Tag: daycare activities

• Why did we pick all these tomatoes when they are so green and so small?

   

  

   

  Turn them over for an unpleasant surprise:

   

  

   

  What we have here is blossom end rot. What a disappointment! After some research, and talking to other gardeners in my life (namely, Uncle Loren), I learned that this unfortunate condition occurs for mainly two reasons:

   

  1). Uneven watering

  2). Lack of calcium in the soil

   

  After the kids and I properly mourned our first harvest of tomatoes (for we had watched them since they first began to bubble out from their blooms and had very high hopes!), I set out to learn how to enrich the soil with more calcium. I found a lot of advice online, including feeding the plants with bonemeal, bloodmeal, and even Tums! Which makes some sense, since they are made of calcium. Eyeing the Tums container in the cabinet and wanting a quick fix, I almost followed that advice, but I just couldn’t. It seems like logical advice, and perhaps we’ll try it if we need to later, but for now I felt like there was just too much at stake for experiments…we really really wanted to save our tomatoes! So, I resisted the urge to head out and stuff Tums into the ground, and instead waited until I had a chance to go to the gardening center (aka Lowe’s) down the street to look for something else.

   

  Lowe’s has a nice little selection of organic plant feeds and sprays, which I find encouraging. Of course, the chemical selection is 4 or 5 times bigger, and the types of promises on those chemicals’ packages are quite enticing. Grow huge vegetables, eradicate any and all types of pests and diseases! I feel fortunate, however, that as a novice gardener, deciding to start out organically, I’ve never had a taste of the chemicals’ quick fixes and I don’t know what I’m missing. I am simply not interested in them.

   

  Even in the organic section, looking at the labels carefully is important. I had my mind set on bloodmeal when I headed to Lowe’s, even though the name makes me shudder. I looked at a couple different brands, both of which boasted “cow-free” blood, which I thought strange, so I looked at the ingredients: 100% porcine. How is pig blood any better? And where was this pig blood coming from? I was feeling woozy at this point, and realizing I hadn’t armed myself with any of the arguments of what type of blood is better, or with any knowledge whatsover about using bloodmeal (does the blood come from CAFOs?), I looked for something entirely different. I realize the importance of bloodmeal and bonemeal to organic gardening (I have read about the use of these two morbid-sounding substances countless times in sources I fully trust), but at the moment I was feeling completely unprepared to make any decisions.

   

  This package caught my eye (was it the giant tomato?):

   

  

   

  The one and only ingredient? Well-composted chicken manure. Plenty of calcium, among other plant goodies like nitrogen and phosphate. In fact, the percentage of calcium in this plant food was higher than in the blood or bone meal. Score!

   

  We fed the tomatoes by putting our fingers down into the soil around the roots to make small wells, putting a tablespoon full in each well (4 wells per plant), and smoothing it all back over. Then, of course, we gave the tomatoes a drink.

   

  But what about that water? What is ‘uneven watering’? Have we been watering the tomatoes too much, or not enough? Since we had been giving the garden a drink every single day, my instincts told me perhaps we could try watering every other day.

   

  Since we’ve implemented the new watering plan, and fed the plants, we’ve watched for healthy tomatoes every time we enter the garden. We still see this:

   

  

   

  And we also see tomatoes with less severe rot:

   

  

   

  AND! We have been finding beautiful tomatoes with absolutely no blemishes whatsoever!

   

  

   

  I think we may have hope!

   

  Now, I do want to mention something. We had been picking those black-bottom tomatoes as soon as we spotted them and tossing them into our compost bin. I felt like the plants would be wasting energy to continue growing a bad tomato. Lately, though, we leave them alone. For one thing, blossom end rot is not a disease that will effect any other tomato or the plant itself. It is a condition that effects only that particular tomato. The plant will potentially grow unblemished tomatoes simultaneously. For another thing, those tomatoes do not have to be wasted! Once they get large and ripe, the bottoms can be cut off, and the tops will be perfectly good. Since we want as many tomatoes as possible, we thought we’d let the tomatoes grow and see for ourselves if this is good advice.

   

  Hopefully we’ll see some red, soon!

• Foraging

  

   

  Along with planting and growing food, it is an amazing experience to find edible goodies in nature. Whether you love finding mushrooms, berries, or edible weeds, it really is possible to supplement your meals with foraged food. Or at the very least, you can find a great snack!

   

  Meet our mulberry tree. It lives in the backyard, was probably ‘planted’ by a bird years ago, and it has been loaded with beautiful plump berries for a few weeks.

  

  The kids have all been searching for the perfect berries when we go outside, and each day we get a nice amount in our bowl.

  

  

   

  Here, Maggie and Rylee are finding lots of berries on the lower branches:

   

  

   

  And here, Simon is taking matters into his own hands when all the berries from the lower branches are gone:

   

  

  

   

  The mulberries have become a very popular snack around here, especially with 2-year-old Noah. We have found that if he gets ahold of the daily stash of berries, you will NOT be able to get near them without a fight!

   

  

  

  

   

  He is fiercely protective of his foraged snack!

