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Adventures in Organic Gardening

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Girl Scout Locavore Badge

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A Girl Scout Leader I know asked me if I would be interested in helping her troop of senior Girl Scouts earn their Locavore Badge. Of course I said yes! I love the mission of the Girl Scouts, and I am all in for talking about Local Food and everything associated with it.

Of course I know nothing about Girl Scout badge requirements, so I started with this handy document. 

Here’s what we did:

First we did a tour of the gardens which are at my house. We just generally talked about gardening and I showed them all of the different things that I’ve done. Then, we loaded up in cars and drove the 5 minutes to the pasture where my chickens and bees are. We talked about the challenges of pursuing these endeavors in our world of HOAs and unfriendly city ordinances.

Next, we came back to the house and the girls prepared a recipe for an egg frittata that featured eggs laid by my hens and harvested bell peppers from my garden as well as raw milk from a local dairy along with cheese from the same dairy. They did a great job and it actually turned out really well.

While the frittata was in the oven, we talked about local food, the challenges and the how and why.

It was a great day and I was so happy to have been able to do it.

What’s the big deal about local food?

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Why should you even care where your food comes from? Who cares if it’s from down the street, or across the globe? Don’t we live in a modern age filled with conveniences? What difference does it make where the food I eat comes from? As it turns out, it makes a big difference.

You don’t have to look very far to find another article about greenhouse gasses and climate change. Regardless of what you believe about it, certainly it makes sense to be good stewards of this earth. Does it make more sense to eat what is already in our local area, or to use a finite resource (fossil fuels) to move it across the country or the globe so you can have save a little bit on a cantaloupe?

Anyone who has ever compared the flavor of a homegrown tomato to a store bought one can tell you that the flavor isn’t in the same ballpark. Fruits and vegetables allowed to ripen on the plant and eaten closer to harvest time will always taste better than those picked well ahead of time to allow for shipping time.

Not only will local taste better, but will also be more nutritious. The longer a plant is able to mature, the more nutritious the harvest will be. Also, as soon as you harvest, nutrition starts to be lost. The sooner you eat it, the better. When it grows closer to you, this is easier.

When you seek out and support local food, you support the local economy. Rather than sending your dollars to a far away mega corporation, support that sweet family 20 minutes from your house who lives on a few acres and is trying to make a living with some chickens, some fruit trees and a few gardens. Speaking of a few across close to your house, don’t you want to play a part in preserving some land near you that is neither a parking lot or a strip mall?

The fact is that you vote with your dollars. You get to vote every day what kind of world you want to live in. Every one of your dollars supports something. You get to choose what that is. Be mindful about what sort of world you support with your spending.

So what steps can you take to put more local food into your life? We are all so accustomed to being able to eat whatever we want, all year long. We also want to be able to go to one big supermarket and get everything we need. So how do we start to make a change?

Probably the first step would be to decide to, when faced with a choice, resolve just to make the better choice. While you’re at that big grocery store, eat the food item labeled to have been grown in your state. Or, eat what’s in season rather than those grapes flown up from South America in January. Become familiar with what is in season in your area during each month of the year so yu can make smart choices.

Try a short term challenge. The Living Homegrown podcast recently aired an episode with Andrea Bemis where they talked about a Local Thirty Challenge where you commit to eating only local food for thirty days. If you don’t feel you can do thirty whole days, then do a week. Can’t commit to only local everything? Then commit to just local produce. Just try something. Start with a small change and see what happens.

Finally, support agriculture in your town and neighborhood.  Do you live in an HOA?  Start a movement to allow Backyard Chickens.  If you want local food, you need to be willing to see it being grown.  What does it hurt for attractive food crops to be grown in landscape beds in the front yard?  What does it hurt to have a couple of chickens in the back yard?  Support your neighbors and their steps toward sustainability and away from dependence on the industrial food system.

Seven Reasons to Love Gardening

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Gardens make you more mindful. When you’re outside pulling weeds you can only go so fast. You can’t text, or Facebook or send an email. You can listen to a podcast though, which is great. :-).

