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October 2007 Newsletter
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To read the full newsletter online, please see: www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletteroctober07.html
Dear Kitchen Gardener,
How do like them love apples? Aren't they beauties! Well,
not beautiful in the conventional, airbrushed, Gourmet magazine
kind of way. The beauty, for me, is being able to enjoy my own
reddish tomatoes in late October in Maine after the first light
frost.
True, they may not make the
cut for tonight's starting salad team, but they'll do just fine simmered
in a sauce or
slow-roasted to bring out their latent sweetness. They may
well be our last sauce tomatoes of the year.
It's been quite a run for us
this year, tomato-wise. I can't even guess how many cranks I've given
on my food mill (my new favorite kitchen gadget) over the past 6 weeks.
All of this brings me in a round-about kind of way to the theme of this
month's newsletter: one person' trash is another person's pleasure
or, if you prefer, one person's waste is another person's taste.
Yes, I realize those may not be expressions you're accustomed to
hearing, but they're ones deserving some consideration.
Tomatoes like mine would end
up in the waste bin if they dared infiltrating the ranks of the
picture-perfect, red, round globes that grace the shelves at the local
supermaket. They would be deemed an eye-sore and most likely a
health risk in our bacterophobic culture. For me, though, I see them and
think "pasta al pomodoro" and "Superbowl Chili". With nearly 20
bags of them in our chest freezer, we'll be thinking lots of different
things right through the winter, all of them tasty.
In this month's round-up of
articles and videos, we take a closer look at trash, treasure, waste,
and taste.
Barbara Damrosch's latest article encourages us to go gleaning in
our own gardens. You might be surprised at what you'll find.
3000 miles away, in Portland, Oregon, a group of people from a nonprofit effort called
The Portland Fruit Tree Project is
thinking similar thoughts. A short video follows them as they go
on an
urban fruit gleaning mission, something my family and I have been
doing this month with our neighbor's apple trees. Our neighbor
sees apples with blemishes, we see apple sauces, crumbles, and pies.
In a
world still very much in the grips of hunger and malnutrition, work
like this should be taking place in every community where neglected
fruit trees and underharvested crops can be found.
You know this already, but I
think that we, the organic kitchen gardeners of the world, have an
important role to play in changing people's perceptions about food.
We know better than anyone else that there's really no such thing as
trash when it comes to the garden. What doesn't make the grade for
the table is always a welcome addition to the
compost pile where it awaits magical transformation into next year's
pleasure.
Warmly,
PS: 2008 has just been named
the International Year
of the Potato by the United Nations. If you have a clever idea
how KGI might celebrate potatoes next year,
don't be shy in sharing it.
PPS: And don't be shy in
general. I'd love to hear from you on what we're doing right or
what we might do differently. You're also invited to comment on our
articles and share some of your own knowledge or lack thereof, as the
case may be. That's what the comment form is for at the bottom of
each page!
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Summer Shape-Up: Sane + Organic
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Pass by any magazine rack this month, and the hard-to-miss
cover lines will seem all too familiar: “Lose 10 Pounds in...
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The Real Science of Organic Farming
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Traditional Farming’s reliance on
pesticide is a deadly choice for consumers. Scientists say, first and foremost,
to seek out organic foods, fruits...
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Breakfast Blues?
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I love breakfast foods, and I’ll sometimes prepare them for dinner. But like many on-the-go professionals, I rise early and...
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Building a simple compost sifter
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By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, August 16, 2007 in The Washington Post
If compost is the holy grail of organic gardening, what's holier than thou? Sifted compost.
What you want in a perfect mature compost is, of course, organic matter so fully broken down that the original ingredients -- whether straw, weeds, kitchen scraps or goat droppings -- are no longer recognizable. Finished compost looks like very rich, dark, fine soil. But even the best soil contains stones, twigs and the like. Sifted compost doesn't. It is the 400-thread-count soil amendment.
Grade-A sifted compost has many uses. Let's say you want to renovate the lawn in the fall. Using a shovel, you scatter sifted compost over the worst patches, rake it into the iffy grass growing there (if any) then sow seeds and water it thoroughly. The fine-textured compost provides an excellent seed bed. In fact, it is a good seed bed for anything, especially small, hard-to-germinate seeds such as carrot and onion. One trick is to dig a planting furrow, then fill it with sifted compost. You can even use it to start seeds in flats -- although compost must be completely mature and mellow for this purpose -- too much high-test nitrogen can burn tender seedlings. It is also a wonderful top-dressing for a vegetable garden, a luxury mulch that provides a good nutritional multivitamin while making your garden's soil look as dark and lustrous as a mink coat.
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