   

  Finding berries on trees and bushes around your back yard (as long as you are certain about what they are and that they are in fact edible) is just the beginning of becoming a forager. Many books about gardening and living more self-suffiently/sustainably will have whole sections on foraging, and if you begin researching and learning what to look for, nature hikes will take on a whole new meaning.

   

  And, you don’t even have to go far into the wild to forage. What about your neighborhood? Are there any fruit trees that you notice on walks around your city streets that bear fruit…fruit that ripens and eventually falls to the ground to rot? My neighbor across the street has a plum tree that produces way more fruit than she can use. In fact, her plums become a nuisance in her driveway when they start to fall. She is more than happy to share the fruit with anyone who wants to come pick it. My boys look forward to her plums every year! You’ll find that many neighbors will be glad to share food that would otherwise go to waste. I’ve read about ‘neighborhood fruit tree mapping’ in a few books, and this site is an example of how it works:

   

  http://neighborhoodfruit.com/home

   

  See if your city has a system like this set up. Google your town along with ‘fruit tree mapping’. My city doesn’t seem to have an official fruit tree registration set up…which of course gets my mind working…I’d love to start one up myself! 🙂

   

  While it may not be quite the same as mushroom hunting or wild berry picking, foraging for food in the ‘wild’ of your neighborhood streets is an idea that’s catching on.

   

  If you just have no luck with the foraging idea, it’s also very fulfilling to go to a local pick-your-own farm. Kids ADORE going to PYO (pick your own) farms! Usually for a very fair price, you’ll leave with loads of berries or produce. A google search can help with finding farms in your area that allow you to come pick to your heart’s content. Here is a site that will get you headed in the right direction, at least:

   

   

  http://www.pickyourown.org/index.htm

   

  Maybe you’ll be surprised by something in your backyard, like we were. We never knew those mulberries existed until last year, and we have lived here 9 years! Take a look around, and look closer to your left and right the next time you take a walk through your neighborhood–you may just find a sweet surprise. Happy foraging!

   

  

  

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• Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

  This is the book that really started me on my journey of gardening. It reads like a fantastic novel, but is filled with facts and eye-opening struggles involved with our current food system.

  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

  My rating: 5 of 5 stars

  After renewing this book over and over from my public library, they finally want it back. I can’t bear to part with it! I will be buying my own copy, which I anticipate reading and referring to until it’s quite shabby.

   

  Barbara Kingsolver sets out with her family to spend a year eating food within a 100 mile radius of her rural Virginia home. Whatever she and her family don’t grow or produce themselves, or cannot be found from local sources, they will go without. There are a few exceptions made at the onset (coffee being number one). However, the exceptions don’t detract from the project as a whole. Starting in April, the family goes week by week, month by month, eating what is in season and available locally. The goal: to prove that an ‘average’ American family can be part of the locavore movement successfully. Kingsolver acknowledges that most families do not have access to the land like her family does in growing food, so she focuses portions of the book on farmer’s markets and community supported agriculture (CSA’s) as well.

   

  The book reads like great fiction, filled with passion. Kingsolver is a gifted writer who breathes immense life into every story she creates, and this ‘true story’ is no exception. Each of her family members has a place in the book, as well. Her partner, Steven Hopp, includes timely, researched essays on pertinent issues effecting our current food economy (and points to valuable websites and resources for further info). Her oldest daughter, Camille, writes a section after each chapter with humorous observations and recipes (even though at times she comes across as strangely smug beyond her young years, and at times is downright annoying). The youngest daughter, Lily, while not credited as a coauthor like the others, is a huge presence within the family’s story as she learns to raise chickens and gains incredible passion about every growing project as only a young child can.

   

  I was surprised to read that the family intended to eat some of their own chickens (for some reason I pegged Kingsolver and her family as the vegetarian ‘type’…not the first assumption she shattered for me). I read about the process of butchering the chickens (and the turkeys), and was not horrified like I expected–Kingsolver brings humanity and respect to the life cycle of these animals–raised by her family with the best poultry life possible.

   

  Kingsolver introduces the reader to many of the families surrounding hers, who all play a part in the community. The idea of community is a central theme in this book, as Kingsolver and her family branch out with their neighbors, speak personally to area farmers, and learn valuable lessons from those in their little corner of the earth.

   

  If I tried to outline every important fact I learned from this book, the review would take up pages. Each time I flip through the pages another powerful idea pops out at me, and continues to inspire me on my own journey to attempt a more sustainable lifestyle.

   

  I finished this book months before I finally wrote a review about it, because it affected me so profoundly. I couldn’t seem to find the right words to describe how the book altered my perspective about many things in my life. Perhaps I am biased because Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors, and this a book about a subject very near and dear to my heart (sustainable living). Or maybe the book touched me because so many pieces of the story brought back strong memories of my rural past: details that I once found boring and unbearably quaint were unearthed with a new passion and desire to reconnect to my roots. I read other scathing reviews about the book that accused Kingsolver of being sanctimonious, but all I can feel in her words is pure passion, at times, wry humor…and a consistent sense of realness. This is not your typical ‘gardening book’, it is a book that has the ability to change your life.