The phrases urban agriculture and urban farming answer the where and the what, but not necessarily the why of food production. Some urban growers are producing for personal use (which could include sharing their excess bounty with friends, neighbors and coworkers) while other growers are producing food as part or all of their household income stream.While these two groups take very different approaches to growing, watching Curtis Stone's Profitable Urban Farming workshop intro showed me that the personal grower can learn from some of the strategies and efficiencies of the income grower. We are both working to grow food so a little cross pollination (pardon my pun) of ideas can be beneficial.In this 42 minute video he gives an overview of his commercially successful urban farm in Kelowna, BC. For income growers, there are a lot of interesting ideas presented. He has an innovative strategy for land acquisition that is essentially OPP, other people's property. He rents portions of front, back and side yards from homeowners in his city within a 1 1/4 mile of his home to grow his produce.A very interesting strategy he uses that can be adapted for personal growers is how he categorizes crops as either "quick" or "steady". Quick crops are crops that are ready to harvest in less than 60 days. Steady crops are those "cut and come again" crops that take longer but provide a more sustained harvest. With his 5 growing plots scattered across 1 1/4 mile, he grows his quick crops in the plots closest to him, since they need to be visited more often for planting, rotation and harvest. He plants his steady crops in the furthest plots to since they only need to be harvested once or twice per week.Personal growers can adapt this concept and plant their baby greens and lettuces in the part of their garden closest to the house and plant the squash and onions in the far part of the garden since they need less regular attention.For growers looking to build or expand their business, this video is packed with information. For personal growers, there are some great tips on layout, harvesting and drip irrigation that can be implemented in home gardens.In addition to this workshop intro video, he has a lot of other videos on his YouTube channel worth perusing for both income and personal growers.
Hello, My Name Is...
This year will be my fifth year as an urban food grower. It will also be my fifth attempt to create plant markers that are still legible at the end of a growing season. With 52 varieties of annuals planned in addition to the handful of perennials that live in my garden, knowing who is who can be important. This is particularly true when it comes to saving seed.In previous years I have tried cheap plastic tags labeled with sharpee, which faded after just a few short months followed by the same plastic tags using pencil after reading the graphite would weather better than ink. They did not fade quite as much or as fast as the sharpee had, but were still hard to read after a few months of sun and rain. Next up was wine corks with sharpee thinking that the porous nature of the corks would absorb the ink better than the hard plastic had but which also faded into illegibility by mid season.For this year's garden I was determined to find something more lasting and attractive for my plant markers since the majority of these varieties will be planted year after year. I spent some time researching permanent plant markers and found these copper plate markers that can be inscribed with a pen and a bit of elbow grease.
The initial cost to purchase and the time to label are certainly higher than my previous marker attempts but the end result is much more pleasing and should endure for many years to come.To inscribe the markers I printed out my varieties list in a nice, easily readable font. I laid the variety name printout over the copper plate and gently traced out the letters. I then removed the printout and used the pen to go over the letters directly on the copper plate until satisfied with the depth and thickness of the letters.
Each year my garden gets better and better #kaizen
The Expat Starter Garden
A dear friend is moving south of the border to live on the shores of Lake Chapala, said to have the second best climate on earth, behind only Atenas, Costa Rica. She wants to start a small garden there and was looking for suggestions.All of these suggestions do very well in both containers (both patio and raised bed) and in rich garden soil, making them versatile, low maintenance choices for a first time gardener.If you are only going to grow one thing, I think basil is a great place to start. It is easy to grow, abundantly productive and can be added to almost every meal you make or have for takeout. I prefer the sweet genovese varieties.If you are only going to grow two things, then basil and cilantro are my choices. Again, easy, abundant and can add a bright taste to any dish, homemade or otherwise. For warmer climates (mine included) try a slo bolt variety.Oregano and rosemary are also low maintenance but useful and abundant herbs for a first time gardener and experienced cook.If she wants to expand beyond herbs, spinach is a great choice for novices. Leaves can be taken as needed allowing the plant to continue growing, many fresh or cooked uses and easy to grow. Again, with warmer climates, a slo bolt variety would be best.After spinach, the chili pepper of your preferred spiciness range. I favor serranos. They are very abundant producers, impart a great flavor in addition to the heat they add to dishes and can be picked green or red depending on your heat preferences. Roasting ripe ones each time you grill and freezing them means delicious roasted peppers on hand year round.And then every gardener's pride and joy, tomatoes. For many of the same reasons, I would recommend cherry type tomatoes for the small scale gardener. They produce much more abundantly than slicing tomato varieties and due to their size can be dried or roasted and frozen for year round additions to meals.With just these 7 items, incorporating bounty fresh from the garden (or preserved from the garden) year round is easy and will work into everyone's favorite dishes.
