All-Around Updates

Some general updates since I haven't had time for longer posts recently!

1. Composting is going well. I discovered that the community garden where my CSA pickup is located has a compost bin as well, so no more need to haul it into Union Square! I just load up my bike with the scraps on my way to pick up the vegetables, then drop them off and go on my merry way, non-scrappy vegetables in tow. Apparently most community gardens have a compost drop off - look into it if there's one in your neighborhood!

2. The CSA itself is going well too; I like the variety and I think the every-other-week option that Hearty Roots offers is just the right amount of food for a two person household. The only snag is that I'm pretty much out of luck if I happen to be out of town or otherwise occupied on a Saturday morning...it's either beg and plead for a friend to snag 'em, or cut my losses, like we had to over Labor Day weekend. Fortunately they donate everything that isn't picked up to a food bank, so at least I can feel good about that. And for your viewing pleasure, here is a lovely picture of me mulling over corn at the pickup two weeks ago, taken by my awesome photographer friend Patrick (who's going to be doing more photos for the blog, yay!)

3. The day after I blogged that I thought cutting down on sugar was giving me more energy, I felt totally drained. It probably also had to do with being in the middle of the busiest season of the year at work, but I was downing multiple diet Dr. Peppers (which I usually never do!) to plow through. But I've been sticking with it and now I feel fine. And I discovered that peaches are even better than blueberries in Greek yogurt!

4. My landlady is apparently no big fan of my gardening attempts. I guess all the little herb pots create quite the hassle for her when she goes to sweep our porch once a week. I'd be happy to sweep the porch myself, but there's a bit of a language barrier and I'm not sure she wants to relinquish her porch sweeping responsibilities to me anytime soon...

5. My tomatoes definitely DIED. Died died died. Never even produced any little green fruits. I think it was the blight, but as my landlady liked to point out when discouraging my gardening attempts, we're on the north side of the street and nothing will grow there, ever-not-ever-never, because it doesn't get full sun. Except, you know, my herbs that are doing quite nicely.

6. Somebody stole my $2 Ikea watering can the very first day I bought it! Never even got to use it. My money's on the garden-hater upstairs. Did I mention she has the freaking Garden of Eden in our building's backyard? Rows and rows of healthy tomatoes and raspberries, which I can see every day out of my bedroom window but never ever touch...siiiigh.

7. I'm buying a COW! One quarter of one at least. Well, one fifth of one quarter, once I split it with four other beef loving pals, so I guess I'm buying one twentieth of a cow. My CSA's farm partners with a neighbor in the grass-fed animals business, and buying it directly lets us get our hands on delicious grass-fed protein for MUCH less than Whole Foods would have you pay for it. It's pretty much the cost of regular grocery store corn-fed beef, and cheaper in the case of certain cuts. Not quite sure exactly when we'll get our hands on it, but I'll do a full post when we do.

Moo.

(cow image not mine)

Basil Project - Part 3

In light of all the depressing tomato news, how about a cheery basil update?

Tada! From teensy seeds to margherita pizza-ready plants in less than two months. I even found a worm chilling out in one plant when I transplanted them into the coffee tins. No clue how it got there, but thanks Mr. Worm! Now lets just hope the Cilantro Gang isn't a fan of pesto...

Late Blight Tomato Tragedy

I just watched an episode of Jamie at Home, a beautifully produced Food Network show (DVR it, folks!) and it darn near brought me to tears. I knew I shouldn't watch it, that it would be like watching "Father of the Bride" when I'd just been left at the alter, but I did it anyway and now my heart is wrenching even more so than it had been before, all because the episode was entirely dedicated to one seasonal food: tomatoes.

It just so happens that a few hours before I watched the show I received an email from my CSA reporting that all their tomatoes had fallen victim to late blight, a disease that specifically attacks tomatoes and potatoes and is currently spreading throughout the Northeast. Behold:

The agony. The horror. You think I kid. Seasonal tomatoes (not that pink Taco Bell crap) are among my top favorite foods, and they're really only available in late summer. Caprese salad with tomatoes, basil and fresh mozzarella would be my last meal if it ever came to such a thing. When I first read about late blight, it struck me as an important issue, but other than paying a little more once tomato season rolled around, I didn't see it as something that directly affected me.

