I got mail

My mail came with the most amazing stamps!  It appears as though the USPS hitched their lagging wagon to the sustainability train, and they've issued forever stamps with a "go green" theme.  According to their website, you can also purchase these designs on a tote, playing cards, plant-able postcards or as part of a family fun activity kit.  While family fun activity kits may illicit a kind of barfy reaction, I think the illustrations are darling.

Argument for the urban homestead

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating"

In exchange for a bit of chalk art, Abe and I have enjoyed a CSA membership through the farm-to-table restaurant where I work. The vegetables are wonderful (best carrots ever!), and I can identify the farms they come from.

Even better are the vegetables we've been harvesting from our greenhouse - I know when they were planted, whether the seeds were heirloom or genetically modified, and what kinds of fertilizers were used.  I've likely even seen the same bugs that nibbled on their leaves.

To me, this is a rich life, but I've been struggling to articulate why.  Then I stumbled across this wonderful article, and decided to let Harvey Usery do it for me.

GROW YOUR OWN, BECAUSE...

1.  There are serious problems with our conventional food system.  Some of the issues include:

• Concerns about food safety.  CDC data shows that more than 25% of the U.S. population suffers from food-borne illness each year.
• Concerns about food quality. We sacrifice flavor and nutritional value by consuming processed food. 
• Lack of ingredient choices. From the abundance of different products on the supermarket shelf, if might appear that a trademark of the American food system is choice.  But the FDA decides what we need to know about the contents of the packages we buy at the supermarket, and many of the different products are just new combinations of the same highly processed ingredients.
• Ignoring the hidden costs of our "cheap" food.  U.S. supermarket prices don't take into account the actual cost of our food system - the pollution, the reduced effectiveness of antibiotics because of their overuse in commercial meat farming, erosion/topsoil loss, and the toll on our health.
• The price we pay for convenience: Ignorance.  We don't understand our food, where it comes from, or what it took to get it to our plate.  There's an opportunity cost here, in that we miss out on the satisfaction of wholesome, clean, fair food.

2.  There are signficant benefits (economic, social, physical, environmental, financial) to having a garden:

• Safe food. Growing our own lets us opt out of a "totally anonymous system based on minimum-wage, exploited, often uneducated workers."
• High quality food. There's no food fresher than what we harvest from our own backyards.  Not only that, but when you choose produce over packaged, convenience food, you get a more nutritious diet.
• True food choice. Growing our own food allows us to decide if we want organic or not, are we for or against GMO's, and do we support the use of added antibiotics and hormones.
• Getting what you pay for. "Every dollar we plunk down for food is first and foremost a vote in favor of the way that food was produced."
• Food security. Even a brief look at our current food system reveals it is anything but sustainable.  Knowing how to produce food means knowing how to "sustain" yourself. 

Modern eating is above all about forgetting — about what it is we are eating, about its origins in living systems. The alternative is to learn to know our food intimately, to care intensely about its quality and its role in our lives, to share it with gratitude and respect.

Whenever we grow our own food, or seek it from local sources, we reconnect with the natural year, the passing of the seasons, the interdependence of all forms of life in the great web. By participating in the creation of our food, from soil to table, we find our way back to food as a sacred gift.

Harvey Usery, "21st Century Homesteading: Why Grow Your Own Food?"

Welcome to our greenhouse!

Isn't it wonderful?  Abe made it.  The doors were salvaged from a neighborhood where the HOA made everyone take out their perfectly adequate and expensive double-pane french doors to replace them with identical new ones.

A friend found the water tanks (there are actually two, one on each side) in the "free" section on Craigslist.  Our aquaponics bins are cheap under-the-bed storage containers, and we used as much scrap wood as we could find.

I planned to do a whole series on our greenhouse construction during the winter, since during cold months there isn't really much going on around here .  Instead I got consumptive pneumonia multiple colds and sinus infections and wrote nothing at all.

But there's always hope for the spring!

Planning a garden

Last week I bought my 2012 planner.  I love me some papergoods, and planners are my favorite.  I love the blankness of a whole year of  pages, and the potential of that year to finally be the one when I got organized! had a social life! remembered the dog's heartworm medication!  I love writing in the birthdays of the people I love, and looking forward to those celebrations.  I love pencilling in visits and vacations and coffee dates.  I like to plan, and to know what's coming.

As a financial counselor, I preach about planning.  I teach budgeting, saving for retirement, planning major purchases.  I love planners, and I am a planner.

But I have never planned a garden. The closest I've come is sitting down with Abe and a seed catalog, making a list of things we wanted to grow.  If memory serves correctly, we forgot the list when we actually went to buy the seeds, and we ended up with five kinds of tomatoes and several herbs that we never even used (the shame).

Here are at least four

 benefits of planning your garden:

1. Saving money.  It may be easier to pick up young plants from a nearby nursery or home improvement store, but it's sure cheaper to grow your own from seed.  Planning ahead allows you to get seeds sprouting in time to avoid paying retail prices for plants.
2. Saving time.  Every year by July, it seems we've come up with a new plan for a lower-maintenance garden.  Of course, if we'd started planning before we planted, we could have saved ourselves the effort this year, too.
3. Saving effort.  We're lucky that just about every yard in our neighborhood has a kitchen garden. Last year, we traded cherry tomatoes for romas and squash for peppers.  If you know what your neighbors grow best, you can save yourself the trouble of duplicating their efforts and swap produce. 
4. Saving seeds.  If you pay attention to what grows well, and keep a basic record of your garden from year to year, you may be able to save seeds.  This is important to our farm because we're pinching pennies  increasingly, large agriculture dictates what home gardeners grow, and heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables are lost. For that reason, we don't mind paying more for seeds from Seed Savers - it's an investment in our right to continue to grow whatever varieties we want.  If home gardeners don't invest in that right today, we won't have the same options in the future.

With Superbowl Sunday fast approaching, it's almost time to start some indoor seeds.  That means it's time to get planning!

Thirsty

I read this article in the NY Times the other day.  We live in such a strange world, with such strange distribution of resources.  I feel a little despair when I read this stuff, reminding me of how unsustainable our systems are.

And then I feel better when Abe comes home with two giant, food-grade containers stacked on the roof of his rabbit.

thanks to Josh and the man who gave them to us FREE via Craigslist

Because we don't have to farm 2,000 acres of carrots in a dessert.  We can have a tiny farm in our backyard, watered with whatever we can collect from our roof.  We can grow what we need, use dual flush toilets, and save pasta water for our house plants.  Even within a broken system, we have choices.