Suspended Animation

Going into my second year in upstate NY--where it still gets cold, just not so much anymore--and I'm amazed again at what can survive the winter and just start growing again like all that snow and degrees owed (only got down to -9 once this winter) never happened.

Out there this morning planting peas in earnest (the St. Patty's day peas were a crap out), I came across radicchio, collards, spinach, carrots, and miner's lettuce, all doing just fine, thank you, as if they had been in suspended animation and just, spring, came back to life.

I left the baby carrots to their own spot, but while hoeing a row for peas, adult carrots kept popping out of the ground from a spot I'd forgotten about. I threw the mangled ones up into the woods for the deer, and the rest will be food for us thanks to that free winter storage.

This phenomenon hitherto unknown to this southerner leads me to the assumption that I should be saving myself a lot of work and muddy boots by planting a bunch of cold-tolerant plants late in the fall, so they're just old enough when the warm blanket of snow covers them as they hibernate. I'm starting to see how my lazy Yankee gardener friends think now.

This tactic would allow me to spend my time more wisely in the spring. Because of my disability--lack of back bone cartilage--I only get a little time in the garden each day or I pay severely. So, I could spend more time turning compost and mixing it with horse/steer manure and peat moss to pile on the raised beds before the warm weather plants go in. I could spend more time in the woods harvesting ramps and making sure they're properly cared for so we don't deplete them. I could spend more time sitting in the chair sipping coffee listening to woodpeckers laugh and whatever birds those are that sound like they're playing Marco Polo.

The Long Ant War

My friend back in California is still waging war with the invading ants, who apparently are of the sugartee--a militant sect of sugar eating ants that wage guerrilla warfare in a territorial battle for southern California. My friend was asking about aspartame, the sugar substitute in Equal, which kills ants when they eat it. Since I know he doesn't want anything even potentially dangerous around his kid, I shied him away from the faux sugar and pointed him toward some new tactical weapons in the looong war.

Once I threw some chunks of fat (we were battling the fatatee--a meat eating sect in So Cal) into the corners of my property, which I then blocked off with a thick standing infantry of diatomacious earth, after making sure that civilian children could not access the area. This classic misdirection move, followed by a pincer attack of fat bait laced with borax surrounded by diatomacious earth with howitzers of ant chalk laying down circles of indirect fire support in the gaps in our front line. 

They tried to flank us near the barbeque, but I sprayed them with cedar oil there and they beat an angry retreat into the neighbor's yard, where they were probably met with synthetic chemical warfare, which is against the Geneva conventions of insect warfare, to which we are a signatory.

Damn ants. Out there doing their job and taking hell for it...

Grass-fed Cows Save The Earth

Since we sell grass-fed beef jerky, we like to plug any story we hear about how much better grass-fed beef is. It's usually about how the grass is better food for cows, which make the cows better food for you. So, we have this saying:

Grass-fed beef is better for you, the animals, and the planet.

What you don't usually hear is how grass-fed beef is better for the planet. We like to tout the fact that these animals are not eating corn, so you can subtract all the petroleum and other resources that get used to feed cows corn. But this story about how cows help the soil caught my eye.

Grass is a perennial. If cattle and other ruminants are rotated across pastures full of it, the animals' grazing will cut the blades, spurring new growth, while their trampling helps work manure and other decaying organic matter into the soil, turning it into rich humus. And healthy soil keeps carbon dioxide underground and out of the atmosphere. 

So there you have it. How grass-fed beef can save the planet!

The article goes on to mention that yes, grass-fed cows create more methane than the corn-fed animals, but that that is more than offset by the CO2 sequestration taking place in the fields. And they're not even taking the petroleum out of the equation. So, grass-fed is actually much better for the planet than corn fed.

Bush Administration Ignored Organic Laws

I'm shocked, shocked to discover that Bush was the head of a giant criminal organization. In this case, it seems we were all being ripped off, paying for organic that probably wasn't.

New Management at USDA Reforms, Strengthens National Organic Program

WASHINGTON, DC: After an extensive audit and investigation of alleged improprieties at the USDA’s National Organic Program, the agency’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) made public their formal report, dated March 9, substantiating the allegations of prominent organic industry watchdog groups — that under the Bush administration, the USDA did an inadequate job of enforcing federal organic law.