Countdown to Garden 2016
Even before presents are unwrapped, the countdown is on with less than a month to go before indoor starts of cabbage, leeks and rosemary get going in the first part of January with peppers (hot and bell) just behind.So I've been making my list and checking it twice this week to see what varieties will make it into my 219 square foot of garden space for 2016.I am making heavy use of containers for herbs (and one lettuce I just couldn't resist) and also using two composted trenches in the yard to grow The Three Sisters: corn, blackeyed peas and decorative squash. I currently have 8 1x1 boxes for cucurbits, but will be adding in 3 more before spring to hold all the zucchini, squash and cucumbers on my list.
Despite planning 52 different varieties of annuals for next year, my 2016 seed order (including shipping) came in under $42. This economy was mostly due to saving more of my own seed this year than ever before and having plenty of unused 2015 seed for most of what I plan to grow next year - Square Foot Gardening makes better use of individual seeds than row gardening so more seeds are conserved for future use.
One of my splurge purchases for this year was the Slo-Bolt Cilantro. I am still drawing down the huge supply of cilantro/coriander seeds saved from my 2012 garden. They still have a high germination rate so I have been using them for both outdoor garden and microgreen plantings since then. If the slo-bolt lives up to its name, my 2012 cilantro has had its last reproductive cycle and will be only for microgreens and I will switch to saving the slo-bolt seed.Next I will start plotting out the placement of these plantings on my garden map. 2015 was my first full garden cycle in Raleigh and the biggest lesson was that maximizing light has to be a priority for north facing gardens further complicated by some tree shade. To that end, I added a height column with each plant ranked Short, Medium or Tall to plan my garden for next year. Tallest plants in to the north and shortest plants to the south has always been the rule of thumb but is now a requirement for my future garden plans which will make crop rotations a little more challenging.It is damp, but in the low-mid 70's this weekend, so I will also spend some time putting in new grids into my raised beds. I have been using kitchen string for the past few years but the cottony string only lasts one year before stretching, breaking and needing to be replaced. This year I am going to try a white nylon string that is made for outdoor use and hope it holds up better.Here's to a wonderful close to 2015 and a bright start to 2016! Happy Holidays!
December Morning on the (Urban) Farm
Some keep the Sabbath going to the ChurchI keep it, staying at HomeWith a Bobolink for a ChoristerAnd an Orchard, for a Dome
Some keep the Sabbath in SurpliceI just wear my WingsAnd instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,Our little Sexton sings.
God preaches, a noted ClergymanAnd the sermon is never long,So instead of getting to Heaven, at lastI’m going, all along. ~ Emily Dickinson
Mornings like this never fail to bring the words this poem that I loved since I was a young girl to mind. The beauty of the rising sun was rivaled by the sunset colors of the blueberry leaves all decked out in their fall colors.
And the tender green leaves of the Tom Thumb lettuce growing in a container on my deck made the morning feel more like a late spring day than a warm winter one.
Now, if I just had that orchard dome...
