I gave up on this thing for a while, obviously. I’ve been busy with (and fairly depressed by) work, and I felt like I was surrendering more free time than I wanted to writing and thinking about food. But I feel like if I quit this blog I’ll have let myself down – I was really enjoying writing and hearing people’s feedback, so I think I’m back again.
This change of heart is due in part to the fact that I’m finally (finally!) going to start visiting farms tomorrow. I’m visiting the largest organic vegetable producer in Michigan – he lives about an hour away, and once I ask permission to write about him, I’ll be talking about him a whole lot more. I’ve also been surprised to see that people are somehow still finding their way to this site – the magic of the internet, I suppose. It makes me think that if I spend less time worrying about how many people are paying attention to me, I’ll make gains in both quality and quantity of posts, without stressing so much.
I’ll put together a “real” post in the next day or two, but for now, here are some updates:
- I just bought a CSA share from Titus Farms in Leslie, MI. I’ve mentioned them before, and I think they’re pretty wonderful. I’m going out to visit them on Friday as part of my farmers’ market vendor study, and I can’t wait to see the place. Even more so, I can’t wait for it to warm up so they can start giving me food!
- My wonderful, wonderful boss who has the raw milk share decided that she just can’t keep up with the glut of milk at her house. She lives alone and is getting a gallon a week. So she’s splitting the share with me, and she’s not letting me pay for it. Amazing! I have a half gallon a week of delicious raw milk. This is the third week I’ve been getting it and I’m absolutely thrilled. She seems to like how it’s been going too, and wants us to keep splitting it indefinitely. Sometime this summer she’ll be gone for a couple of weeks, and I’ll get all of her milk too – I think I’ll have to have an experiment in cheesemaking!
- I got to see John Jeavons give a 2-hour free talk at MSU this past week. I want to say it was amazing, but it was pretty blah. He didn’t say anything beyond what was covered in How to Grow More Vegetables, which was disappointing for me since I’ve already read it several times. He’s also not a particularly gifted speaker, in such a way that the impact and gravity of his message was greatly diminished. The bright spot in all of this is that I brought my mom along, and while she wasn’t very impressed with Jeavons’s rhetorical skills either, she did come to two realizations: she’s only been taking things from her garden, not feeding it at all, and this has had a negative impact on her soil quality and yields; and eating locally produced food really does mean you can’t have eggplant in March.
- My mom (after hearing Jeavons’s talk) told me she’d buy me compost for my garden as a birthday present. I don’t have anywhere to make my own (damn you, apartment living!).
- My friend Lauren (with whom I’m splitting my CSA share) and I are contemplating taking a master composting class at Fenner Arboretum in May, so that if I ever have access to enough space to make my own compost, I can do it.
- Local leeks exist at my food co-op (or at least they did for a few weeks – they seem to have disappeared since). I bought approximately a ton, and I’ve had leeks coming out of my ears ever since.
- I’ve started my tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and onions. The first three are huge. Absurdly huge. They’re making this cold snap almost bearable. I’ll be starting kale, collards, cabbages, and a few other things this weekend. Pictures forthcoming.
Can’t wait to see the pictures of your garden! I live in a tiny urban apartment, so can only do a small bit in boxes, but so far I have: mint, lavender, rosemary, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, basil and dill. And our Christmas tree from December is growing like gangbusters…of course, we are in Northern California…
I’m glad you’re back.
A class on composting? Wow.
I’d suggest getting some red wrigglers and putting them in shredded newspaper in a sweater box below your kitchen sink. You can make lots of good worm poop for your little pots. I’ve vermicomposted for years. People think I’m nuts, but hey: when I was a city gardener, it was one of the only ways we could compost all the kitchen waste.
El-
I’ve been thinking pretty seriously about vermicomposting – especially if I end up living in this apartment for another year, which it looks like I probably will. We’re pretty short on space, so I’m not sure where we’d put a worm bx. How big is yours? We don’t have an under-sink space, but we have a mostly-unused drawer that might work.
Ours is one of those boxes people usually put their xmas ornaments in: it’s got a pretty intense lid, as opposed to a light and flimsy one. Okay I just went to the basement and it says Rubbermaid Roughneck 14 gallons. But they don’t need to be this big. They can be a lot shorter, especially.
I would look up http://www.wormwoman.com/acatalog/index.html
(A Michigan woman! Though she died recently. She was THE vermicompost crusader.) You can get ideas and WORMS from this site.
We use the castings in our pots: be they houseplants or seed starters or the outdoor plants, the stuff is really muddy gold. Otherwise, we use the compost we make.
When I did live in the city, I used 2 of those same Rubbermaid tubs to make our compost. I spraypainted them black and propped them against the house so they weren’t ridiculously obvious to visitors or neighbors.
So I think even an apartment dweller like you has some options! (All for the betterment of the plants, you know)