Since 2002, when the USDA adopted the federal organic regulations, the agency has been plagued by underfunding and a number of scandals and complaints about its cozy relationship with agribusiness interests and lobbyists.

While I'm happy to hear that things are getting better under the Obama administration, one way to avoid putting your trust in a corporatocracy is to know and support your local farmers. Join a CSA. Buy produce at your local farmer's market. I'm sure that even un-certified  local growers are more organic than some of the big companies that helped keep George W Bush in the White House for 8 years.

This is, of course, par for the course for the Bush administration. They had foxes guarding the hen houses in all departments of the Executive branch. I'm sure we'll be finding out all kinds of ways that the American people were duped, ripped-off, lied to, harmed, and even killed in order to boost the bottom line of some international conglomerate.

Oh, wait. We already have, haven't we? That was the whole Bush raison d'être.

Break the Tradition... Un-corned Beef!

Tradition has it that up here at 42.77 north latitude you don't plant anything less hardy than a collard until after Memorial Day. But there is, of course, a contrary tradition of planting peas on St. Patrick's day, which I shall now be doing, at least in the places where the snow has melted and where I can get without waste-high mud boots.

There is also this tradition of eating corned-beef, which we will be reversing by eating un-corned beef, meaning we didn't get a brisket to put in brine, and the beef we eat now is grass-fed. So, no corned beef in anyway whatsoever today.

I will, however, still be drinking a Guinness this evening. Some traditions are worth keeping.

Weeds Genetically Engineer Themselves to Resist Roundup

Monsanto deserves its critics. They genetically engineered plants to resist Roundup, and now the weeds are doing the same to keep up. Way to go Monsanto...

in reference to:

"Scientists said on Friday they have confirmed expanding weed resistance to a key ingredient in Monsanto's (MON.N)widely used Roundup herbicide, a troubling development for farmers and fresh fodder for Monsanto critics."
- UPDATE 1-More US weeds found resisting Monsanto Roundup | Reuters (view on Google Sidewiki)

From the Grass-fed Duh Files

OK, I shouldn't be so harsh when people discover that grass-fed beef is better for you and the planet, especially when they're playing up the angle that rotating fields of grass-fed beef actually improves degraded soil. But it is a sort of duh. Just look at the fertile plains of North America that the settlers found under roaming buffalo that had built the prairie over eons of rotation through those fields. And look at those fields now... barren big agri wastelands polluted with petroleum-based farming known as synthetic chemical subsidized agri-business. And then look at the feed lots where thousands of animals are concentrated into environmental grass lands.

Then look at this:

Case rested.

Natural Pest Control Product

The question I get most often is how to get rid of bugs. The answer, for the garden at least, is to make sure your soil is healthy, which will make sure your plants are healthy (other factors do apply, like sun, temperature, water...), which will make the plants more able to resist bugs. Stressed out plants are bug magnets, since bugs are just doing their job by helping weed out the weaklings.

Occasionally, though, the bugs go crazy and attack everything. In that case, you need an organic and natural pest killer. Our friend Jackie (who makes great Hawaiian perfumes and body butters) recently started Natural Pest Free, which sells cedar-oil-based natural pest control products.

CEDAR OIL for more than a 1000 years is and has been a proven method of pest control that emphasizes simple, inexpensive, 100% organic practices that cause no harm to people or the environment. CEDAR OIL focuses on building a barrier of entry on the perimeter of your property, so bugs stay out of your yard, which means they stay out of your home. At Natural Pest Free we are dedicated to reducing the health risk and environmental impacts of pesticides and promoting organic alternatives to homeowners across America, one home at a time.

I'm a big fan of the natural barrier plan. I surround my garden with rows of clover, which rabbits and deer love. They'll stop and eat the clover and be happy with it, never making it deep into the garden where the expensive goodies are. Occasionally there's a deer (like our regular visitor, Scarface, shown here), who gets deep into the garden where he's learned to love pea shoots (who doesn't). In that case I use hot pepper waxes, another barrier--one that sends scarface running for the nearest water.

