Bless this food to our service

The whole point of this blog is to keep a careful accounting, which I have failed miserably at. But the reason for the accounting...the reason is... to make an economic argument for something that runs deeper than balance sheets.

As the Veggie Man said to me today, "when my family asks, I try to stay away from the big picture. I don't want them to think I am a conspiracy theorist. I tell them the reason we spend so much effort in the garden is because the food tastes better."

But there is more there. 

He and I both recognize that food, energy and the environment are different parts of the same thing. And that thing is a challenge that cannot be ignored. The time has come to pay the piper. The 20th century was a glorious advance, oblivious of limits. This century we must forge ahead with scarcity as our teacher. 

What we have built uses cheap oil and an undervalued environment as the sand dunes of its foundation. What we must build does not deny the miracle of the 20th century's design, but goes back to the root. Ecosystems are finite. An economy that imagines infinite expansion because our imaginations are limitless, does not credit enough the system that makes our economy possible. What is the value of a soaking rain versus a torrential downpour? What value the small wetland that absorbs the flood?How rich each blade of grass that holds a small clump of soil and keeps it from the sea? The New Testament speaks of an accounting that marks the fall of every sparrow and each hair upon every head. We must marry our wisdom and our technology to that humility. 

Along the lines of this discussion I recommend a book: "The End of Food" by Paul Roberts. There are many points where I disagree with the author, although I sense he may have tamed his argument to reach a broader audience. Nonetheless, it is a broad and compelling argument. The international food system that world economies are based on is in a tenuous position. Looking only at water consumption, or oil use, or the limits of plant and animal chemistry, is enough to prove his point. When political cowardice and basic human incalcatrence ( forgive my spelling, the word I mean implies hardening, an unwillingness to move or change position) are added to his argument, Robert's picture is quite sobering. But here, in a land of deep soil and soaking rains, we need to recognize this crisis as a time of opportunity. We still have relatively compact urban centers surrounded by good farmland. It is time to redevelop our regional agricultural system and begin again to feed ourselves. It's time to turn abandoned land and ignored populations back to the important job of feeding our communities.

I will dispense with the apologies and get right to the listing of my failures! My lack of posting reflects a lack of time spent in the garden. I have not kept accurate records of my harvests, but will try to recreate them in a general sense, by consulting what frail notes I have and the few unposted drafts left in this blog's memory banks.
Roughly speaking I have managed a weekly harvest of greens averaging 4-5 pounds. My friends and neighbors have been thankful since Tiz and I can only eat a couple of pounds a week. My six broccoli plants offered 6 small-to-medium-sized heads over the last half of June. In every case, the side shoots that have followed produced more than I got from the original picking.
Our crazy weather did more than encourage the weeds, it seemed to force the brassicas in an odd way - the 5 Violet Queen cauliflowers went immediately from small head to flower and so were a complete loss. The broccoli would have been a disappointment too, if I had not gotten such production from the side shoots.
My first tomato was harvested on the 11th and shared with friends in a salad we brought to the beach at North South Lake. If I do say so myself, the salad was delicious. It featured Oak leaf, Red Sails and Speckles lettuce; escarole and red orach; fresh young carrots, red onion; herbs and a generous amount of broccoli.
Every year I promise myself I will plant more broccoli and more carrots. Fresh from the garden they become completely different vegetables. I hardly ever cook the broccoli, it is so succulent raw. When cooked it gets just 3 or 4 minutes of steaming and a small amount of butter, nothing more. And the carrots, well they are like eating candy, nothing compared to carrots from the store.
A few weeks back I gave my buddy Terri one of our big heads of Romaine (2-2.5 pounds apiece!) and a collection of herbs greens flowers etc. She also got one of the heads of broccoli. Terri is a vegetarian and a bit of a foodie, so its not like she has no knowledge of veggies, but she was shocked by the broccoli. "I don't even cook it," she said. "It's so good." Terri likes the flowers too, when I dropped off her most recent pile of food on Sunday, she still had flowers on the mantle from two weeks before. She got rid of the old bouquet and replaced it with the new bunch of dianthus and snapdragons.
Every week I have brought home big bouquets, usually one or more gets shared with friends. Last week the first sunflower bouquet went home. They are Tizzy's favorite, except perhaps for her Zinnias. Both will now be common until the end of summer.
A week ago I roasted a big batch of beets on the grill, with garlic scapes, fresh tarragon, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper. I brought them to work for a birthday party, where they were served with local goat cheese on a bed of oak leaf lettuce, surrounded by flowers and individual leaves of Speckles lettuce. People raved. Personally, I thought it was a waste of good goat cheese. I got much more pleasure from the beet greens I had steamed up and served with cider vinegar - both when they were hot and when served cold alongside an omelet.
I just don't love beets. I try, but I fail. The golden beets are better, but their greens are not near as good. What to do? Well I just planted another batch of beets and I plan to pull them up as soon as they begin to make the tiniest of beets. They will be grown strictly for their greens, which I like even more than Swiss Chard, which is saying something!
June was the end of my month from hell. I got back into the garden over the fourth of July weekend and began beating the garden back into shape. The peas were finally finished and their section of the garden was cleared. On 7/13, in that section, I planted beets, radicchio(Carmen), fennel(Firenze), carrots (Royal Chantenay), and Iceburg and Buttercrunch lettuce. I also planted basil and cilantro. I picked my first Kentucky Wonder bean and it was awesome, so tender and delicious. I also planted the last of my Provider bean seeds left from last year. That was one good bean and it sure produced a lot, but I don't recall the flavour being near as good as that of Kentucky Wonder.
There is so much I have left out, the staking of the cucumbers and melons, my first garlic harvests, chatter in the garden - did I ever report on the nematodes? Still I need to move along, if only so I can get on to another post where I will have a chance to rave about the world food economy - neither my tomatoes or my hot peppers, not my cilantro nor tomatillos, are polluted with salmonella - how certain are you that your food isn't?