Garden Girl

Originally uploaded by TheHerbGirl

We have lift off on all the trees but the peach, who I’m hoping is just a slow starter.

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A kind person on flickr finally identified my front tree as a Bradford Pear and I’ve noticed my neighborhood is full of them. Texas Mountain Laurel is coming out strong too (ahhh, the Springtime smell of grape koolaid , *chuckle*.)
The Red Oaks are still asleep, ‘though.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen that other local favorite, the Texas Redbud around here.

In more very local tree news, Jeremy from  Bio-Gardener brought us fruit trees! He was a one man tree planting, information & education giving force of nature and he pointed me at even more resources for learning about my little plot of earth. He told me, for example, that the soil of the Blackland Prairie, where we are, is very different from the soil of the Hill Country next door.

Digging in to plant the fruit trees, I saw an earthworm or two, a good sign that the ground isn’t such dense clay that there’s no life going on down there.
My next post will be photos of Jeremy doing the hard labor & me just helping out getting the treelings in their new home.
Here’s hoping the baby plum, apricot, fig & peach trees that now gently stand watch at the four corners of my home thrive under my newbish care

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In the Midwest, Growing Power runs three farms in Chicago, youth employment and education programs and a world famous vermiculture (worm compost) project.

In Oakland, Calif., People’s Grocery operates five urban gardens in the largely black and Latino communities of West and North Oakland, as well as a youth nutrition program staffed by young people.

In Brooklyn, Added Value has turned an old asphalt baseball diamond into a full-functioning farm. And in Philadelphia, Mill Creek Farm is using storm runoff to irrigate its urban farm. Indeed, community agriculture projects are sprouting up in cities across the country—in San Francisco (Alemany Farm), Buffalo (Massachusetts Avenue Project), Birmingham, Ala. (Jones Valley Urban Farm), and Houston (Urban Harvest). According to the USDA, the number of farmers’ markets has grown by 50 percent since 1994, and the federal Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program is funding more than twice as many groups as it did a decade ago.

Read more here

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“But let’s look at it like this: In Kenya, where millions of undernourished, underemployed people choke the slums of Nairobi and Mombasa, should the fertility of the nation’s prime farmland, and the efforts of its most ingenious farmers, rightly be used to grow organic tomatoes for consumers in Mother England?

By the same token, should the best farmland of Guatemala and Mexico be devoted to stocking the off-season produce shelves at Whole Foods outlets in the comfy areas of Austin and Manhattan?”

link to the rest of the article

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Granny Good Food now has a blog that’s very worth keeping up with.

“When I was a girl, you got food from the grocery store, and then got your medicine from the drug store. Today, there are drug stores inside grocery stores. This is not a coincidence. If you eat just anything off the shelves without doing your homework, you will need medicine.

Caldwell County (I live in Lockhart) apparently uses a lot of medicine, with 14,159 of the 36,523 residents having asthma, emphysema, bronchitis, heart disease, and diabetes.[1] That’s a whopping 39% sick people in this county! In blogs to come, I will expose the food fraud and venomous vittles that are sabotaging our health and stealing our future, and hopefully change these frightening numbers. “

Link from the Austin American Statesman

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Good article in Salon

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Good news here.

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If stories like this:

Feds: Millions have eaten chickens fed tainted pet food.

encourage your desire to eat organic food, then stories like this:

…in high summer of 2005, about the time I was seeing red in my kitchen, the same thing was happening to some of our county’s tomato farmers. They had learned organic methods, put away the chemicals, and done everything right to grow a product consumers claimed to want. They’d waited the three years and paid for certification. They’d watered, weeded, and picked, they’d sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect organic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains. And then suddenly, when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. “Not this week,” one store offered without warning, and then another. Not the next week either, nor the next. A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold. Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packinghouse and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies.

These tomatoes were perfect, and buyers were hungry. Agreements had been made. But pallets of organic tomatoes from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper. It’s hard to believe, given the amount of truck fuel involved, but transportation is tax-deductible for the corporations, so we taxpayers paid for that shipping. The California growers needed only the economics of scale on their side, a cheap army of pickers, and customers who would reliably opt for the lower price.

As simply as that, a year of planning and family labor turned to red mush.

may make you think about buying local.

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I’m on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.

The whole post is fascinating & potentially very good news!

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Self-sufficiency on a balcony

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