Archive for May, 2009
Handmade Pasta
I don’t have a pasta press, and it’s much lower on my wish list than a pressure canner, but how wonderful it would be to make herb pasta with fresh herbs from the garden! Or spinach/sun dried tomatoes/peppers.
This article on Dave’s Garden makes it sound so easy, I will try to make a batch by hand this summer. The author said his hand crank pasta press only cost him $25, and hand made pasta is cheap to make, while giving you control of the ingredients (all you REALLY need is flour and water). Also, chocolate pasta?
First Harvest!
In spite of the fact that it got down to -1 this weekend…
Last night I made what I call Kitchen Sink Salad, which consists of me going outside and picking everything that’s ripe or needs to be thinned: radishes+greens (radish greens are a lot like spinach in taste/recipe potential), buttercrunch lettuce, red leaf lettuce, mesculin mixture, kohlrabi sprouts, borage, mizuna, sweet allium leaves, plus edible weeds like dandelion (only young leaves, which I think are less bitter), and shamrocks. Then I added herbs for a tasty suprise: anise hyssop leaves, oregano, summer savory, and lemon balm. Plus purple cabbage and crazy twisty baby cucumbers from the market. Yum!
Happy Traffic Cops
Thailand`s traffic cops know the easy way to deal with stress. *hint: you don`t swallow it.
Is informed eating traumatic for children?
The Thames Park community garden is right next to the playground. This is a wonderful thing, because it gives kids the opportunity to learn about where their food comes from. I let many a child pick tomatoes or beets from my plot for this reason.
I think it’s important for kids to know that their food comes from somewhere beyond the grocery store. They get really excited when they see what a growing melon looks like. That’s why things like this scandal are very troubling to me:
Children help to raise pigs to learn about ethically, organically raised food. The pigs are taken to a slaughterhouse, and the pigs are turned into food available for sale to the families. The parents flip out, saying it is insensitive, and that the children are too young to learn about where their food comes from.
These animals weren’t raised ‘as pets’, they were raised as food; they weren’t in ‘pets corner’, they were in a farm. The children appear to have taken the difference in their stride and as a result will probably end up being either informed meat-eaters or informed vegetarians. But to the parents, this is a challenge to their curious, teetering balance of sentimentality and unthinking consumption of meat. If you think your children would be traumatised by the idea of eating pigs, why are you feeding them bacon sandwiches?
I was at a friend’s house one evening, where roast beef was served that was once a cow called Buttercup. I talked to the kids about this. One of them said to me, “Buttercup was a mean cow. And she’s tasty. I won’t eat the nice cow.” That is informed eating, and I think it’s as important that children have the same opportunity to make informed decisions about ethical eating as the rest of us. Thoughts?
In Our Backyards. Who’s in?
I just stumbled upon a website called IOBY. The name stands for “in our back yards” as in, it’s our responsibility, not someone elses. The website is a hub, where local (New York) organizations can post requests for volunteers and funding for environmental projects, so that small organizations can have the benefit of microphilanthropy, even if they don’t have the administrative resources to handle it. If I learned anything at the Pillar Nonprofit conference this spring, it’s that London needs something like this. Most of the organizations in the city are completely incapable of using social networking resources (lacking knowledge or resources) to effectively further their missions.
Mark today on your calendars. You’ll remember it as the day that a similar project started it’s wheels turning in London, Ontario. I’m working on it. Who’s in?
Imagine a Car-Free Suburb.
Here’s the result of visionary city planning: the streets of an upscale neighbourhood in Vauban, Germany are designed for pedestrians and cyclists, rather than cars.
The neighbourhood is car-free except the main road, where public transit runs. It does not have street parking, driveways, or garages attached to the homes. No more ugly snout-houses. Residents are allowed to have cars, but they have to buy a parking space at the edge of the development. Most families buy cars together or rent communal cars from Vauban’s car-sharing club when they need a car to move large purchases or to take vacations. [For the record, there are car-sharing organizations in Canada.] Sounds crazy, right? Of course it does, in a city like London, Ontario, that doesn’t have a decent grocery store downtown. But imagine what a sense of community a neighbourhood can have when people aren’t just moving between their cars and their houses. I love hanging out in my front yard and talking to the people who walk by.
The trick is actual urban design, which locates stores within walking distance.
“Development comprising jobs, shopping, leisure and services should not be designed and located on the assumption that the car will represent the only realistic means of access for the vast majority of people,” said PPG 13, the British government’s revolutionary 2001 planning document.
The Environmental Protection Agency is pushing for “car-reduced” communities in the USA, and a change in legislature may help. A six-year transportation bill to be approved this year is expected to consider public transportation service to suburbs. This is a big shift, since by law 80 percent of funding has gone to highways vs 20% for all other transport.
Still, zoning laws in the USA generally require two parking spaces per residence, and mortgage lenders can’t get behind the idea that someone would want to buy a house without space for cars. “People in the U.S. are incredibly suspicious of any idea where people are not going to own cars, or are going to own fewer,” according to David Ceaser, the co-founder of CarFree City USA.
It’s perfectly reasonable to demand enlightened thinking from your city government.
There’s a lot more to read about the topic in this New York Times article.
How To Grow Uber Tomatoes, even when you start them too early
…by using recycled coffee cups to maximize root size. Every year I start my tomatoes in February. I don’t have a south facing window–I am totally reliant on shop lights to help them grow. But instead of being leggy, my tomatoes are crazy drought-proof beasts that take over the world. Last year, my Matt’s Cherry tomato grew about 9 feet wide, and the neighbours had to cut it back just to figure out where the fence was so they could park their car. That’s because the root ball was deep enough to support it. My secret is using recycled coffee cups to help gradually build up the root ball.