Being outside tending to your garden on a regular basis also makes you more mindful of the seasons. Something I hear a lot is about how certain locations don’t have four seasons, or that a particular season is very short. Here in Texas, for instance, people are constantly saying that it goes from too hot to too cold in just a couple of days. It simply isn’t true. Most people go from inside their homes, to their cars to the mall or to their offices. The weather just isn’t in the top of their minds. So, the one time they go outside they notice the weather and they’ve missed an entire season. When you’re outside more regularly you really notice the difference in weather and the seasons.

Gardens teach you to appreciate your food more. If you ever begrudge the cost of organic produce, just try growing it. All of the sudden getting a zucchini before being overcome by squash vine borers seems like a minor miracle. Not only that, but seeing a perfect tomato, or berry, or leaf of chard is something you truly take the time to recognize and appreciate it.

Gardens make you move your body. When you garden, you spend time bending over working in the beds, carrying heavy bags of soil, moving throughout your garden, pulling on weeds and on and on and on. In most diet and exercise apps, gardening is even listed as an exercise that you can log and get calorie credit for.

Gardens allow you to be generous. When one of your crops are in season, especially if the crop doesn’t lend itself to being canned, frozen or otherwise preserved…or if you simply don’t have the time to preserve it… you can give away the excess to friends and neighbors. Many food pantries will take produce as well. So much of the food in pantries is packaged food, so the people who rely on them don’t get much that is fresh. What a treat.

Gardens are beautiful. I love staring at my garden. Gardens in general catch my eye. I’ve been known to swerve out of my lane when I first encounter a community garden I haven’t seen before. Gardens are just lovely to look at and spend time in.

Gardens allow for lifelong learning. There is always something to learn or improve on. You don’t have to look very far to see something new to try. Just when you think you know how to grow a tomato, you’ll have a season where there is a new pest or a new weather condition that sends you back to the books to research how that leaf looks or why something isn’t happening. I guess lifelong learning is another way to say that gardening keeps a person humble.

I know these reasons just barely scratch the surface of the reasons to love gardening. Why do you love gardening? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Seven Things I Wish I’d Known About Beekeeping Before I Started

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Bees, Hard at Work

 

How expensive it is: There may be less expensive ways to do it, but I bought the hives ready to go from my local hobby bee supply store. I suppose I could have bought a nuc (nucleus colony) and the woodenware, but I just went with the whole hive. I think each one of the original hives ran about $350, then I also had to buy additional woodenware for top brood box. A painted, assembled box runs about $75.00. Again, there are less expensive ways to do it, and I’m hoping to get a couple of unpainted boxes that I can make beautiful this winter while I wait for the spring when I hope to be able to do at least one split. More hives, yay!

The expenses don’t end with the bees, either. Other purchases to get started include a bee suit, a smoker, hive tools and on and on and on.

How important it is to have two hives: Because it is so expensive, I ignored advice to not get only one hive. Well, sure enough, a had a queen fail because I let her become honey bound. Of course it was the day before we were leaving for 8 days, so I had to do something quick and I couldn’t find just a queen to buy locally. So, I bought an entire new hive. It’s a long story. Anyway, if I’d have had a 2nd hive already, I could have borrowed some brood from the healthier hive and perhaps let the ailing hive requeen itself.

How much to feed and when to not feed: I only got my bees in late May. Here in Texas we harvest honey over the Independence Day holiday (early July, for those of you not in the US). The popular advice I was getting starting in mid July was FEED, FEED, FEED. But here’s the thing. I hadn’t harvested any honey. My girls had all of the honey they had produced for their very own selves. Yes, you do need to feed your bees here in Texas starting after you harvest honey..because you just took a lot of their honey. But I didn’t take any! Plus, I assumed feeding them meant that you needed to make sure you have syrup available to them constantly. I would go out mid week and refill the feeders because the girls had consumed it all. So, my industrious hive did what bees do and stored resources. This took up all of the room that the queen needed for laying eggs. It didn’t end well for that poor queen. She has now been replaced.

