New garden pic!!

Here's the latest picture of my garden! It was taken on Sunday before it began raining here. I have snap peas, snow peas, blue lake pole beans, red onions, carrots, Early Girl tomatoes, heirloom roma tomatoes, heirloom cherry tomatoes, 2 kinds of purple kale, Homestead toamtoes, spinach, Purple Beauty Bell Peppers, Red Beauty Bell Peppers, habanero peppers, jalapenos, lemon cucumbers, honeydew melon, zucchini, canteloupe, and it will have watermelon once it warms up a little more here. :) Also in my teeny tiny yard are 2 kiwi vines, a pineapple guava bush, a lisbon lemon tree, white lion edamame and strawberries. :) YAY me!!!

Tomatoes in the desert

Well, we're nearing the end of spring planting season here in Phoenix. Working at the plant nursery, I've learned a lot about desert gardening. I now have a stack of books next to my bed that I plan on reading soon, including Extreme Gardening by David Owens (the Garden Guy)

I've known for some time now that tomato plants are crazy with their hybridizations and wonky genetics, but I learned another set of tomato facts a couple days ago. The plants are classified as either "determinate" or "indeterminate."

Determinate plants produce all of their fruit at once. They tend to be the breeds that we use for making big batches of stuff, like sauces or salsas or that are used for canning. Since they produce everything at once, they grow more compact plants and are a little more shrub-like than the others

Indeterminate plants fruit out over a period of time. They're good for use as slicing tomatoes and salads. Since they produce more slowly than determinate plants, they tend to be more vine-y and require more support. They also tax the soil a bit less. since they use the nutrients more slowly.

And that, class, concludes today's lesson. :)

Outdoor adventures

I planted my first garden. I've had gardens before.... well, they were actually mom and dad's gardens. this is the first one that I've done entirely by myself. I have this overwhelming sense of pride about it. I mean:

1. I (with Dad's help) built a raised garden bed in my tiny backyard.


2. I found free dirt from some guy in the city and (with Scott's help and Jeanine's truck) moved about a cubic yard of it into the box. (The picture here has Lilo in it-- you know, for scale...)


3. Then I amended the dirt, and planted it


4. Then I got a job at my local nursery so I could maintain/improve it for pretty low cost. Oh also, they pay me to talk to people about plants, and to take care of plants. :)

I'm so exceptionally happy right now. I've been getting produce from bountiful baskets each week (or so) and have been buying grass-fed beef and other humanely raised meats. There's a dairy about 10 miles away from my house that does a csa-type thing. They have free range chickens there too and sell the eggs. So I've been getting my dairy from the source.

Until I began doing things like this (~6 months ago), I never noticed how disconnected we (Americans) are from our food. Growing up, food came from supermarkets and restaurants. We had a garden, but I never equated that to food production. It was a kind of game: go outside, play in the dirt, pick tomatoes. Even that meager education about how food is made was more than most kids get now.

It all started with a little talk about what's in our food. The professor that I teach with is big into health. He eats "right" and exercises (by riding his bike ~40 miles in the morning before riding to work) and we all know that we'll never be as awesome as him. Fine.

But at the end of the semester in one of the biochemistry classes that he teaches, he likes to have a food day. All of the students make treats and bring them in. As we eat them, we talk about the ingredients (GMO, processing, organic) and about food as it relates to health. I think that for most students, it's the first time that they really make the connection between the foods they eat and the consequences of eating it. One semester, it really got me thinking... The professor had had us read a couple chapters of The Omnivore's Dilemma. A book that I hadn't read. It chronicles a man's quest to trace the food in our supermarkets back to their sources. He finds little trouble in tracing fresh produce and meats back to the farms from whence they came, but encounters a world of trouble trying to find the origins of some processed foods. There's more to it, but just READ IT!

So, somehow, this book on this day with these people really got me thinking about food. It's a slippery slope, thinking... I started reading food labels, and other books, and I got these ideas, these notions that food should be real. It shouldn't be chemical (says the chemist). I changed the way I eat and slowly changed the way my husband was eating. We cut out HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). Then, we cut out ALL hydrogenated fats. I started going to the produce co-op and then we started buying wild-caught fish and grass-fed beef. I started going to farmers markets and buying more local foods. Husband decided last June that he wanted to start running. He's ridiculously awesome at it!! He lost 20lb in 3 months just from changing his diet and moving more. He ran his first half marathon in January and soon we will do a full marathon together. Life. is. GREAT. :)

I've been here, where have YOU been?!

So apparantly, I really need to remember that this blog exists... and post to it.

The end of last year was a little frantic. We developed a hole in a hot water pipe under our kitchen and after locating the source of the leak and demolishing half of our kitchen to repair it, we got a new kitchen!! It's funny to look back on baking pictures from before the renovation, because it's pretty now. I mean, beautiful. :) Oh, and insurance paid almost all of it. The only thing I covered was the actual repair to the pipe. not too shabby at all...

Now that my kitchen is functional again, I've been baking/cooking like a mad fool. I've made pork tenderloin (twice),

triple chocolate cupcakes,

sugar cookies,

chicken enchiladas (entirely from scratch)

ravioli

and since citrus is in season, fresh squeezed orange juice! I love food. :)

More adventures will be forthcoming, cross my heart. <3