Trench Composting for Corn
I have never really wanted to grow corn since the small amounts I desire for home cooking are readily available at the farmer's market in season, it takes up a lot of valuable space in an already tight garden plan and it is an environmentally costly plant to grow. Corn is greedy. Really greedy.Then I promised my 8 year old that he could grow anything he wanted next year and flipping through a seed catalog he picked Strawberry Popcorn. I dutifully ordered the seeds and we were researching growing, harvesting and drying the variety online when we ran across our first glimpses of Glass Gem Corn. We marveled at the photos and videos of this varietal and were both smitten by its beautiful colors. When it appeared on the Baker Creek Heirloom cover a couple of weeks ago, I found myself suddenly preparing for two varieties of corn in spring 2016 but still didn't want corn in my garden proper.My suburban lawn is in its second year of organic management (no herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers are used) so the conundrum of what to do with the corn made me consider planting directly in the yard as a solution to the space requirements and soil depletion problems of corn. But although I don't use chemicals on the soil, that is not the same thing as having good, rich soil for growing anything. I had seen information on trench composting some time ago and decided to dig back in and learn a bit more.There are a lot of variations on trench composting from the fill it as you go style to the much more elaborate hugelkultur style installations. I opted for something closer to the style in the video below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1XmP9-RpmYI started with a trench and filled in a layer of browns. These are leaves and pine needles that have been composting for a year now. The leaves have already broken down into a rich soil structure but the pine needles take a bit longer.
I followed the layer of browns with some rich, dark, nearly done compost from my two tumbling composters.
I topped the compost with another layer of the browns.
And finished it off by replacing a top layer of soil, mounding it up a bit since it will settle as the layers of browns and compost continue to biodegrade and compact.
The Glass Gem Corn will be planted on either side of this trench in spring and I will need to do the same elsewhere in my yard for the Strawberry Popcorn. I hope to have a staggered planting system in years ahead where I grow on top of a trench a year and a half after it is filled with rich, organic matter that has had time to be broken down by microbial and worm activity.
Store Bought Reboot - Regrowing Veggies
Here at NearlyHomeGrown, food scraps usually end up being frozen for future vegetable and/or chicken stocks or composted to feed the next generation of growing food. But I have been interested in the regrowing veggies craze and finally had the perfect reason to try it.The latest shiitake flush resulted in 7.7 oz of fresh mushrooms and they have been going into almost every meal in one way or another, but especially into homemade ramen noodle soup where they are a headliner ingredient.
One of the other ingredients, the scallions, have been something of a philosophical splurge for this autumnal meal. They are store bought, out-of-season produce that I could live without but really didn't want to because of the flavor and color they add to the dish...and voila! The perfect vegetable to try regrowing!
The green onion ends were pulled from the cooking scrap pile destined for stock making and put into a clear jar with fresh water and placed in a sunny window. The water will need to be changed every other day between now and spring when I will try planting them in my outdoor garden. In the meantime I can continue to steal the green tops for ramen soup and other dishes while keeping the root alive and growing.
Glass Gem Corn
It's not often that a packet of seeds is so exciting that I cannot wait until spring to open the flap and take a peek inside. Glass Gem corn is a clear exception!The Glass Gem heirloom corn variety hit the homegrown stage a few years ago and has been offered only on a wait-list basis from very limited outlets until now. So when I saw the cover of the 2016 Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog I assumed they were just highlighting a very photogenic variety for the cover. When I discovered they were actually carrying the seed, I didn't hesitate and am now planning where to plant the star of my 2016 garden!
Quest For Fire
My tomatoes were troopers this year holding onto green romas, blue beauties and red delicious globes into early November, but I gave up and pulled the remainders two weeks ago just so I could begin cleaning the beds and preparing them for winter before heading off to a week's worth of meeting in San Diego last week.This weekend's task was to pull the rest of the serranos off before 3 consecutive nights of freezing or below temperatures hit them. My final harvest ended up being 1lb, 5oz of beautiful peppers that will warm dishes from now until next year. All were cleaned and vaccu-sealed before being frozen except for a few that will go into the Thanksgiving cornbread later this week.
