Adirondack Erratic

The market is bustling as we head into the high summer season at Paul Smith’s College! Here are a few views from early July. Check us out Fridays, 2-5 on the Paul Smith’s College campus.

Paul Smith's Market in July

17 Photos

Oh happy day! The Scrabulous website works again! If you are a Scrabble player who needs a daily fix and a chance to procrastinate doing real work, email me and we can play. Scrabulous sets up a game with a dictionary built in so you can tell right away when you’re spelling things wrong (this is the default setting; you can play in challenge mode without a dictionary if you prefer) and sends an email message telling you when it is your turn. I have found it can be quite leisurely - one or two moves per day - and really sharpens my Scrabble playing. My email is beberman@verizon.net.

While looking up info about tents, I happened upon this site documenting a couple’s (Michelle Ferrarese and Marty Heller) bike trip in Michigan in 2006 visiting CSAs around the state. They visited 31 farms ranging from 4 to 250 shares each. The photo blog, and the documentary they made (you can see the short version here) give an idea of the variety of ways that people are growing food for themselves and their neighbors. There’s plenty of inspiration here for growers and eaters!

…’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Keats

And sometimes it can be found in the garden… Hard to remember this in the intense flurry of planting everything, building stuff, and getting the market display ready. But the garden is beginning to fill up with green, as well as other colors, which truly does bring joy when I take my evening stroll. I’ll be posting batches on the photo page periodically; for an early season look click here.

Some of the pictures in this batch are of the hoophouse, which is so far living up to my expectation of an inspiring and challenging experiment. Melons that have been planted and watered with drip irrigation already have flower buds! On the other hand, the sides must be rolled up when the sun comes out or the air temps will get too hot. And I’m not sure how many years the plastic will last if it is constantly being folded and unfolded.

This is the hoophouse in all its glory:

and these are the end walls before assembly:

Here’s Rich working on the boards that go along the edges:

and this is inside the area before covering:

There will be more pictures of vegetables in the next few days. Next year, during the winter months, these posts will help to remind me what was happening in the garden, and when.

Lots of things are going on in my garden, including the construction of my first hoop house (yay!), but I’ve left my camera in Massachusetts and can’t take any pictures. So here are a few very interesting factoids about food and growing:

Giving up one day per week of eating red meat will lessen your carbon footprint as much as eating locally all year. This calculation is based on the intrinsic greenhouse gases released by cows in the form of methane and nitrous oxide.

According to a UC Davis study, organically grown tomatoes have considerably more flavonoids (antioxidants) than conventionally grown tomatoes. Grass fed and grass finished beef have a higher percentage of omega 3 fatty acids, healthful fats which are scarce in the American diet, than grain fed beef.

World food prices have increased dramatically, by almost 60 percent on average since March of last year, according to the index compiled by the World Food and Agricultural Organization, and there’s no sign yet that they’re going to substantially fall back in the near future.

Some of that increase is due to US policies turning food into fuel in the form of ethanol. Yet both Democratic candidates are in South Dakota today touting their support of ethanol subsidies.

How do our food choices affect climate change, land use, local economies, world trade? A movement is emerging to connect people more directly with the foods they buy, an ethic that looks at the hidden costs of our current food system. (A similar discussion about the hidden costs of our material culture has yet to reach mass consciousness , but that’s another topic.) Two recent articles add to the accumulating wisdom that says buy whole foods, buy local, go organic, and cut down on meat.

Last fall, Cornell researchers compared the amount of land needed to maintain various diets based on New York agriculture.

“A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food,” said Christian Peters, M.S. ‘02, Ph.D. ‘07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. “A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres.”

Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use.

According to the findings, supplementing a mostly plant based diet with small amounts of meat uses less prime agricultural land, because animals can be pastured on more marginal acreage. For more info, read here.

The second article comes from the North Country Kitchen column in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise by Yvona Fast who maintains a website at wordsaremyworld.com. This article, written for Earth Day sums up a commonsense approach to eating “green.” As she says,

By reducing waste, recycling, using fewer resources, and buying locally raised, pastured meat and organically grown vegetables at farmer’s markets, you can honor the earth’s bounty and sustain natural resources. Waste less food, produce less greenhouse gas, and consider how your food choices affect the rest of the world.

You can read the rest of her article here.

Beautiful weather means everyone is on the move - including this woodpecker beating my alarm clock lately (the hose sprayer does seem to cool him off.) And it means an influx of hungry deer.

It took a surprisingly short time to get the electric fence going again this summer. In order to condition the deer to the fence I’ve put bait on bits of foil all around the perimeter. The idea is for the deer to touch a tender part (their noses) to the fence, getting an instructive shock. We will see; last year they blithely walked through the fence to reach the goodies in the garden.

My charger setup is on the left; the picture on the right shows the baited foil, with garlic sprouting in the background.

And here’s a shot of the forsythia, just because it’s so lovely.

Sunday was one of the best days skiing at Whiteface - soft snow, crazy spirits, beautiful views. I returned home to see bare ground peeking out from the snow edges, enticing me to pull my first weeds. The growing season begins!

Last week I stoked my enthusiasm for expanding my gardens by attending a workshop on high tunnel growing in Saranac Lake, sponsored by the Cornell Cooperative Extension.
Various presenters, including farmers and researchers, talked about the pros and cons of growing under plastic (mostly the pros) and showed a number of different types of structures that could be used. Investment costs range from over $10,000 to grow raspberries to a few hundred dollars for low tunnels, such as the ones built by Eliot Coleman as a demonstration for the Common Ground Fair in Maine.

(to be continued…)

The sky is blue, the conifers are green, and the garden is buried beneath feet of snow. It’s almost April first! Click here to see a small view of the early, early spring signs, or just go the the “Photos” page above.

Having taken the time to read through Oxfam’s guide to the 2007 Farm Bill, I appreciate why it is so difficult to talk about. Although the majority of funds included in this omnibus bill go for food stamps and other nutrition programs, the commodity and trade support portions of the bill concentrate payments into the hands of a select group of “farmers”, some of whom collect payouts through pass-through entities without ever getting their hands dirty. In addition, heavy handed trade policies flood the world market with US taxpayer subsidized commodities, like cotton, putting farmers in developing countries at risk.

Many groups have put together recommendations for farm bill reform. American Farmland Trust has a web-based email form for painlessly sending a message to our elected reps; Oxfam’s “Fairness in the Fields” gives a succinct list of important steps that Congress could take to improve the bill. If we continue to raise our voices it might not be too late to have an impact on agricultural policy for the next five years!