Step 1. Get everyone you know (and their office) to collect coffee cups. Sort them by size, because you will want to start with the small ones. Poke drainage holes.
Step 2. Remove your leggy tomato seedling from the cellpack (I plant all my seeds in cell packs recycled from past years, because most greenhouses won’t recycle them), and place at the bottom of a small cup. See the first leaves at the bottom? Carefully pinch those off.
Step 3. Bury the tomato up to where it branches, stem and all. Around the root ball, you can use compost to give it a healthy start, but when you are burying the stem, a soil-less potting mix is best. (I prepare my potting mix by soaking it first, to make sure it has absorbed plenty of water.) This is how deep you should plant it.
Roots will grow out of the part of the stem that you burried, to become part of the ever-growing rootball.
Step 4. When the tomato grows up out of the pot again, remove it from the small cup, put it in the bottom of a medium sized cup, and bury it up to the branch again. (In these stages, you can make a doughnut of compost around the outer edges of the cup, and use potting mix for the rest.)
Repeat until you have a root ball as deep as extra large coffee cup. You can keep moving them up into larger planters, but by XL I run out of space to keep all my seedlings.
Using coffee cups also makes it easy to give away tomatoes to friends and neighbours. Share the heirloom love.
When it’s finally safe to plant everything outdoors, I’ll show you how to use drought-proof planting to make your tomatoes (and other plants) survive between rains without the need for watering.
Canada’s New-Found Ethanol Love
According to the Globe and Mail, Environment Minister Jim Prentice has gained cabinet support for proposed regulations requiring 5% ethanol be included in gasoline by September 2010. Yup, Canada’s jumping on the Ethanol bandwagon, just as America is contemplating stepping off.
Obviously Ottawa missed all the studies that suggest corn ethanol is not a solution, but part of the problem. The fact that it raises food prices by displacing food crops for fuel crops aside, ethanol doesn’t magically pop out of the ground. It takes energy to grow (using fossil fuel based chemical fertilizers), to cultivate (using fuel burning machinery) and to process (using natural gas or coal). And that fuel-growing land was once used for living things that sequestered CO2- ethanol production has led to more land-demand. But “the department does not include indirect land use emissions in its calculations.”
[here are 3 studies on the matter, for starters: "Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change"; "Climate change and health costs of air emissions from biofuels and gasoline"; "Effects of Ethanol Versus Gasoline Vehicles on Cancer and Mortality in the United States"]
Or maybe they did hear the news, but don’t care:
Industry consultant Barry Bower, a former official in the Ontario government, said governments are often less concerned about emissions from ethanol plants than they are about providing markets for grain growers and incentives to build plants in rural constituencies.
“Environmental analysis of how ethanol plants perform is not allowed to impinge on the decision whether or not that plants gets built,” he said.
I’m tired of the Big Thinkers proposing quick solutions instead of getting at the heart of the problem. WE NEED TO EVALUATE OUR LIFESTYLES. Giving us a green-washed excuse to continue to live as thoughtlessly as we have is not helping anyone. Well, except the farmers, but I have a lot more respect for farmers that “feed cities” literally, not figuratively.
Here’s where you can find the contact information for your MP. I, for one, would like them to know that quick fixes aren’t going to cut it.
Shoplights, My Seed-Starting Sun-sub
I have a grow-op in my basement. It’s not what you think. I have more than 60 baby pepper plants, 100 baby tomatos, 3 hibiscus, 5 brugmansia trees, 2 abuliton, jacobinias, artichokes, 5 varieties of basil, a goji berry yearling, and many many other beautiful or edible plants that would be dead if I left them outside for the winter. I grew a pineapple in my basement. If I used high pressure sodium grow lights, the utility bills would kill me. Instead, I have 5 banks of fluorescent shop lights with wide spectrum bulbs on a 16 hour timer (2 of those banks are borrowed just for starting my veggie seeds). They keep my plants happy without using a lot of power.
I just tie my cell packs of sprouted seedlings directly to the lights to make sure they get enough ‘sun’. If I don’t remember to lower them as they grow, they bend around the bulbs in funny ways, but they never burn, and it’s enough light to keep them happy.
I already started hardening off my seedlings 2 weeks ago, because the end of may is way too long to wait to plant them!
Architecture of Urban Farming
The City of Vancouver, so much more than a “city that could be,” has developed Climate Change Action Plans and an EcoDensity Charter to do something to make things better. The city recently partnered with The Architectural Institute of British Columbia to present Form Shift: an architectural ideas design competition to support their goal of becoming “the greenest city in the world”.
Urban agriculture ideas were big in the competition. The Harvest Green Project By Romses Architect recieved an honorable mention in the competition, which saw urban farming as a way to help the city eat more sustainably:
To a certain extent, we have seen 20th century town planning disregard the importance of food and farming, and urban development has virtually eliminated agriculture in our cities….Incorporating urban farming prominently into the fabric of the city, and in a synergistic mixed-use development integrated with transit, is a way to re-assert the cultural and environmental importance of locally produced food to the health and sustainability of the city and its residents.
The Community Catalyst submission by Garon Sebastien and Chris Foyd also received honorable mention. Their approach was simple:
Community gardens have proven hugely successful in fostering neighbourhood exchanges and building a sense of community.
That’s what we’re hoping for with the River Forks Community Garden, which has taken more than 3 years of fighting to push into existance. Now we’re just waiting for the city to do their thing, so we can do ours. The suspense is killing me!
via City Farmer.