On another pepper note, a friend has some seeds that he will be sharing with me from his home country of El Salvador. I am keenly interested in growing them out next year since he doesn't know the name of them in either his native tongue or English. For now I am thinking of them as Mystery Pepper and what a fun mystery to solve!
Growing Sustainability - Part 2
In Growing Sustainability - Part 1 I lauded the War Commission Gardens and Victory Gardens for what they grew, a lot of food and a more self-sufficient citizenry. At their height, over 20,000,000 Victory Gardens dotted the American landscape and in 1944, they were producing 40% of all the vegetables grown in the US. These small scale but widespread gardens and orchards contributed to the food landscape in many subtle ways beyond just the food produced on them. A diversity of growers and a diversity of what is grown seems to go hand-in-hand.This startling illustration by the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA depicts the realities of our dwindling agricultural biodiversity with a sampling of the commercially available varieties of 10 commonly grown vegetable seeds from seed houses in 1903 at the top of the chart and the dramatic reduction in varieties of those same vegetables at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation just 80 years later.
And it is not just the 1o varieties shown above that are at risk - this article by National Geographic puts the estimated diversity loss of all historic fruits and vegetables for the US at 90% while this Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations article puts the total global decrease of plant diversity at 75% in the last century.But there is good news in the What's For Dinner in 2025 discussion as well. Recessions spur backyard growing in a big way because growing your own food is cheaper than buying it. And this last recession happened in the age of the internet! How to plant, grow and harvest videos populate YouTube and sites like Garden Girl TV. Online seed houses for heirloom and open pollinated seeds have exploded in number and serve to connect the growers to a growing variety of available seeds. Two of my favorites are Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange. Countless rural and urban farmers have blogs and vlogs, sharing their successes and failures and creating online communities that are (excuse the pun) growing.Whether the online/rural/suburban/urban agricultural movement of people growing food where ever they live will be able to sustain itself over the long haul is anyone's guess. So a further bit of good news for future agricultural diversity is that Cary Fowler, along with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) created the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to serve as a salt mine style back up of seeds from gene banks all over the world.Every minute of Cary's charming, engaging, sometimes scary* and ultimately uplifting 2009 TED Talk is worth watching!* At the 8:30 mark he talks about the the extremely limited time (2 breeding cycles) that plant breeders have to get corn ready for the climate of 2030. In the context of today's GMO headlines, it is easy to forget that injecting genes into a food crop does not make "food". It makes a plant organism that still has to grow to sexual maturity, be crossed with another plant to even get the first round of seed to test.
To Buy or Not To Buy, That is the Question (Dal Fry)
Each year between September and January the question of "what to grow" must be asked and answered by growers everywhere. This is the time of year when seeds are carefully saved, seed catalogs are perused and garden plans begin to be sketched out for the following year.Asking and answering the question of what to grow necessarily means also answering the question of what not to grow, i.e. "what to buy" the following year with the answer being - everything else.Wendell Berry spoke eloquently on the consumer side of agriculture with his often cited quote, "Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." So this answer to "what to buy" is in many ways, just as important as what we chose grow.Consumers are considering this question of the provenance of our food more often today and answering it from a variety of perspectives such as the locally-seasonally available movements to reduce food miles like the 100 Mile Diet (and its many variations), the Fair Trade movement and the certified organic movement. We are setting personal standards and restrictions on what we can and will purchase.Though it doesn't have a name or a label, another way to look at growing vs. purchasing locally from other growers vs. purchasing locally after being transported from across the globe is to consider the water content. Fruits and vegetables in particular have incredibly high water content and shipping this water across the world with fossil fuels comes at enormous environmental impact.Foods that are high in water content are highly perishable so the varieties grown are selected for their ability to withstand the journey, not for their flavor or nutrition. The perpetual summer these commercially grown and shipped varieties create in our grocery stores crowds out consumer demand for locally grown produce when it is in season, impacting the number of US family farmers that can make a living growing food.So which foods make a great planned buying list? Outside of locally grown fruits and vegetables, purchased from local farmers when they are in season, buying dried foods which are light and unlikely to be damaged in transport compared to high-water foods helps keep local farmers farming and reduces the need to ship water from one part of the globe to another. Rice, wheat, oats and other grains as well as beans, lentils and pasta are all high in nutrition, lightweight compared to water heavy fruits and vegetables, have a long shelf-life and the water gets added by you when you are ready to use them.A few months ago I wanted to try making a dal fry (a Punjabi lentil dish) and found this great crock pot recipe for toovar dal fry over at The Novice Housewife which I made with only one modification - I added the tomatoes at the end of cooking the dish, not the beginning.The dal fry was fantastic and I wanted to investigate growing lentils myself. I quickly learned that the lentils used in the dish cannot be grown in my humid area so were not a candidate for future garden plans, but since they are a dried and nutritious food as well as being delicious, dal fry will remain on my menu.
