppers (Tabasco, Habanero), Sun Gold tomato, some Okinawan Spinach (not very Caribbean, of course, but we needed some greens!), basil, oregano and cassava. It'll take a few weeks to fill in, but with all the sun and water, things will be overgrown by mid-July.




I'm most excited by the Dragonfruit, which I've never grown myself. We got it at Edible Nursery in Daytona, which has a pretty good selection of fruits for our zone.



Since Mark's property is on a hill, the fence took a lot of time to get right. The three of us spent about eight sweaty hours digging holes, cutting posts, spreading mulch and compost, and cleaning up.

This is just the beginning. Mark's yard get a LOT of sun, with west and south exposure. There's a perfect spot for a big avocado tree, and plenty of space for a bit more citrus, a peach tree or two, and maybe a tropical apple or two. We need to add okra and crowder peas to his summer garden.

Mark was inspired at least in part by an article by Michael Pollan in the "Green Issue" of the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago. Faced with the seemingly overwhelming challenges, and frankly the apocalyptic possibilities, of global climate change, Pollan asks "Why bother?" When the problems are so big, can individual action really make a difference? Isn't it like feeling guilty for the flood downstream because you pissed in the river? Pollan makes a great argument, one that derives much of its worth from something Wendell Berry said about four decades ago in a book I dearly love (and one of the reasons I garden now):

And they have seen that these public absurdities are, and can be, no more than the aggregate result of private absurdities; the corruption of community has its source in the corruption of character. ... Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.

There is something so sensible, so logical -- but at the same time, so humane and patient in the way that Berry writes. We must "begin the effort to change."

Pollan claims that we should bother, we must do something, that our individual choices and stances can ramify through culture -- he cites the example of Vaclev Havel and Adam Michnik, who decided during the deep funk of communism in Eastern Europe, to just act as if they were free. Their personal example "created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc." It's a bit of an overstatement, but there's truth in it.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

We must "begin the effort to change" somewhere, and where better than in our own front yards?

Valencia oranges...

Valencias are the last juice crop of the season. I helped a friend glean her small grove, and came away with about eighty pounds of Valencias and a few dozen old-fashioned yellow grapefruit. The juice from the oranges is a vibrant deep yellow, almost pumpkin-colored. It's sweet but has a nice acid kick, too. Truly, the best orange juice I've ever tasted.

Blueberries in Florida

On impulse, a friend and I stopped by a u-pick blueberry farm outside Ocklawaha. Five bucks a pound for some delicious berries. It took, maybe, five minutes to pick three pounds. My wife made an absolutely amazing pie.
It's hard not to love Florida in April.

The Orange Diaries

This site is modestly funny, though it smells mildly of a big corporation's sweaty attempt to be cute and folksy.

Still, I sympathize with their cause -- it ENRAGES me that, in my local Publix, it's hard to find frozen OJ concentrate from Florida, or that I have to go out of my way to get local juicing oranges, or that my blueberries in April come from Chile. I realize that it's a complex, economic system: Publix needs to compete with WalMart, so it searches for the least inexpensive possible necessities, like OJ concentrate from Brazil. And because of wage differentials and inexpensive (relatively) energy, Brazil can produce juice more cheaply than Florida, where groves are being turned into subdivisions. But it is enraging that we here, in Florida, do not, on principle, drink orange juice raised here, by farmers whom we know who buy their equipment from workers whom we know. In theory, I believe in free trade and international commerce; but when it comes down to my own personal preferences and instinctive beliefs, it almost always turns out that I prefer to buy local, even when it's not in my own economic best interests.

Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change - New York Times

Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change - New York Times: "The biggest animal rights groups do not always overlap in their missions, but now they have coalesced around a message that eating meat is worse for the environment than driving. They and smaller groups have started advertising campaigns that try to equate vegetarianism with curbing greenhouse gases.

Some backlash against this position is inevitable, the groups acknowledge, but they do have scientific ammunition. In late November, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.

When that report came out, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other groups expected their environmental counterparts to immediately hop on the “Go Veggie!” bandwagon, but that did not happen. “Environmentalists are still pointing their fingers at Hummers and S.U.V.’s when they should be pointing at the dinner plate,” said Matt A. Prescott, manager of vegan campaigns for PETA."