Obviously I wasn't thinking about my CSA membership. And truly, other than remembering to show up every other week to pick up my share of Hearty Roots farm's produce, I hadn't thought a lot about it. When I joined it seemed like an easy way to access fresh, seasonal veggies without leaving my neighborhood. I didn't give a whole lot of thought to the underlying idea - Community Supported Agriculture. But when I wrote them a check back in March, I was agreeing to receive a share of this summer's yield - no matter what that yield happened to be. Weather and pests and tomato killing fungi were now my issues too, whether I consciously thought about them or not.

To plenty of people, this is probably not the most economically efficient way to go about obtaining fresh produce. I could just as easily take the $250 or so that I alloted for the CSA to the grocery store and farmers' market each week and award that cash to whomever had done the best job growing whatever looked appetizing to me. Hopefully that would have included included several local farms, but if I wanted tomatoes later this season, the money would probably have to go to a grower outside my community. And while happy little me would have my Caprese salad, I would be a lot less interested in what caused the spread of this disease and what I can do about it (along with the wet weather, pathologists are eying unregulated garden centers at big box stores as the culprit.)

I'm not really a locavore (that's an issue I hope to explore later) but I do believe in supporting my local community to a sizable degree, especially when it comes to produce. While I'm certainly no economist either, I know that by paying a local farm upfront whether I receive a bountiful share this summer or not helps to ensure that next year, they won't be entirely out of luck and money because they lost this year's tomato profits. And if they stay afloat and I join next summer, hopefully I'll see some nice local tomatoes again. There's no way to tell exactly how much money I personally lost on tomatoes (which actually softens the blow a bit) but for now I'm okay with it.

On the home gardening front, I checked out detailed photos of late blight's symptoms and now I'm not even sure my Topsy Turvy plants are okay.

Only one leaf looks kinda funky (I pruned this one just to be safe) and the stem on that same plant has these brown bumps, but they don't match other photos of affected brown stems. It's hard for me to tell since this is the first year I've grown tomatoes. Any expert growers out there have any thoughts? I bought them from a stand at the Union Square Greenmarket, not a big box store.

Speaking of the Greenmarket, yesterday it looked like a lot of farm stands were selling decent-looking tomatoes on the cheap, around $2.50 per pound with "today only!" signs. I don't know if it's related to late blight - maybe they're hoping to get some profits out of their current crop before the disease does any further damage? - but in any case, you might want to snatch some up while you still can.

Topsy Turvy Turmoil

I suppose it's my own darn fault, because every time the Topsy Turvy infomercial came on the screen I'd bounce with excitement like a Mexican jumping bean. So it's really no wonder that Shaun got the growing kit for me for my birthday:

Now, I love me some tomatoes. And I love me some veggie growing. So it seems natural to combine the two, but this is apparently not without several hitches. First, our only outdoor space is on the front patio, and while our neighborhood is populated by a good number of friendly, tomato-respecting Italians, it also houses quite a few punks (clearly proven by the unfortunate fate of my cilantro plant) and I'm not entirely sure that they're going to respect the tomatoes as my personal property when harvesting time comes around. Or really even right this minute...only time (and perhaps some barbed wire?) will tell on that issue, I suppose.

Second, you have to hang the Turvys (Turvies?) from something. Since our only option for hanging them with the hardware provided involves drilling holes directly into the front of our landlords' building (that they live in...directly above us) we realized they'd have to hang from some sort of free standing plant hanger. The cheapest I found cost about $40, and I could buy a whole lotta tomatoes for that price, so we went with the DIY route.

Something of a carpenter's daughter, I decided to have at it with a nails, a saw and some 2x4s. Shaun helped, of course! The wood cost $10 and the friendly neighborhood hardware store man even gave me some free nails. Here's what we came up with:

It's actually not too shabby! These are roma tomato plants...I figured I might have more success starting out with a smaller variety, plus hopefully a teensy weensy tomato will be less tempting to passing punks. And should tragedy occur, the plants were $2 each so at least I will have gained some tomato-growing expertise for when we're better equipped to grow them. Stay tuned.

Cilantro Theft!

Well, it happened sooner than I thought. Somebody gone done stole my cilantro plant right off my front patio. So to that cilantro stealer I say: Really?? A $2.99 cilantro plant from Lowe's?! Well congratulations, because you now have yourself two hundred and ninety nine pennies worth of cilantro and two wasted weeks of my attentive care to the plant, because anyone willing to steal a CILANTRO PLANT probably does not respect gardening enough to properly take care of it. All this is assuming of course that you, thief, did not steal it purely for kicks to prove to your punk buddies what an herb-stealing baddie you are, just to toss it into a dumpster once you got down the block. And if that is the case, I consider you even more lowly than a common herb thief who at least may have wanted it for respectable guacamole-related purposes. So...there.