So, a cedar oil barrier makes sense for keeping the bugs out. I suggest using it sparingly, mostly when there's a serious infestation of something you really need to stop. Remember, when you're gardening, most bugs are beneficial, so you don't want to just keep all bugs out.

But in your home is another matter. This is a great product for use as an in-home pesticide.

...control of Head lice, Mosquitoes, Flies, Fleas, No-See-Um, Chiggers, Ticks, Chinch Bugs, Grub Worms, Mites, Mole Crickets, Earwigs, Slugs, Snails, Caterpillars, Beetles, June Bugs, May Bugs, Root Maggots, Army Worms, Weevils, Wire Worms, Ants and Termites.

Way to go Jackie! I'm proud to be affiliated with such a fine product!

Cold Climate Composting

As my friend Mort Mather says, the soil is your bank. You can't make withdrawals unless you make deposits. I get composting straw and manure from Nectar Hills Farm (where we also get the beef for our grass-fed gourmet beef jerky), which I mix with my kitchen waste to create compost that I then deposit into the soil bank so I can make fresh veggie withdrawals. Mort and I are both lazy gardeners, meaning we like to let nature do as much of the work as possible, and we just help her along.

Last winter, though, my compost pile (which, by the way, lowers my carbon footprint considerably, since that food waste won't decompose anaerobically in the landfill) froze solid, like a big block of ice. It was my first real winter after years of living in substantially warmer climates. This year, I was ready for these sub-zero temperatures. With a couple of bags of hay, some very dry, aged horse manure, and a lot of snow for insulation, I have built a very insulated compost pile.

Since I'm lazy, the pile is up against the foundation of the house, right at the bottom of the back stairs. I don't want to have to put on the snow shoes to compost all winter. This way, the compost is only exposed on three sides. On two of those sides, I've stacked flakes from the hay bales, creating a kind of straw bale shelter for the pile. The front is open, but held up about 18 inches with some chicken wire fencing, which I have now piled snow up against for insulation. The top of the pile is covered with snow, which I poured hot water down to create a cylindrical hole down to the top of the pile.

Now, when I want to compost, I just pour some fresh hot water down the hole to melt any new snow that accumulated, then I dump my compost bucket down the hole, layer some manure on top of that, and then a couple of handfulls of hay (or the cedar shreds I take out of our turtle cage when I clean it, which has turtle manure) down the hole. Come spring (or another thaw like we had a week ago) there will be a bunch of cylinders of frozen compost sticking up on the top of the pile. I'll be sure to take a picture of that scene.

But underneath all that lies the compost pile proper, where my probes have proven that composting is taking place, worms are thriving (future turtle food), and aerobic decomposition is reducing our carbon output. But the best part, of course, is that come spring, when I build some new raised beds, I'll have plenty of currency saved up for the soil bank!

Of course, if you have a little money to spend, I imagine a black plastic composter would use insulating and solar power to keep your pile going year around, unless you're above the arctic circle.

Ant Wars!

A very good friend of mine from my stagehand days recently bought a house--a fixer upper in ant country--and asked for some help on that front.

Ants go where the food is, so first, make sure there's nothing for them to eat. This is most important! Cut off their supplies!

Now the battle can begin!

Put out the ant baits you can buy anywhere, but put them outside near their homes. I used to use those metal stakes that go in the ground. They work for a while, but eventually they learn to avoid them, so you have to keep changing brands. This is the artillery to soften them up a little.

Find where they're coming through the wall. Unless they're under the house, or living in the house somewhere, they're coming in through a crack, usually around a cable inlet hole or window. Caulk. You want to seal the holes anyway, for energy efficiency.

Now you're going to have to launch an attack on their fort. Follow their trail back to the home. If you don't care about growing anything in that spot for a while, pour a bunch of vinegar down the hole. Get the 10% vinegar if you can find it, but 5% is OK. If you dig the area up after wards and compost the soil with some grass clippings and food waste, it will balance out the pH and you can use the soil again.

