Green Options

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This time of year is when hummingbirds start making an appearance in many of our gardens, but those cheap plastic feeders don’t lend much ambiance. Luckily, there are many methods out there for making them yourself out of re-purposed materials.

Kelly recently showed us some great examples of glass bottles turned useful again, and here is another project to add to the list. You will need: a glass bottle with an opening that would fit a standard cork, Heavy gauge wire and cutters, and a purchased stopper for a hummingbird feeder. You can find these on pottery supply sites such as Aftosa, and occasionally at specialty garden shops. Thoroughly wash out the bottle. Then, wrap the wire around it so that it will hang upside down or at an angle in the location you will be placing it. Fill it with nectar, cork and hang! Here are some simple instructions for mixing nectar from Hummingbirds.net. They stress not to add red dye, as it may be dangerous for the birds to consume:

There are many sustainable options when it comes to putting food on the table, from eating organic to choosing locally grown foods to avoiding animal products. But there’s nothing quite as truly sustainable, satisfying, and tasty as growing your own organic food. What follows is my homegrown experience in community gardening.

After traveling around in a veggie oil and biodiesel powered “volksvegan” for most of last year, I was eager to have a garden again (not to mention an actual kitchen). It didn’t take long in our small town to find a wonderful non-profit organization teaching organic food production classes and get involved. Before long we were starting seeds in a greenhouse, not quite sure where we’d be planting them when they were sprouted. Luckily, the organization, Noyo Food Forest, was just breaking ground on a new community garden, and we jumped at the chance to get our hands dirty and grow some organic food.

Our gardening experience in coastal Northern California has been quite an experiment. After growing up in the hotter and dryer climate of Idaho, gardening on the coast took some getting used to. But we discovered that with some fertile soil, organic seeds, a few helpful people, and the labors of love, we could grow a bounty of fresh organic produce and community at the same time.

The jury is in: the most sustainable way to feed yourself is to grow your own food.

There are many factors considered when evaluating food sustainability.  The primary concern is: what is the ratio between how much land is used, and how many calories are produced?  

In asking this question, we can immediately eliminate meat from our sustainable diets.  Pigs and cows are extraordinarily “inefficient converters of grain energy to calories,” as put by the executive director of Steel City Biofuels, speaking generally about fuel efficiency.  In her presentation about Organic Farming during Pittsburgh’s Farm to Table Conference 2008, Dr. Patricia DeMarco, executive director of the Rachel Carson Homestead, noted that raising meat in the U.S. comprises 79% of all agricultural resource usage.  While the health benefits of going vegan will be endlessly debated, at least doing so will be much more healthful for our environment.

The next question naturally becomes: how can we grow food in a way that nourishes the soil, produces a vast yield in a little space, and is maintained by nature?

Surprisingly, all of the above is easy to do, if you’re using the right methods.  John Jeavon’s book “How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible” describes the biointensive method: growing food tightly together in ways that foster symbiotic relationships between plants, like those that would organically occur in nature.  For instance, marigolds ward off common insect pests for their companion plants, tomatoes.  But biointensive gardening is more than just knowing companion plant lists and spacing maps.

Welcome to this week’s Farmers Market Fare Posts! We gathering more posts in this second edition, and I hope that continues to grow as the Eat Local season really gets started for most of the country. Perhaps not so much for my neck of the woods where we had snow and cold. Then spring arrived the following afternoon. Just to mock me, or to cheer me up. Or both.

Given that this coming week is Earth Day, and April is poetry month, here are a few words from Kahlil Gibran’s poem, “Earth:”

“How beautiful you are, Earth, and how sublime!
How perfect is your obedience to the light,  and
how noble is your submission to the sun!

How soothing is the song of your dawn, and how
harsh are the praises of your eventide!
How perfect you are, Earth, and how majestic!”

Here are your blog posts for the week (after the jump).

Pretend you hold the magic fairy wand of political change: What would you want the next president to do on the first day of his or her administration to tangibly address the planet’s most pressing challenges?

For me, I’m voting with my friend Roger Doiron and his campaign to get the next president to turn a chunk of the White House lawn into a kitchen garden. Roger contributed this idea (and currently leads the vote tally) to the On Day One project, a web platform of the Better World Fund to collect and share ideas about a to-do list for the President’s first day on the job.

Such a Presidential act would take the burgeoning local food movement to new levels of awareness and interest, and make an important global statement that America is taking self-reliant responsibility for our planet’s future. With a pack of zucchini seeds, the White House can send a message that the individual act of growing some of our own food can, collectively, combat and wrestle the looming weight of peak oil and global warming much more positively than further fertilizing the obese defense budget.

Interestingly, Roger’s crusade for the kitchen garden at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue roots in historic precedent. A local food advocate and founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, a global non-profit network of 4,900 gardeners in 90 countries working together to take a hands-on approach to championing the local food system, Roger admits this “is not so much a new idea as a good old one worth recycling.” As the first White House resident in 1800, President John Adams broke ground on a vegetable garden. And talk about eco-lawn care: During WWII, President Woodrow Wilson “hired” a herd of sheep to cut back the cost of maintaining the 18 acres of White House lawn, additionally resulting in thousands of dollars raised for the Red Cross through auctioning the wool. Eleanor Roosevelt inspired others with her Victory Garden on the White House lawn. Most recently, Alice Waters essayed to get the Clintons to plant a garden, but the idea never bloomed under that administration. Instead, the Clinton administration championed the North American Free Trade Agreement, steadfastly convinced its the economy, not ecology, that matters most.

Particularly in August, I feel a sort of tomato delirium. I love biting through the slightly resistant outer flesh towards the tart, slippery reward of the inner gel sacs. I make salads and sauces and jellies, bruschetta and gazpacho and homemade catsup. I even make cocktails from the stuff! I probably average a three-tomato a day habit.

Last spring was my great farmer’s market awakening. Up until that point, I shopped mainly in mom and pop grocers and corner delis. Now, having entered the warmth and luxury of the green market universe, I cannot imagine shopping anywhere else. This has meant a reduction in the produce that I eat, as the realities of a frigid Zone 5 (with some local farms in Zone 4!) set in. I eat a lot of root vegetables and more canned preserves than is good for anyone’s glucose levels.

Here at Eat. Drink. Better. we talk a lot about the process through which food moves from farm to market to plate. But responsible food consumption includes accountability for the manner in which food scraps are disposed. It’s all well and good to have a backyard composter if your property includes some green space or even a balcony, but what about apartment dwellers?

We’ve spoken often about those areas in industry that are contributing most to the current climate change. However an industry that has been swept under the radar is the agriculture industry. Not only does it too expel its own worth of emissions, but it could very well be the answer to a lot of our problems.

We’ve seen what their fertilizers are doing to the outlet of the Mississippi in the Gulf

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You’d think in January, Sweden would be cold, blanketed with snow and ice, but not this year.

According to The Local, a hobby gardener in southern Sweden has already harvested the first potatoes of the New Year, with a garnish of strawberries and daisies.

Thanksgiving is only a week away, which means the gift-giving season is in full swing. To make your seasonal shopping easier and more sustainable, I’m bringing you a series of green online stores that offer a wide variety of eco-gifts that would make anyone on your list feel appreciated. The first offering in this series was Max and Zane and now, for my second installment, I bring you Organic Style.

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