Good Food is Everybody's Business
It’s the middle of March and time to get your seeds in – and for those of us lucky enough to live in milder climates, time to get those cool season plant starts! Buying starts and seeds from local growers and at local sales ensures that you get plants that are climate-appropriate. Get planting!
1976, Early April: Lambing, as always, was stressful, but out of 64 lambs born we lost only three. That was just under 5%, which was considered quite an acceptable loss to most producers. It was not acceptable to me! I had a dream of a year when no lambs were lost.
Here in the Pacific Northwest a clam called a geoduck – pronounced “gooey duck” – is the butt of many lewd comments because of its unusual shape. Actually, it’s just a case of outgrowing that way-too-small shell! Geoducks are the largest burrowing clam in the world, and Washington shellfish growers have only been raising them since 1991. And now nearly 800,000 pounds of them seem to be missing.
More and more people are eating organic food because they want a healthier and safer alternative to “conventional” food. They want food produced without toxic pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, and genetic engineering. They want food that sustains both human health and the environment. The Organic Food Handbook written by Ken Roseboro examines this important trend and provides a concise, simple guide to buying and eating organic food.
The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s is a perfect example of how monocropping can lead to disaster. Lack of genetic variation in Irish potatoes was a major contributor to the severity of the famine, allowing potato blight to decimate Irish potato crops. The blight resulted in the starvation of almost one of every eight people in Ireland during a three-year period. But the greatest shortcoming of monocrops may lie in the compromised quality of those foods, and the long-term effect that has on your health.
We had an early fall, with first frosts on September 12. Lisa and I covered the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, watermelons and cantaloupes with plastic tarps so we were still harvesting them in October, otherwise they would have been long gone. Our young orchard produced a huge apple crop that fall and my sister, Merle, also had a bumper crop. We decided we should make apple juice and can it for winter enjoyment.