If you do want to grow something there immediately, you can get some Diatomaceous Earth--not the kind for pools, but the finer kind used to kill bugs--you can pile it on the mound and in a radius of a foot or so, more if it's big. The powder is so fine it clogs the breathing pores in their skin. Be sure not to breathe the stuff, as it will do the same to your lungs. They will die trying to get out. In fact, they will build a bridge of dead ants and crawl over them, so you have to keep going there, raking the area free of dead any bridges, and reapply as needed. Watch for places where they try to tunnel out, and apply there to. Obviously, you're going to have to be patient and vigilant. Kind of like democracy.

If you really want to have some pyrotechnic fun, I suggest gasoline of kerosene. Not exactly organic, but you're going to let it soak in and then light it up. Careful. I suggest some sort of fuse so you can stand back when the fire geyser spews flaming ants into the sky.

If they're really bad, there is an ant chalk that is technically illegal, but they sell it in Chinatown. It has a neurotoxin in it, so use gloves, and make sure the kid can't get near it. It's not technically organic, although a lot of people say it is. The active ingredients are Cypermethrin and Deltamethrin, which are both common, very weak insecticides which break down quickly (but are really bad for fish, so don't use near water). They are both Pyrethroids, synthetic chemicals that very closely resemble pyrethrins, which come from flowers. This is what a lot of ant sprays have in them, but I hate sprays as a lot of it gets in the air that way. Besides, they stink for days after you spray them.

Draw chalk lines where the ants are coming into the house, on concrete it works well, you have to press hard to make sure it gets into the stucco. They will not come back for a long time once they get a taste of that stuff.

Finally, learn to live with a few of them. Too many and there's obviously a food source available, so again, make sure every thing's sealed up. Battle them back as much as possible, but there will always be scouts. Kill them when you see them, but no need to freak. They're actually pretty clean, an amazing evolutionary engineering wonder. The colony acts like a single brain (I often call it the ant brain).

And they're just doing their (very important) job....

Community Supported Agriculture

This is an interesting post on Grist: It takes a community to sustain a small farm. It doesn't mention CSAs, community supported agriculture, where local residents purchase "shares" of a farm, which guarantees delivery of a set amount of food over a period of time, usually a year. But it does address the issues small, local farms face, considering that agribusiness has been putting the little guys--from farmers to butchers to truck drivers and grocers--out of business for a long time now.

Our local and organic grass-fed highlander beef (very lean), which we use for our Happy Hobo Grass-fed Beef Jerky, is from Nectar Hills Farm, which recently started an upstate New York CSA of their own, mostly for meat (they also have lamb, pork, poultry, eggs, and cheese), but also other things from the farm, like incredible organic produce during the season and organic red bamboo honey (which we also use in the beef jerky).

Nectar Hills Farm also has a new farm picture gallery, if you'd like to see some pictures of a small organic farm in upstate New York.

CSAs aren't new. You can find one near you on the Local Harvest's CSA finder. They're a great way to help your local farmer. It gets them money when they need it, and it gets you a discount on farm-fresh local and organic products on a regular basis. This food is better for you, better for the animals, and better for the environment. It is money you won't spend keeping big agri-business in business.

Our New Year's resolution is to stop eating corn-fed and factory farmed beef. You don't have to be that drastic about it, but once you research grass-fed beef in your area, you'll find an array of delicious meats that are essentially solar powered, instead of oil and corn powered, like the concentrated feed lots of industrial meat production.

Robin's Best Grass-fed Beef Jerky Ever!

If you're lucky enough to be up here in the walk-in freezer that is upstate New York this weekend, you'll want to swing by the Cooperstown Farmer's Market, the last of the year, for the best Happy Hobo grass-fed beef jerky Robin's ever made.

The grass-fed Highlander's top round that this batch of jerky is made from is, as we're told, as good as they get, having spent the whole summer eating grass from the fields of Nectar Hills Farm here in central New York's leatherstocking region. When the cows have been out in the fields eating grass all summer, they fatten up and become especially delicious.

Of course, Robin thinks it's cute that I say every batch of jerky is the best. But I'm serious. She's perfected the recipe, the cows are particularly delicious this time of year. And we've switched to organic tamari to replace the soy sauce (we're making a special batch with no wheat, which soy sauce contains, for some relatives who can't eat wheat). At this point, the only wheat left in the recipe is the trace amount in the organic Worcestershire sauce, so to make a wheat-free jerky, we just leave that out.

