Food for Thought

It's cold out now, but soon spring would be here, and that means for anyone who lives on a farm or has enough patio space to sneak a few planters on now is the time to plan out this year's garden (if you were really on top of thing though you would have started planning in the fall and perhaps started some plantings then).

BC Farms hopes to produce some serious food this year, from some delicious chicken dinners to fresh salsa, and apples that aren't deformed. In the fall I'm hoping for a glorious pumpkin patch fwith sugar pumpkins for pies to Connecticut's for jack-o-lanterns, to huge pumpkins just to say "In 2010 we grew these huge pumpkins and we would've brought them to the Big E but they broke the forklift...".

If you thought about raising some livestock or growing some veggies this year (mmmm fresh string beans), this may help sway your decision: "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week" (-Steven L. Hopp, Oily Food)...that's 46,200,000 gallons of oil. Which is a lot.

Locally and organically raised meats and produce lower oil usage because they don't use as much fuel to transport, and there aren't any fossil fuels used in their fertilizers or pesticides. Going to your backyard uses no fuel (and burns calories instead of gas!), and local farmer's markets allow you to buy your produce for the week, along with goodies like goat milk soap and free range eggs, at one stop away from the craziness of the super market, and not only do you know where your food is coming from, but you get to meet the person who grew it. Not a bad deal.

If eating an entire meal made up of local produce makes you panic, I think it's more than acceptable to work it in through the whole week. Fresh berries on your cereal in the morning, a salad with fresh greens for lunch, and a chicken pot pie with the odds and ends in it seems pretty good to me!

In one of the books I read, it said that vegetable gardening should be based around your current diet, so if you don't eat carrots and Swiss chard then don't plant them. However, I think the opposite is true and that it is worth the 49 cents at The Christmas Tree Shop (I didn't make that number up, their seeds are on sale from .49-1.29) to try something outrageous...and if you don't like it, feed it to the chickens.