Variations On A Theme - Potato Leek Soup
My favorite recipes are the ones that resemble a good canvas - a delicious backdrop that can be accentuated and modified by what is in season and/or on hand. Having just finished a post about an overabundance of serrano peppers, I wanted to do a variation on a fall favorite - potato leek soup.This year's leeks are on the thin side which I attribute to my north facing backyard garden, so I harvested roughly 3x the number I would normally use for this recipe.
I decided to add some kick to the background canvas and finely chopped 4 roasted red serranos from my freezer and fresh oregano.
On it's own, this soup is mild but hearty making it a perfect backdrop for any number of flavor profiles.
The genius of this soup is the mandolin sliced potatoes.
Once cooked through and gently mashed, they thicken the stock and the mashing breaks the potatoes into bite-sized pieces.
Add a little cream and cook on low for a few more minutes and voila!
A delicious meal that varies depending on preferences and additions!
Cooking with Wilbur Scoville
My 3 serrano plants have produced so abundantly this year that even after freezing enough raw and roasted peppers to last until next year's harvest, giving away dozens more to friends and co-workers and drying many more to save seed, I am still drowning in the spicy, delicious peppers.I first learned the distinctive flavor and heat of these peppers back in 2010 after searching and trying one of those 'top secret restaurant recipes revealed' sites for the Chipotle guacamole recipe*. As soon as knife met serrano the unmistakable scent that I associated with Chipotle guac filled the air and I was sold on serranos and I have been growing them since.Serranos are a type of chili pepper that fits on the Scoville scale between between the less spicy jalapenos and the more spicy cayenne peppers. The Scoville chart has its shortcomings, but it is the closest thing to an authoritative ranking of spiciness of chiles that is in culinary use.What I like about serranos is that they have a taste, not just heat, so they add an actual flavor layer to dishes made with them, not just spiciness. I have not been able to find a chart on chili peppers and umami but my taste buds tell me serranos have it.
So as much as I love serranos, the still going bumper crop of this year's harvest has presented the challenge of what to do with all of these serranos!Drying ripe, red chiles to save seed made me wonder what the ubiquitous crushed red pepper flakes in my spice jars were made of. A bit of research later and I found that crushed (or dried) red pepper flakes are the result of red chiles, but can be made of a blend or different types and are usually not labeled with the type(s) of chiles inside and are generally blends of several types of peppers.Back in September I decided to gamble some of my over abundance on an experiment and dried about 10 fully red serranos and popped them into the food processor, seeds and all. The seeds are generally believed to convey even more heat to the dishes they are added to than the fruit body so most recipes specify that the seeds should be removed. But the crushed red pepper flakes I have seen always have visible seeds so I left them in.
The experiment in making my own crushed red pepper flakes was a huge success! They definitely add the spicy kick that I am accustomed to with the store bought spice and my serrrano-only version is also adding the flavor and body that I associate with serranos.I am drying a second round of serranos to grind into spice mostly because I have to do something with them and I am beginning to think they might make spicy stocking stuffers :)*Interesting side note - the "official" recipe on the Chipotle website calls for jalapenos and is a possible red herring so that the made-at-home version does not taste quite as good as the restaurant version.