Starting this winter, we're going to begin experimenting with other flavors of jerky. We're thinking Teriyaki, tropical, and a few others. Suggestions are certainly welcome!

We're also going to experiment with organic dog treats, but don't tell your dog yet; we want to get it just right first.

If you can't make it to the Cooperstown Farmer's Market Saturday morning, you can order our grass-fed beef jerky at the Nectar Hills Farm website.

White House Hoops

Good looking and inexpensive hoop houses are the focus of this White House Blog post by Sam Kass, assistant chef and Food Initiative Coordinator for the WH.

Glad to see they're growing all my favorites, especially mustard greens! I wish I'd had the time to put in some hoops over my greens. Too busy of a year-end for us to get out there and do much.

I'm looking forward to seeing what lives through being mulched, buried under a blanket of snow for a few months, and then uncovered in the spring. I know the spinach plants will start up again, but I also mulched some small mustard, collards, mizuna, and miner's leaf lettuce.

So, I'll just think of not having hoops out there as an experiment into what survives the winter up here in zone 5... If you mulch it, will it come back?

in reference to: Planting the Winter Garden | The White House (view on Google Sidewiki)

White Hoop House

I put up some plastic last year and made a little hoop house to protect winter greens. It was hastily built just in time for a surprise snow storm around Halloween.

This year, I just picked the greens down as low as I could, and mulched them with old straw over a layer of very dry, aged horse manure. I know the spinach will come back in the spring, and I suppose the mustard, mizuna, collards, kale, onions, radishes, and other cold hearty vegies will survive as well.

If not, whatever dies will compost under all that straw, which is now under a few inches of snow. It stays pretty warm under that white blanket--warm enough for things to decompose if not actually live.

This spring, or late winter, if I have any money, I plan to build a slightly larger hoop house, something I can actually walk into instead of crawling under (I have a bad back), and that will get me started much earlier.

In the mean time, I'm going to look into these little hoops at the White House, as maybe they'll make a good low-cost alternative to the big one, and I'll just have to figure out a way to get under there more easily.

in reference to: Our Blog : 12/07/09 - The White House extends its growing season : Slow Food USA (view on Google Sidewiki)

New New York Grass Fed Beef Pictures

No, that's not a Futurama reference. I just posted some new pictures to her site that Sonia Sola took of her Nectar Hills Farm, where she raises New York grass fed beef. She took a bunch of great shots on one of our recent sunny (!) November days (which I'm told is rare for November up here, usually the dreariest month). As you can see, these cows (and horses) look really happy to be out in the sun getting fat for the winter.

Sonia tells us that she and Dave are working out the details for a CSA (community supported agriculture) that they will be offering soon. Nectar Hills Farm sells grass-fed free-range beef, pork, and other meats, plus farm-fresh eggs, honey, cider, and produce. You can find out about CSAs in your area at Local Harvest.

If you're bored, I recommend checking out the Nectar Hills Farm Links page, which has all kinds of fun links, like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics. Fun stuff!

Would You Eat a Monkey?

As I learned growing up on a small farm in Arkansas, pigs are smart. Not just dog smart, but really smart. Like, the pigs would learn tricks so fast that they would help the dogs learn. I had pigs that would jump through hoops, roll over, play dead, and even speak on command. It broke my heart when one got sick, and I spent days hand scooping corn mash with molasses into its mouth and spraying the sores on its skin with some sort of medicine with purple dye in it.

Of course, I was a kid more obsessed with beer and girls than ethics, but later in life, after studying bio-ethics and getting a philosophy degree, the smart pigs haunted me. Eventually, when I got old enough to worry about my cholesterol and whether I was doing the right things, I really started to feel bad about eating pork. The more I learned about factory farming, the worse I felt. I never thought I would say it, but I started losing my taste cravings for bacon (I used to joke that a pile of crap would taste good with bacon and cheese on it).

Then I learned about Michael Pollan. I heard him make the argument that pigs are at least as smart as dogs (in reality, new research shows that pigs are much smarter than dogs), and you wouldn't eat your dog, so why would you eat pork?