Local U-Pick farms..

A list of East-Central Florida You-Pick farms.

Tropical Corn

I'm going to give a shot at growing a small patch (sixteen square feet) of sweet corn this fall, sowing sometime in August, hopefully harvesting some ears for Thanksgiving. After a lot of searching, I chose Silver Princess Hybrid, since it offers very early harvest, good disease resistance, and sturdy plants. I poked around the 'net for advice on growing corn in a sub-tropical climate (which ours is, kind of...) and came across this great picture of tropical corn in Peru from Breeding Field Crops.

Corn used to be grown extensively here in Central Florida, but that period ended with the Lake Apopka cleanup effort, which involved buying out hundreds of acres of field, many devoted to corn. The phosphorous and nitrogen run-off from these farms, combined with degraded wetlands caused by wanton development, destroyed the ecosystem supporting Lake Apopka,. When I moved here at the end of the 1990s, wading birds were (no exaggeration) falling dead from the sky and Apopka's shores were lined with dead bass...

There is at least one farm -- Scott's -- around Zellwood, FLA, which grows significant crops of corn, and, even though I wince at the ecological harm and the amount of pesticides and fungicides, I buy some every fall and again at the end of spring. Zellwood grows seriously good corn, for sale from the backs of pickups on byways at fifty-cents an ear. One of our family fall/spring traditions is to hold a shrimp boil made of Zellwood corn, potatoes and freshly-caught shrimp. We also find the time to visit the Zellwood Corn Maze in October to buy pumpkins and corn.

Local food culture...

I'm reading Bill McKibben's new book, Deep Economy. I haven't been terribly impressed so far -- Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry are far more eloquent and sophisticated in their analysis and criticisms of modern farming-food culture, but McKibben understands better the unsustainability of the whole of modern American economy.

Berry says somewhere that it's a sign of how far removed we've become from the most primal experiences of life when children know where babies come from, but not potatoes.

"Eating is an agricultural act."

I spend a fair amount of time in the garden with my children, talking about how things grow and reproduce and die. And trying to share with them the wonder and awe I have for all things living, even the writhing mass of maggots in my compost bucket. They're usually out there with me planting seeds or helping harvest cukes and tomatoes. My daughter loves to pick snapdragons and make them ROAR!

From this morning's Times:

Local Food 101, With a School as His Lab

By GERRI HIRSHEY

BLOOMFIELD

TALL, bald and of robust appetite, the chef Timothy Cipriano is casting an appreciative eye at the young free-range chickens clucking in their moveable, open-air run outside the Agriscience and Technology Center at Bloomfield High School. “By fall, I can give you three dozen eggs a week,” predicts Joseph Rodrigues, the agriscience teacher who oversees greenhouses, raised-bed gardens and a set of big, burbling aquaculture tanks.

“Fantastic. We’ll do frittatas,” Mr. Cipriano murmurs.

The two men are amiable and enthusiastic co-conspirators. Mr. Cipriano, the food service director for the Bloomfield school district, is also a committed activist for the Connecticut Farm-to-School program, which advocates serving students fresh, locally grown and sustainable food. He is clearly delighted by Mr. Rodrigues’s next promise: “We’ll be raising tilapia. It’s a good, mild fish the kids like. I’m hoping to give you a couple of decent harvests.”

Having cajoled a few students out of study hall, Mr. Rodrigues has set them to transplanting heirloom tomato seedlings in the greenhouse. He walks between potting benches reciting tomato varieties: “Moskovich. First Ladies. Juliets. The Great White ... .” The crops also include snap peas, leeks, broccoli rabe, carrots, herbs, lettuce, arugula, okra and squash. Crews of volunteer students will tend the beds over the summer, with early harvest going to a local food bank.

Students also test recipes, from watermelon gazpacho to Mexican pizza, and Mr. Cipriano has gathered the favorites in a self-published compendium intended for the delectation of “Not Your Average Lunch Lady.” His most popular dish is Squapple Crisp, a toothsome bake of winter squash, apples, cinnamon and brown sugar topped with crushed cornflakes. Has he had some losers?