Myke's Weblog

Don't Eat the Tomatoes - Unless You Grow Them Yourself

In The Indignity of Industrial Tomatoes, Barry Estabrook says that industrial tomatoes are tasteless, indestructible and picked by literal slaves.

If you have ever eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store or restaurant, chances are good that you have eaten a tomato much like the ones aboard that truck. Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than one billion pounds every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.

Ann's Garden: The Transition from Cool to Warm Weather Plants

On April 21, the collards and kale are tall and flowering. They've been nutritious and tasty.

On April 29, the collards and kale have been removed and the trellises are ready for tomato plants to climb.

I'm the trellis "engineer." These custom trellises are not decorative but they can be reused each year and can withstand severe thunderstorms with hundreds of pounds of tomatoes on board.

My Four Food Groups

In my world, there are four food groups:

1. Food that tastes bad and is bad for you.
2. Food that tastes good and is bad for you.
3. Food that tastes bad and is good for you.
4. Food that tastes good and is good for you.

Food that tastes bad and is bad for you must be avoided. Often, it's the spoiled stuff that gives you the "stomach flu." It's fairly easy to avoid if you pay attention to the smell and taste. No one eats it knowingly.

 

Food that tastes good and is bad for you is the most dangerous food. It's addictive and fun to eat. Most food ads on TV feature this kind of fare. It keeps the hospitals filled and the pharmacies busy. Fast food is the perfect example; it you want to see the effects, watch the movie Super Size Me. It's very hard to stop eating this food once you start because it is engineered to use salt, sugar, and/or fat to stroke your pleasure centers in the brain.

Food that tastes bad and is good for you is what is available at many "hippie" health food stores. Fresh tofu, bean sprouts, and wheatgrass juice are examples. Most Americans are so accustomed to commercial food that tastes "good" that they can't eat it. Many of the people who eat from this food group are skinny. They are rarely seen and may become extinct.

Food that tastes good and is good for youis the holy grail for healthy eaters. Whole Foods and Trader Joes are making big profits selling this kind of fare. We have a garden, which is the best place to get food that is good for you because you know how it was grown (one of the great advantages of locally grown food). Some of it doesn't taste good to the people who eat only processed and packaged food. Fortunately for me, my wife Ann can take food that doesn't taste good and is good for you and convert it into food that tastes good in her kitchen.

Photos from Ann's garden at www.InspiredGardening.com 

Lunch – Fresh from Ann's Garden

Ann's garden continues to provide fresh, organic vegetables in early autumn.

Ann's gardening blog is here: InspiredGardening.com

Gardeners: Earthworms are very Beneficial for the Soil in your Garden

Pesticides and herbicides kill good bugs as well as the bad bugs. That is one of many reasons why industrial agriculture is unsustainable. John Michael Greer describes the role of the earthworm in this excerpt from Animals I: Birds, Bats, and Bumblebees.

A garden is an ecosystem managed in such a way that human beings get to eat a significant fraction of the net primary production of the plants that grow there. Net primary production? That’s the amount of energy each year that the plants in a given ecosystem take in from the Sun and store in the form of sugars and other compounds that can be eaten by some other living thing. Everything other than plants in any ecosystem gets its fuel from the net primary production of that ecosystem, or of another ecosystem that feeds energy into it.

You’re not going to get anything close to a majority of the net primary production of your garden onto your dinner table, by the way, and it’s a mistake to try; if you do, you’ll starve other living things that depend on a share of net primary production to keep their own dinner tables stocked, and you need these other living things in order to have a healthy and productive garden. (Ignoring this latter point is one of the critical errors of today’s industrial agriculture.) Your goal instead is to make sure that as much of the net primary production diverted from your table as possible goes to living things that earn their keep by doing something for your benefit.

Here’s an example. A certain amount of each year’s net primary production from your garden goes to feed earthworms. Any gardener with the brains the gods gave geese won’t grudge them their share, because earthworms break down organic matter into forms plants can use, and they improve the texture and drainage of soil as they do it. Charles Darwin – yes, that Charles Darwin – wrote a brilliant and too often neglected book on the role of earthworms in the creation of topsoil; what he found, to drastically simplify a classic piece of ecological research, is that earthworms are topsoil-making machines, and the more you’ve got, the better your soil and the higher your crop yields will tend to be.

The Cultural Conservers Foundation at CulturalConservers.org

The mission of the Cultural Conservers Foundation is to support the conservation of the cultural heritage of the past and present by:

• educating the public about the value and importance of cultural conservation
• giving cultural conservation a presence and voice in the collective conversation of our time
• assisting aspiring cultural conservers to plan and accomplish projects for the conservation of cultural resources
• providing networking tools that cultural conservers can use to pool their knowledge and experiences
• fostering the transmission of cultural heritage to learners and to the future

For more information on the vision and purpose of the Cultural Conservers Foundation, please see this article: Cultural Conservers.

Downloadable Files

• Master Conserver instructional handouts in one large file. (8 Mb pdf file)
• Topical sections of the Master Conserver instructional handouts for those with slow Internet connections or an interest in specific areas.
  1. Table of Contents
  2. Handouts 001-004: Home Buyer Checklist
  3. Handouts 005-015: Heat Loss Calculations
  4. Handouts 016-025: Caulking and Weatherstripping
  5. Handouts 026-037: Home Insulation
  6. Handouts 038-045: Reducing Moisture Problems
  7. Handouts 046-055: Hot Water Conservation
  8. Handouts 056-068: Indoor Air Quality
  9. Handouts 069-080: Energy Efficient Doors and Windows
  10. Handouts 081-090: Insulated Window Covers
  11. Handouts 091-100: Purchasing a Woodstove or Fireplace Insert
  12. Handouts 101-110: Wood Heat Maintenance and Resources
  13. Handouts 111-122: Heating Domestic Water with a Woodstove
  14. Handouts 123-128: Passive Solar Heating - Residential
  15. Handouts 129-138: Passive Solar Water Heating
  16. Handouts 139-150: Active Solar Water Heating
  17. Handouts 151-158: Solar Greenhouses
  18. Handouts 159-170: Solar Cell Electricity - Photovoltaics
  19. Handouts 171-180: Earth-Sheltered Housing
  20. Handouts 181-190: Building the Superinsulated Home

Background Information

• Cultural Conservers (The Archdruid Report, May 21, 2008)
• Same New Ideas (The Archdruid Report, May 14, 2008)
• Our Evanescent Culture And the Awesome Duty of Librarians (Richard Heinberg'sMuseletter, October, 2009)[.pdf file - opens in new window] Reposted on this site with permission.

Blogs and Discussion Groups

• The Cultural Conservers Yahoo Group
• The Archdruid Report

Nature's Revenge – the White Oak Strikes

Last Sunday we decided it was time to cut down the beautiful White Oak beside our garden. We had postponed this action for several years, pruning this tree that we loved rather than cutting it down. It had grown quite large and was shading the garden from the afternoon sun. Our garden produced significantly less last year due the shading.

Permaculture: A Guide to Sustainable Living

Holmgren's 12 design principles of permaculture

These restatements of the principles of permaculture appear in David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability:

Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire on PBS

I highly recommend (no pun intended) Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire on PBS if you like plants and gardening. Also, if you like apples, cannabis, potatoes, or tulips, you will enjoy it.

Critters Like Our Garden

Another critter caught on Garden Cam. The rabbit (in the earlier post about critters in our garden) is welcome. The pointy face visitor in the photo is not welcome.

Our Siamese garden cat Blue has been instructed to take care of the problem. You can read Ann's description of the damage done at Inspired Gardening.