I believe I have a better understanding of how to watch for when to feed and how to monitor the resources in the hive. At least I hope I do. I guess we’ll see.

Keep spare frames and boxes. At one point in my honey bound queen situation, I needed to have another deep box to put on. I didn’t have one. I did have a honey super that I ended up not needing, so I used that. The bees didn’t end up building it out, but it would have been nice to have an extra box. As I mentioned above, I’m going to get a couple and take my time painting and decorating them. It will be fun and I’ll them have a couple of extras.

How heavy a full box is: A medium box has 10 frames in it. Each frame when it is full of honey, weighs 10 pounds. Do the math there. Go ahead, I’ll wait right here. When I’m doing a hive inspection, it requires lifting some pretty heavy boxes. Some people use shallow boxes so that each box is lighter.

That my hives needed to be 100 feet from the property line: The wonderful lady whose land I have my bees on, she asked me to put them close to the fence line so that the flight pattern of the bees would be encouraged to be up and over the fence so as not to bother people. Well, as it turns out, our city ordinance requires that hives be located at least 100 feet from a property line. So, I had to move them and that was a bit of a pain.

How much fun it is: This is the biggest one. I assumed that I would enjoy beekeeping and find it interesting. Obviously, or I wouldn’t have done it. I have many interests, lots of things on which to spend my time. I have a demanding job and travel a lot. I don’t have time for things that I don’t love. And beekeeping? I LOVE! Every weekend (that I’m home) I can’t WAIT to get into the hives. If you follow my page on Facebook you’ll see that I’ve gone live several times for the whole hive inspection. I suspect to many people that that is incredibly boring to watch but I LOVE IT. I got a spam email the other day saying that my email had been hacked (it hadn’t). In it was a threat to send an email to all of my contacts with a list of the online videos that I’ve watched. I laughed out loud because it would be video after video of bee hives and hive inspections.

I went to an advanced beekeeping class a couple of Saturdays before. I just can’t learn enough. I could sit in a bee class every single weekend I think. I love every moment of it.

Four Basic Things to Consider When Starting a Garden

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Space: Do you have the space to put in a garden. Of course, if you aren’t blessed with much of a yard or if yours is filled up with a pool, or the kids trampoline, or whatever else, there are many many books and blog posts written about container gardening. If you want to do a raised bed on the ground, you can easily start with something even as small as four feet by four feet. In fact, starting small is a great idea. The last thing you want to do is put in too much garden, then wear yourself out and get frustrated trying to keep up with everything.

Gardening is like learning how to drive a car with a manual transmission. At first there is a lot to pay attention to. It’s frustrating and seems impossible. But then after a while it becomes more second nature and less overwhelming. So, starting small is a good idea. I started with a single bed that measured approximately 4 feet by 10 feet.

Sunlight: Everything you’ll want to grow needs sunlight. Lots and lots of sunlight. Sure, there are some things you can grow with slightly less sunlight, but even those things grow better with LOTS of sunlight. Most vegetables need about six hours of sunlight per day. Things like tomatoes and squash need more like 8. Plants where the part you eat is the root can tolerate less light than that. (Think beets and potatoes).

Irrigation: Your new garden is going to need to be watered regularly (although less than you might expect). Your enthusiasm will likely wane if you’re carrying water, or hauling hoses, or dealing with kinks in hoses, or any of a number of other watering inconveniences.

The easiest thing is to install a simple drip irrigation system. You could run a garden hose from the spigot on the house, to your garden bed, attach a timer to it, and water automatically.

Even if you don’t want to go to those lengths at first, at least try to make the garden bed on conveient proximity to a water source. Of course, don’t sacrifice sunlight. (See above.)

Soil: If the only thing you seek to do as a beginning gardener is to have good soil, you can’t help but be successful. Do what it takes to have healthy soil and everything else will fall into place. Add organic material regularly, and cover with a think layer of mulch.