Fall Cleaning
Unlike houses that only gently admonish us once a year with the expression "Spring Cleaning", gardens ask that twice a year we get down and dirty and work until our backs and legs are singing to bring a temporary order before allowing nature to rule for another half-year.This weekend I have begun the Fall Cleaning in earnest. After a year of unmolested growth and rooting, it was time to cut back the asparagus and the strawberry runners and bed them down for the winter.
The 5' asparagus plants looked like little Christmas trees even before the seeds turned bright red two months ago and mimicked ornaments. In the past couple of weeks some of the green growth had started to yellow and then brown, signaling the time to remove the above ground part so the underground crowns could prepare themselves for winter.Asparagus has a long and storied history going back at least 5,000 years to Egyptian times and has the rare distinction of appearing in one of the oldest known recipe books De re coquinaria ("On the Subject of Cooking") from the 4th or early 5th century AD.
My Jersey Knight and Purple Passion asparagus crowns were transplanted into my garden in the earliest part of 2015 meaning that I could not harvest anything this first year and could only watch as the tender shoots grew to and then beyond edibility stage and finally into the fern like growth above.Although I could not eat the shoots this year, nothing goes to waste in my garden and the green growth that had fed and nurtured the crowns all year were cut into 2-3" sections to be composted and feed future growth.
Once the asparagus and strawberry beds were cleaned up they were fitted with low hoops and covered with water and light permeable mesh that will hopefully keep the squirrels and pine needles out until spring.I have been looking into organic mulching options and ran across Leaf & Limb Tree Service's site that offered free wood chips delivered to your home (with some caveats). An inquiry has been sent and hopefully soon I will have my crowns bedded down for winter and am already looking forward to getting to harvest some of my own asparagus shoots next year!
Haystack of Needles
It has been raining two things since Thursday night. Raindrops and pine needles.
Going into my second fall as a North Carolina gardener, I have started calling them Piedmont sand because they are a pain to clean up and get into absolutely everything!Last year I made a leaf composting bin to reduce yard waste and build soil with all the sweet gumball leaves that fall into my backyard. With each infusion of leaves, pine needles inevitably found their way into the bin also and they take much longer to break down. After a year of compositing and being filled to the brim with leaves no less than 4 times, I am left with a small pile of garden gold mixed in with a small haystack of needles.
There is conflicting information on whether pine needles add a significant amount of acidity to the soil as they break down or not so to be safe, this mixture will be used to compost around my acidity loving blueberry bushes.I am reasonably certain that the 8 pine trees in my backyard are Pinus taeda, the loblolly pine. They will shed needles almost continuously from now until spring. This year's needles will be used to mulch around the magnolia tree, which also likes a bit of acidity, after being broken down a bit with a weed wacker to speed up the decomposition.I hope to find a happy balance between the amount of needles the trees can produce in a two year span and the amount of pine needle compost/mulch I can use.
Fall Garden 2015
As I plan and finish planting my fall garden this weekend I have to give a shout out to the tomatoes, red bell peppers and serrano peppers that don't seem to care that it is the middle of September and are continuing to bloom and set fruit in earnest.Working around these summer hold-overs is a little easier with the addition this weekend of the last two 4-x-4 beds I had planned to add. I have also added 8 1-x-1 boxes that will be used for summer squash next year but are mostly available for planting now.I am trying a non-dwarf variety of collards this fall and trying parsnips for the first time.
I have added permanent supports along the back portions of beds (blue lines on garden plan) by way of 6' metal fence stakes hung with rungs of coated wire to act as a ladder for climbing plants. It also works well as support for triangle shaped row covers.
If all goes well I will be serving spinach at Christmas and collards on New Years all fresh from the garden!