Seriously though, I was really surprised at how sad I was when I discovered it missing. Not only do I no longer have my favorite herb plant or the nifty-spifty bucket from Jack's that it was planted in, but I essentially see the theft as an act of horticultural terrorism because I am now afraid that anything I plant out there is going to be swiped. What to do? Defiantly continue gardening? (Yeah that's right. Defiantly. Garden.) Chain the plants up with bike locks? Somehow these don't seem to be the kind of issues most gardeners face. What of four-legged pests and cold spells? Only in Brooklyn, I suppose.

Adventures in Composting

When I started to think about gardening, it naturally led to thinking about the soil and the nutrients it contained. My Jack's 99 Cent basil plant (which is doing quite well, thank you!) included instructions that recommended adding plant food after the seedlings sprout to promote growth. Considering the whole reason I wanted to start growing things on my own was to become more aware of what goes into my food and where it comes from, I figured this should be no exception. So I started to think about composting.

I didn't realize that in addition to creating nutritious food for my veggies, composting is like recycling for food waste. It seems like food would be the least worrisome trash item next to plastic and metal and all that, but apparently when food sits in a landfill in the absence of oxygen (because of all the other waste on top of it) it turns into methane gas, which contributes to pollution and global warming. According to the EPA, landfills are the largest single source of methane emissions in the US, accounting for 34% (other major sources include fossil fuel production and livestock, ahem, waste). Eek.

Shaun quickly shot down the idea of indoor composting, primarily because he'd prefer not to have hundreds of worms squirming around in our apartment, quite literally in a worm condo. While this is apparently not particularly uncommon, I couldn't really blame him, so I started looking into other options. Short of a curbside pick up program, the likes of which will soon go into effect in San Francisco, my best option seems to be the food waste drop off program run by the Lower East Side Ecology Center at the Union Square Greenmarket. Perfect! Well, except for the part where it involves saving up all my food waste, packing it up, and carrying it on the subway to take it to the drop off point.

I don't have a scale, but after about three weeks I ended up with this bag full that I'd say weighed about as much as a gallon of milk. Supposedly the average NYC household produces two pounds of food waste a day, so maybe we produce less because it's just the two of us. The key is to store it in the freezer it so it doesn't stink up the place. (When I made my first drop off, someone asked the woman working the booth if she could freeze the scraps, and she responded, "of course, everybody does it!" which gave me a very amusing mental image of just everybody everywhere going cuckoo about frozen compost scraps!) Carrying it really wasn't that bad though, and going forward I will definitely make more frequent trips in order to free up more freezer space and not have to carry so much at once. It's also a great motivation to stop by the market for veggies more often. I usually go on my way to work since I have to change trains at Union Square anyway and they open at 8 am. If the other L train riders only knew what was in my bag...

The other glitch is that you still have to buy the soil they make out of the composted material. But it's not so very much (about $1/pound) and I'm sure they have bills to pay too, so it seemed reasonable. And, my new cilantro plant shot up immediately when I planted it in some! (Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is just what cilantro plants do regardless of soil, but it looks good to me)

Links:
US EPA - Methane Sources and Emissions
LES Ecology Center Community Compost Program (includes a list of what you can/can't compost)

Basil Project - Part 2

It's growing!

For some reason I didn't really believe deep down that something I planted, let alone seeds and soil bought at Jack's 99 Cent store, would actually grow. I was also really surprised just to see the tiny little sprouts; I can't remember the last time I saw something grow start to grow, unless you count that lima bean/paper towel project from third grade.

One snag - I left it outside overnight the other day when it stormed so loudly I thought Noah was back with a vengeance, and woke up to some slushy dirt/basil/rainwater stew. I drained the extra water out, but the wee little sprouts got jostled around quite a bit in the process. Again, fingers crossed!

Basil Project - Part 1

One of the things that had me the most excited about moving into our apartment in Brooklyn is the front patio...outdoor space to grow things! Now mind you, I've never actually grown anything, but the concept of not having something in a pot and then sunlight, water, boom, bang, produce (or so I hear) is fascinating to me.

While I'm still planning a larger(ish) expedition to a garden center, I happened upon this all-in -one basil kit - at Jack's 99 Cent store in Midtown of all places - and for $5, (I've been hard pressed to find a single item for 99 cents in that store) and considering $5 is about what I'd pay for a pre-grown basil plant at a farmer's market and it came with the nifty-spifty bucket, I figured I'd give it a go.

Fingers crossed!