Chus On Chow

Dear neighbor,

I must confess, it was I who stole your leaves. Shirley, I came after dusk with a rake and blanket, and a wheelbarrow, the tools of the trade. I checked to see if you were around, but no, you left me to my silent task.

Just as was taking one of the last loads, Mike peered down the street from his front yard and thought to himself, “Hmm! That looks like Lonnie… and she’s stealing Shirley’s leaves!” He came by to assure me that he’d already called the cops. But I guess they had more important things to do. Mike stayed, still in his sock feet, to entertain me with stories of some recent food marvel he’s created, while I kept stealing leaves right underneath his nose.

Sue, Dave and I stole your leaves today. The city crews were out rounding up all the leaves from the sides of the streets. They gathered them in huge piles using large, carbon-spewing earth-moving equipment. I wonder how many of my tax dollars went to pay people to collect leaves that could have been mowed into lawns as mulch.

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By now, most home gardeners are well aware of the tomato blight that has just about wiped out all tomato and even potato production in the northeast. Our garden has been similarly affected. If you have a garden or think that one day you just might plant one, reading these two articles is a must:

Tomato Blight in Northeast Aided By Home Gardeners

Outbreak of Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop

As in many large-scale disasters (e.g. hurricane Katrina, airlines disaster, etc.), the scale of the destruction here can be attributed to a series of mistakes or weaknesses in a large system.  In this case, we have the following:

• a combination of many new home gardeners (who want to eat locally-produced food)
• large chain stores such as Wal-Mart, Lowes and Home Depot that sell plants but don’t adequately inspect for disease
• an unusually cool, wet summer

Put all these elements together and you have a blight that got out of control. It’s very important that we learn from this. I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to lose the tomato crop next year.

So these are the lessons I’m taking from this:

• Buy from small, local nurseries where you know the grower and you know him or her to be picky about selling only healthy plants
• Or start your own tomatoes from seed. Why not look for seeds locally, or from a group of seed-savers? (Make sure they’re not GMO-contaminated seeds! Monsanto will sue you!)
• Start tomatoes under some kind of protection so they’re strong early in the season
• Talk with other gardeners and keep up with the news
• At the first sign of disease, deal with it! I believe I could have saved my heirlooms, which were doing great (I bought them from Harris Seeds in Rochester) if I’d torn out my Romas (which I bought at a hardware store) when I first noticed something was going wrong.

About.com says this is what to do with your infected plants:

“DO NOT COMPOST INFECTED PLANTS!

“To best prevent the spreading of spores, put a black plastic garbage bag over the infected tomato plant, then pull tomato plant out by the roots. Make sure entire plant is in the bag and seal it. To kill the pathogen, so it can’t spread, leave the bag in the sun. Then dispose of the bag, preferably directly into landfill.”

Following are pictures of the fungus among us. Hold the mouse over the picture to see descriptions of what you’re looking at. Click to see bigger versions. Hit your browser’s back button to return to this page.

How are you coping with the lack of tomatoes this year?

No worries! There’s a great example of how we’re going to survive when the oil runs out, and it’s been 20 years in the making: Cuba.  When all that cheap oil from the old Eastern Bloc got cut off, they had to switch from an oil-fertilizer-pesticide dependent monoculture style of food production to what we know as urban community gardens.  Now about 200 of these gardens are feeding the city of Havana.

The details are fascinating and instructive. Did you know that sunflowers attract ladybugs?  I didn’t.  Could you imagine our urban gardens feeing the entire city of Syracuse? It’s possible.

A great read and a video here at The Vegetable Gardeners of Havana.

Another great article, from 2000, on how it happened in Cuba. No more money going to the international pesticide cartel.

Everything, food and weed alike, has been growing like mad in the garden for the past three weeks while I’ve been down with a cold.  But today we got out there, pulled weeds, removed more sod and thinned out the beets and spinach. We’ve learned one thing: carrots don’t seem to like being transplanted. That’s okay – we have other things to grow there, and the original bed from which I was thinning is happier now that there’s more room for the remaining carrots.

Today’s meal was created around what simply had to be thinned out. I froze the beet greens. The stems and wee bitty beets are simmering on the stove for a vegetable stock. When you work so hard to grow it, you don’t waste any of it. The spinach was going to seed, so I cut out a lot of that and combined it with garlic and fresh oregano, also from the garden. I cooked it briefly in some bacon fat (no nitrates) that I had saved (waste nothing), tossed in a bit of white wine, leftover bacon bits and some romano shavings. It was really good, if I do say so myself!

Oregano:

Spinach:

Spinach with organic bacon, garlic, oregano and Romano cheese:

More garden pictures – mid-July:

I’m a Capricorn, so I relate to goats, especially the way they eat just about anything. We have scapes in our garden now, so in order to encourage the garlic plant to put its energy into the bulb instead of the flower, I’m cutting off the flower stem – the scape – and cooking with it.

When we bought our house five years ago, it came with garden items left over from a previous gardener, including garlic. I’ve transplanted what I found and it’s doing pretty well. At least the scapes are delicious! Yesterday I chopped up a few and sautéed them briefly in coconut oil and butter before incorporating them into scrambled eggs (fresh from our kids’ mini-farm) with fresh rosemary, sea salt and fresh ground smoked black pepper.  Coupled with Cafe Kubal coffee (roasted four blocks from our home) and whole wheat bread, it was a breakfast fit for royalty.

To learn more about growing, harvesting and storing garlic, take a look at this excellent series of videos from e-How.

Now all I need is some chevre goat cheese from Lively Run Goat Dairy to add to my eggs.  The dairy is in Interlaken, NY, but we’re lucky – we can buy their cheese at the Real Food Co-op right here in Syracuse.

My dad lives in Mexico (and that’s not Mexico, NY!). He retired years ago to a fabulous little town that is a favorite destination for readers of Conde Nast publications: San Miguel de Allende. Dad has always been a gardener, but of flowers, never of foodstuffs. Given his interest, and the fact that it’s been years since he’s seen the flora of Syracuse, I’m putting some pictures of our urban yard – currently in some turmoil – in this post.

Maybe you’ll be inspired to try putting some raised beds in your own yard. Our goal is to have as much food to eat and as little mowing to do as possible.

To view larger images, click on each picture. Use your browser’s “back” button to return to this site. Enjoy!