Nature v Nature
I planted a second run of squash and zucchini in early August and they are faring much better against squash vine borers and squash bugs but two of the plants, the acorn and spaghetti squash have an aphid problem.I have used ladybugs on an indoor aphid infestation before with excellent results. The ladybugs did not explore the house but stayed at the all you can eat buffet of aphids on my indoor spinach and lettuce. Within a few days the greens were completely aphid free and the ladybugs died off as their food dwindled, but not before starting a second generation.In the cool of this overcast morning I released 1,500 ladybugs on my squash, with the heaviest concentration on the acorn and spaghetti.
The ladybugs fanned out over the squash plant, honing in on the aphid colonies which seem to like gumming up unopened blossoms in particular.
Farming the Burbs
Two of my great passions collided earlier this week when a colleague forwarded a recent REALTOR® Magazine, July/August 2015 issue article about the "emerging real estate niche" of backyard agriculture. My day job that I absolutely love is in the real estate industry where we like distinct categories for types of real estate. Properties are classified as either Residential or Farm, but never as Residential Farm. The effect of these categories makes it appear that houses are only incidental on farm land and that land (and its growing capacity) is only incidental to residential properties.
It warmed my heart to see REALTOR® Magazine run such an excellent, in-depth article on urban agriculture. The Rise of the Backyard Farm is both extremely well written and very timely. It is time for these two passions to collide - in real estate we talk about how owning property helps grow wealth over time, but when real estate and suburban agriculture meet additional dividends are paid seasonally.
Growing Sustainability - Part 1
I have three 24 x 36 cork boards in my home office, devoted to helping me organize my garden. They are filled with seasonal planting guides for Zone 7, my own garden plans for seasonal and succession plantings, companion planting charts and the listings of vegetables by family that make sense of them.Interspersed between these work-a-day printouts are some of my favorite images of the WWI National War Garden Commission (1910-1920) and WWII Victory Garden (1930-1950) posters. I have long been a fan of these nostalgic images for what they represented at the time and what they represent to me* today.The images, although quaint and nostalgic now, when they were produced were part of a bold initiative that is difficult to imagine ever repeating itself in the light of 21st century politics. The world leaders at that time asked of their people to be a little more self-sufficient for a while, to do a little more for themselves and consume less, not for any immediate personal benefit for those making the sacrifices of growing and preserving their own food, but for "the greater good". They also represent a generally accepted, society endorsed back to the land movement long before the Foxfire books of the 1970s solidified in the public mind that unless you are a farmer by trade, growing a significant portion of your own food is a hallmark of an alternative lifestyle.With the War Gardens of WWI and later the Victory Gardens of WWII, ordinary households economized during rationing. They grew, ate, canned and preserved some of their own produce to nourish their families and to help the war efforts by using less of the nation's production and transportation resources so those resources would be available elsewhere.It was a time of lofty and aspirational ideals and pulling together for a purpose larger than ourselves. Some of the growing ideas and solutions promulgated during that period, particularly of WWII were a mix of good and pretty bad, but the overall concept was a good one - a decentralized food system, self-sufficient citizens and a government system that supported the bootstraps mentality that has become a hallmark of those generations.
*Results may vary
Seeding the Future
One of my goals for my 2015 garden is to save more seed. Previously I had saved only cilantro/coriander and some flower seeds, but I am turning a corner in 2015 and saving as many seeds from the varieties I grow as possible. The corner of my home office has become the space for drying seeds to be saved for next year's planting.Some of the seeds I am saving are edible as seed, like the Titan Sunflowers I am growing this year in honor of my years in Kansas. These (and the other Titans) will be split between seeds for planting and snacks.
But most are seeds for planting's sake, saving the best and brightest from this year to plan(t) for next year.
Right now I have some serrano peppers, 3 varieties of sunflowers, spaghetti squash, balsams and candy tufts seeds drying. I will be adding golden acorn squash and oregano to my corner soon.By saving seed from the plants that did best this year, I am selecting those that are most likely to do best in my specific micro-climate again next year, preserving genetic diversity (always a good idea), saving a bit of money in my garden plan for next year and creating a greater level of sustainability for my little acreage and those that want to share in the surplus of seeds.Not a bad way to start the weekend :)