Recycled vegetables & rainy days
Some of the kale from last year’s garden survived in the compost heap! I rescued it, and replanted it: we’ll see what it decides to do. For the time being, it’s keeping the lone collard company.
kale resurrected!
We’ve now got seeds planted in two of the beds, too. To say that we’re going to have a mountain of kale this year is an understatement: we’re going to have so much kale, it’ll be completely insane.
We’re getting rain again, which is hard to take, since we’d just been starting to enjoy days outside, when the weather turned again. I think tomorrow we start drying out, after Monday & Tuesday’s drizzle, torrents, and heavy rain, and I’m REALLY looking forward to it.
Got mucho work done on the felted blanket/hanging/whatever (or its components, at any rate), with all the crappy weather…I’m actually all done stitching the little circles to each other. Now I’ve got to gather them all together into a cohesive pattern across the background. Hmmmmm. I think all of the fun sewing is done…if I remember correctly, the rough wool of the background fabric was hell on the knuckes last time, and I’ve just gone and doubled the size of the background this time. I may be cursing my crafting ways, very soon.
The grow list
I’m gearing up for the planting season (I assume that the unseasonable warmth today is contributing to my garden-y thoughts), and thought I’d share what we’re planning to grow this year:
From Southern Exposure Seed Exchange:
Organic Brandywine Tomatoes
Organic Dinosaur Kale
Organic Bloomsdale Spinach
Mayo Amaranth (for the chickens and local wildlife, really, though we may eat the young greens)
New Zealand Spinach
and from Nichols Garden Nursery
Organic Calabrese Broccoli
Chinese Kale (Gai Lohn)
Cocozelle Bush Zucchini
Takinogawa Burdock
“Land Seaweed” Agretti (Salsola Komarovi) (I have no freaking idea, it looked very interesting, so we’re trying it out)
Rat-tail Radishes (again, curiosity struck)
another package of Organic Dinosaur Kale (also called “Tuscan” or “Lascinato”), since we’ll probably replant in the fall for a winter harvest.
Celtuce (Stem Lettuce) (curiosity again)
So, it should be interesting! This isn’t an exhaustive list at all, we’ll still be buying seed potatoes, pepper plants, and herb plants, as well as other plants that we tend to buy as seedlings, rather than sprouting ourselves.
I’ve also got designs on some random stuff, like actively cultivating the purslane that’s planted itself throughout the raised beds (for us & for the chickens, since it’s very high in Omega-3), and stinging nettle, which we’ll have to procure locally, once Well Sweep (our local herb nursery) opens for the season.
I’m also looking for some seed swaps, so if anyone has any recommendations, please pass them on!
I actually rejoined myfolia.com to track this stuff better, since they’ve got some awesome tools, so you may see some cross-posting or references to my information, which can be found here.
Dilemma 1
About a year ago, I crashed & burned after a very poor implementation of a raw vegan lifestyle. It was the usual failures: too much reliance on nuts & avocados, and not the giant amount of greens that’s needed to bolster the system through such a radical change. And although I lost 20 pounds pretty quickly, I felt absolutely horrible.
The thing is, I feel pretty strongly that eating the right way is the best way to have individual control over health care costs (from a personal level, of course…cumulatively, that can only come if the whole country becomes more involved in ditching junk food, etc.). So, it’s incumbent on me to harness some sort of knowledge & apply it to some sort of diet…and right there is where it starts to get murky.
I’ve got some routines established, mostly in the area of making breakfast for myself, which I have never embraced before, mostly due to early-morning ennuie. And I like it, I really like having a complex meal in the morning. At this point, it consists of homemade refried beans, salsa, cooked egg whites, and soy cheese, rolled up in a whole-grain tortilla. And it’s great, I love it. But I’m pretty sure it’s still got elements of “cop-out” in it (especially the soy cheese). If a person takes a stand against processed food, it all becomes seriously inconvenient, when combined with a long commute & a long workday. And yet, it seems that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing 100%.
An article popped up on Yahoo yesterday about the nutrients lost when microwaving vegetables, which threw another spanner in the works. The microwave is currently pretty essential to my daily routines: we certainly don’t have a stove at work. I’m seriously considering getting a VitaMix, and just making everything into a smoothie, and being done with it, except that would get old pretty fast. I love juicing, and will drink stuff that makes most people run away, like kale-collards-carrot juice that’s a hideous green-brown color. It’s just a lot of work to prep all the ingredients & take the juicer apart & wash every piece: it comes down to about 30 minutes of work for a glass of juice. (It seems ridiculous that I’m complaining about this, seeing it in writing. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it’s more like 45 minutes. Damn it! Prepare for a follow-up post, complete with time trials.)
My Dad’s Pet Fig Trees
real food challenge
my awesome cousin