As ethical arguments go, that's a damn good one.

After that, I was convinced. A few months later was the Chinese New Year, starting the year of the pig. I convinced my fellow prosciutto loving wife Robin to quit with me. And we've been pork free for almost three years now. Even our son has joined the cause.

Since we moved to upstate NY, we found Nectar Hills Farm where they treat their animals with respect. The pigs are free range and appear happy. To be honest, they look delicious. But I'm still not eating them. However, if you can get past the intelligence problem (I've also stopped eating octopus due to research that shows how intelligent they are), then you should at least consider only eating free-range pork. The evils of factory farming are impossible to deny, from the treatment of the animal to the effects on the environment (see the chapter on massive pig shit geysers in Senator Al Franken's Book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them).

Recently, I had been debating around the edges with questions like eating wild pigs (which are very bad for the environment, especially in places like Hawaii) and I'm still not sure about that. Possibly. But I don't think I would eat a monkey that was messing up an ecosystem somewhere, so...

These are tough questions. We all have to come down where we decide. For me, it's a question of how smart an animal will I eat? For now, I'll stick to the oblivious seafood (but only the good stuff per the Monterey Bay Aquariums Guide to Sustainable Seafood), idiot chickens and other birds, and the only slightly smarter cows (but we're moving to only grass-fed beef as much as we can afford). The environmental choices are actually pretty easy: eat free-range, organic, grass-fed, pasture raised, keep it as local as you can, and stay away from factory farmed as much as possible.

Choosing what you eat based on the intelligence of the food? Well, I'll just have to keep thinking about that, and adjusting along the way. It's the least I can do for a species that looks, based on this new research, to be at least as smart as dolphins.

As Dr. Lawrence Schook said in yesterday's NYT article, "Pigs like to lie around, they like to drink if given the chance, they’ll smoke and watch TV." When I'm coming up with rules to live by, this one comes up near the top: I just can't eat anybody who would sit around with me watching a movie (Animal Farm?) drinking beer, and puffing on a good cigar.

Photographs of Nectar Hills Farm by Robin Supak.

What the? Oh, go to...

You call that a summer? I find myself talking to this place. I'm not sure it's because I'm losing it due to my disability and financial situation, or what, but when the weather does something fun up here in central New York state, I want to say, hey, wait. That doesn't count as summer. That was like spring with a few warm days. Now the leaves are falling fast, like some cruel foreshadowing to what is, I kid you not, a prediction for this Friday.

Snow.

This whole cold thing is new to me. Last year, we moved in too late to have a real garden. This year, I get to go out there and see pepper plants that never really had a chance to produce more than a few token reminders of heat, now all post-frost droopy, just waiting for me to get out there and compost them.

I just don't have the energy, partly due to some bad pain days lately, but also because I'm an inherently lazy gardener, and I figure the winter will lay all the dead stuff flat and compost it under the snow anyway. If anything, I should throw some straw and leaves on there.

I'm getting damn good at growing the cold lovers: collards, mustard greens, kale, spinach, some lettuce--all doing great. I'd forgotten how much I like mustard greens--very spicy! Almost makes up for the lack of jalapenos...

We stopped on the side of the road and bought some bags of aged horse manure ($2 for a big bag from an honor cart--stuff the money in the hand-cut slot on the top of a plastic Folgers container), and I've layered it on top of some spots where I'm going to put peppers and other nitrogen hogs (my kingdom for a home grown tomato) next year. So, the soil bank deposit has been made, or at least part of it. I'll be putting more compost and manure out in the next few days, and then again in the spring.

I also have some clover seed I've scattered here and there, that I will turn in in the spring as a green manure. Clover's a good cover crop, and it keeps the rabbits busy so they'll stay away from the radicchio that's almost done. Or so the theory goes.

Kind of like that theory that it gets warm and sunny in the summer...

A Shiny Thing from A Reader!

Thanks for the shiny thing, reader, whoever you are. We just love recognition (never mind that that means to "think again"), especially when there's something ribbon-like involved. In the early days of the web, when we were some of the only people on line giving out organic gardening advice, peddling Mort Mather's Organic Gardening Essays to whomever would listen, we would get awards on a regular basis. Now? Not so much.

