Category: The Garden
When Life Gives You Zucchini, Make Soup
| August 26, 2011 | Posted by JerriCook under The Garden, Uncategorized |
Too much of a good thing is a bad thing, or so we’re told. This is backward thinking in all it’s glory, taught from one generation to the next. This sort of thinking is ubiquitous in our Western culture. We’ve adopted the premise that only scant blessings are good, but blessings that flow to us in abundance are bad. It’s this warped paradigm that shapes our attitudes towards abundance, as evidenced in our attitudes toward zucchini.
It’s late summer, and the zucchini are huge. You’ve made zucchini bread, deep-fried zucchini, and sauteed zucchini. Your neighbors don’t want any more, and you really don’t want to pick any more. Enough zucchini already! And so it begins. The plant you were so happy to see when it first bloomed and in a few short days produced small, tender fruits that you sauteed whole, is now the plant you have too much of. Only, you can never have too many blessings, and you can never have too much zucchini. (more…)
Five reasons to avoid seed bank scams
| May 21, 2011 | Posted by JerriCook under Preparedness, Rural Issues, The Garden |
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Should you buy seeds so you can grow some, if not all, of your own food? Yes. Should you buy seeds from the charlatans advertising emergency seed kits? Absolutely not. I’ve seen these ridiculous ads claiming that for $79.00-$149.00 you can get enough seeds to grow a whole acre of food. There are so many things wrong with this. Where should I start? (more…)
The Picture Perfect Weed-Filled Garden
| May 16, 2011 | Posted by JerriCook under The Garden |
You know those pictures that you see on every “expert” gardener’s website of perfectly groomed gardens burgeoning with color and glory? They’re fake. Those pictures, which are supposedly testaments to the effulgent growing prowess of the accomplished professional (with the really white teeth), only depict the garden at one point in time. Like any staged portrait, the subject is groomed for the moment of capture. Once the picture is taken, the careful preening fades into a normal routine, which for most of us means we weed the garden when it needs it, not on some made-up schedule prescribed by some dressed-up gardening “expert.” (more…)
Going to Pot-Container Growing for Rural Folks and City Slickers
| May 16, 2011 | Posted by JerriCook under The Garden |
Ten years ago, we owned a large market garden, operating a subscription CSA and farmers market stands. The five-acre garden required several hundred man hours of labor to keep it preened and profitable. That was then; this is now. Today we own a small-scale organic dairy farm. We’re graziers, so every last inch of our property is planted to pasture, leaving much less space for a garden than in the past. While we still have a good-sized garden, it’s considerably smaller than five-acres, leaving us to grow the things we absolutely need, like potatoes, onions, corn, tomatoes, and peppers, and almost no room to grow the fun stuff–flowers, fancy lettuce, and kohlrabi. (more…)
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