Good news!

Foggy Bottom coffee house in the Country Market shopping plaza 

(photo credit:  treetowntalk.com)

Foggy Bottom has agreed to be a drop-off point for the Plant A Row for the Hungry efforts. Yay! Thanks to owner Doug Marrin for agreeing so quickly. It'll be a great place for dropoffs because it's air conditioned (better than having the dropoff spot be my front porch or yard) and lots of people go there or by there during the week anyway. And Doug is always friendly and up for a chat (he's got great taste in books, too.) 

More information to come. 

Gardening is cool

The Huffington Post has a quick article with reader photos of their gardens. Although they say they got lots of cool photos, they picked the ones that showed a variety of ways you could do the whole gardening thing. 

My garden looks most like picture No. 7. But I'm also planning to do some container planting on the deck, because I have lots of containers I don't use. 

Also check out the links below the story; the Huffington Post seems to be covering the national gardening trend pretty closely. Off to read Michael Pollan's story myself ... 

Minor garden dillema

So, the garden is coming along much better than I expected at this point. Today there are some snow peas sprouting -- whoot! I love snow peas. And the carrots are getting all bunchy and looking good, too. 

I was just out doing a little bit of weeding -- the lettuce is now mature enough that I can tell the difference between it and the weeds -- and was pulling up the hundreds of little sprouts that have taken over the lettuce square of the garden. I pulled up about two dozen before I starting smelling something yummy. Very yummy. And I realized I must be pulling up something edible. 

I tasted the sprouts, and yep, it's cilantro. That part of the garden was overwhelmed with cilantro last year. I bought a plant that was already too mature, and it went to seed right away. So I kind of let it wither there. 

Apparently it dropped seed all summer, and now it's starting to take hold again. I stopped pulling the sprouts because of the rain, but I'm not sure what to do now. Should I keep pulling them? Any chance they'll grow happily next to the lettuce? Should I take them out and give away the seedlings? 

Oye. I have such a black thumb. 

Been a while ...

Sorry to my three readers -- it has been a while. My day job involves the auto industry, and if you're in southeast Michigan you'd have to be in a coma or blessedly unaware to not know how crazy the auto industry is these days. The world is crazed, and so am I. 

Good news! I have sprouts! My lettuce, radishes and carrots all have teeny tiny sprouts out in the garden. The entire garden is overwhelmed with weeds, though, so I need to figure out how to get those buggers out while preserving the  baby shoots. I'm still waiting for the snow peas to sprout -- I'm kind of surprised that they aren't already sprouting, so we'll see what happens. 

No progress yet on expanding the Plant-A-Row program throughout the town. I'm looking for a dropoff/pickup spot. Need to send a letter to the Dexter Leader talking about the program once I find a good dropoff spot, and then may try to host a speaker at the library on food insecurity issues. 

I came across this story today on Farmer's Markets. It's very interesting, and shows the progession of Farmer's Markets from a cheap way to sell vegetables to locals to something else entirely. 

Rotting piles

If the recent posting on composting got you thinking about starting a rotting pile of your own, here's a link to a great resource on compost piles. It's on a site called "Emily Compost -- Celebrating Gardening, Plants and Weeds." Looks like it could be a site I refer back to a lot!

We just got back from a week in New Jersey visiting the homestead, and I now have to scramble around and make the house look nice for visiting relatives who get here in two hours. Yikes. I am happy to say it looks like the Plant A Row efforts are already taking off at St. Joe's -- I've got the PDF for some fliers in my email box, and folks are seem to be gearing up to get this thing going. Next week I'll put some effort into expanding it beyond St. Joe's.

I'm happy to report that the snow this week hasn't hurt my budding garden. Looks like the weeds are very healthy and hardy! Also, I think there are some radish sprouts starting to take hold. And quite possibly some lettuce. I'm resisting the urge to weed, even though the garden really needs it, until I can really tell what's in there. Knowing me, I'll weed all the good veggies out.

When I was in New Jersey, I went looking for some Jersey Tomato seedlings, but couldn't find any. It's probably too early, I know, but I'd love to have a nice Jersey Tomato plant for my own use this summer ...

You don't have to get this dressed up

First Lady Michelle Obama has planted her own row for the hungry at the White House. They're calling it the "White House Kitchen Garden," and they plan to use some of the produce for themselves and donate some to Miriam's Kitchen in D.C.

It's a big garden. I mean, any garden that has two paths running through it is pretty large. I can't imagine Michelle really did all that raking herself, especially in those fancy boots and nice sweater. They're growing spinach, broccoli, lettuce, herbs, shallots, onions, shelling peas, fennel and chard. Interestingly, they're not growing what many home gardeners usually take on: Tomatoes and squash. I wonder if that's because they plan on donating most of it. Tomatoes don't really travel well -- they tend to squish easily. And squash, while one of my all-time favorite veggies, is in bountiful supply at the end of the summer.