So thanks, reader! It was almost as nice a present to wake up to as the organic Kona coffee my Hawaii coffee farming friend Michael keeps sending! If anyone else wants to do something nice for us, let me know! If you can't afford to help us pay the rent by supporting our advertisers (buy a poster, man, they're cheap and cool), then find a place to submit us! Put a link on your site (this little linking logo works really well for that), or your facebook, get a Supak.com tattoo, or something!

These little gifts mean a lot more to us right now, a very stressful time for us. So, seriously, thanks. A little "thinking again" goes a long way.

It's About to Get Cold So I Think Hawaii

In this summer that wasn't, we've had some 60 degree mornings. But today, with a little breeze reminding me that Canada is right over there and the first frost is right around the corner, 60 degrees seemed a little cooler than the surprise 60 in the middle of July.

Yesterday I'm out there thinning collard seedlings* that are growing where I should be picking tomatoes, and bringing in handfuls of yellow squash, zucchini, green beans, carrots, radishes and whatnot, thinking, no tomatoes, but not so bad. And then, as if to remind me that the cold is on the way, I get this picture in my email from my Innkeeper friend Cherie, who runs the Hale Hookipa Maui bed and breakfast.



That's quite a haul, all from one day she tells me... Well, put my little pile of squash in perspective, will you! Cherie also runs this volunteer on vacation in Hawaii site, and a great Maui blog. If you like tropical gardening (she also has great flowers), check it out. Or better yet, check in for a week. Maui is a gardener's paradise. But beware, in the depths of winter in upcountry, you might wake up to a cool 55 degree morning!

* Planted from the seeds from the greens I let overwinter last year, in an attempt to make them even more cold hardy. I will let some of these go over winter again, to seed in the spring, for seeds for next fall's crop. I never really learned this technique, it just seems to work well, and my theory is that anything that can stay alive over winter here deserves to be propagated. At least that way, if we keep having summers that weren't, I'll have some cold hardy greens to grow any time of year!

Rural Blight

During the 20 odd years that I lived in Los Angeles, most of it was spent living in a pretty urban area (the Valley, Hollywood, Santa Clarita), and I experienced urban blight every day. The boarded up buildings, structures in desperate need of repair (that always reminded me of the Robyn Hitchcock song My Favorite Buildings), graffitied surfaces everywhere (and not the cool kind of graffiti, which I don't mind so much, just the gang tag kind), and general filth and grime everywhere. It's one of the things I certainly don't miss since moving to the country.

So it was with great surprise that I woke up the other morning, poured my cup of organic Kona coffee, and went for my walk-through to see how much radicchio and pea sprouts the rabbits had dined on before the hot pepper spray sent them running for water (I just love imagining that, since, for Robin's sake, I'm suppressing the urge to shoot the little buggers), and low and behold, I found the dreaded rural blight, growing all over my tomato plants like some kind of brush fire that had made it's way into a neighborhood.

It happened overnight, like the graffiti that wound up on a wall near our place in LA. But I couldn't just paint over this blight. This is the dreaded tomato blight that has decimated tomato gardens all over New England this summer that wasn't.

We thought we had avoided it, as it got warm and drier over the last couple of weeks... Bam! Hurricane comes up the coast, cold front comes down from Canada, and one night of cool, wet conditions, and there it was. It literally happened overnight. There may have been some signs the day before, but they weren't that noticeable, and I was being very wary.

I've ordered some copper spray for the big plant next to the house, that volunteered from the compost. It's only showing small signs, and I've been pulling off any leaf with even a speck on it. Maybe the spray will help. Or, maybe, tomorrow, I'll be pulling it up and shoving it in a plastic bag, like some murder victim on Law and Order. Bagging up all the plants yesterday looked like a battlefield...

We had a lot of tomatoes. Almost all started from seed. Many heirlooms. Much pain. Almost like losing a pet.

We have several bowls full of green tomatoes that we're going to make a nice relish with, but damn.... seriously, We're going through the seven stages of grief here.