A city of farmers

A story in last week's Free Press says a local Detroit man wants to start a for-profit farm within the city borders. If you step back and think about the transformation of Detroit over the last fifty years, from before the race riots in the 1960s to where it stands today, it's an incredible change. The amount of vacant land in Detroit can be kind of unnerving -- it feels, at times, like an abandoned city. Nothing like it once was.


Urban farming has been on the rise in Detroit for the past few years, with community activists getting together to plant gardens on abandoned lots. Now John Hantz wants to take that one step further, and make a business that would plant veggies, use wind turbines for energy, grow Christmas trees, and even compete with some suburban farms by selling cider and offering pony rides. It's a great idea, if Hantz can swing it, because he's looking for the city and state to donate some land or sell it to him at a nominal cost.


At the end of the story, the comments from the community farming activist kind of surprised me, because you'd think there's more than enough room for both community farming and for-profit farming. In fact, some of the workers trained through the community farms may actually end up with jobs at a for-profit farm, no? But there wasn't much room for the woman to speak in the story, so maybe she had more to say that didn't make it in. I'll be interested to see how the city, which desperately needs new businesses, reacts to this idea.

Raining today

It's raining today, and out in the driveway there were three big, fat earthworms. I was tempted to scoop them up and drop them in my garden, but ick. Worms. Maybe I'll get the kids to do it.

For the record, I've already planted a few cold-weather seeds. I put in a row of snow peas, radishes, lettuce, and carrots. Like I mentioned before, I'm really not a great gardener. Not sure if it's too early for those seeds. The last day of frost in the Ann Arbor area is supposedly May 15th, but that seems a little late to me. I'm hoping it's earlier, but either way these seeds supposedly like the cold. There are a few sprouts in the garden already, but I can't tell if they're weeds or plants. If they're plants, uh oh. I pulled some and threw them out already.

I guess we'll find out soon enough.

I also started a compost pile. We used to compost quite a bit when we lived in New Jersey, but stopped once we moved to Michigan. I have a weird love of compost. I love not throwing food away, knowing that the egg shells and strawberry tops and old banana peels can do some good in just a few months. For this compost pile, I was determined not to spend any money. So I'm using our crock pot as a temporary storage spot in the kitchen. We usually only use the crock pot in the winter, so I put a plastic bowl inside and just toss the scraps in there until I'm ready to bring them out back.

I don't know too much about composting, but I keep my compost piles meat and bread-free. I only throw in vegetable matter, fruit castoffs, coffee grinds and egg shells. No sugar, nothing processed, no chicken bones. I honestly can't remember if I'm doing that because that's what you're supposed to do, or if I'm just weird.

"We were fat"

This is Clara. She's 91 in this video (93 now, in later videos) demonstrating how her mother cooked cheaply during the Depression. They ate a lot of potatoes and pasta, she says. If you listen closely, at one point on this video she says, "We were fat, we were eating potatoes."

Odd, that statement. We were fat. During the Depression, when people stood in line for food and one year, 25% of the population was unemployed. We were fat. You know why? Because not everyone who's struggling to eat is actually starving. Some folks have enough money to buy some food, and they choose what suits them best: Food that lasts, food that is high in calories, and food that leaves them feeling satisfied, at least intially. 

That's phenomenon is called "food insecurity," and it's something that's spreading in Michigan these days as more and more people lose their job or struggle with pay cuts. Food insecurity is not neccesarily hunger, but it's one of the issues that food banks try to address. Food Gatherers recently published a study on food insecurity in Washtewnaw County. Among their more interesting findings: 

* Fresh vegetables aren't easy to access in poorer neighborhoods; Detroit and the city of Ypsilanti don't have supermarkets within their borders. Of the 124 stores in Washtenaw County that accept food stamps, only 36 sell fresh produce. 

* National studies show that high fat, high sugar foods are much cheaper than fresh fruits, vegetables and lean protein. To that point: $1 can buy about $1,200 calories in cookies or chips, but only 230 calories of carrots. 

* There's a clear link between poverty and poor health. In our county, about 32.1% of the general population has high cholesterol. But of those making less than $35,000 a year, 64.7% have high cholesterol. Just over 18% of the general population is obese, but 26.5% of the poorer population is obese. 

* Low-income families have an extremely high rate of food insecurity, with about 92% of parents saying they saying often skip meals or dole out smaller portions to make food last longer. 

That's where planting a row for the hungry comes in. If we can bring the produce from our harvest to Food Gatherers, they will distribute it to food banks, pantries, and to where ever else there is a need. The discussion on food insecurity makes me think about all the food I've donated to food banks in the past -- boxes of stuffing (lasts long, but is it all that healthy?), cereal, canned vegetables, soup (filling, but very high in sodium.) It would be lovely to help people feed their families the same way I try to feed my own: With healthy foods. 

Still, all that said, I love Clara and her Youtube cooking lessons, and am really tempted to make the Poor Man's meal for the kids. Hot dogs and fried potatoes -- oh my!