Obamas Prepare to Plant White House Vegetable Garden

On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut.

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at time when obesity has become a national concern.

My friend Naiades went to New Orleans and took some great photos, including this one:

I want my balcony to look like this some day. So beautiful. But it does look a lot better than that photo you see at the top of this site. That was taken over a year ago. Now, I have so many big pots of herbs, there’s barely room to hang the laundry. And it smells so nice!

[Note to self: must get camera working with computer again so I can get back to posting pics of my gardening progress.]

I tell ya, the FDA is not smelling like a rose lately…

FDA: Is the Tomato to Blame for Salmonella Outbreak? Is It Not?…

Three weeks after the Food and Drug Administration first warned consumers to avoid certain types of tomatoes for fear they would carry an uncommon type of Salmonella, known as Saintpaul, the number of people getting infected is rising with each day passing by, making U.S. health authorities question whether tomatoes are the real or only cause for the outbreak.

Another reason to grow your own!

Finally, my first 100-foot diet meal from my little apartment balcony. [Sorry, no pic -- still can't upload from my camera to the computer, dammit.]

• homegrown, organic salad greens
• local, organic cilantro
• organic, homecooked chickpeas
• local, organic lemon juice
• organic olive oil
• toasted, organic sesame seeds

Dee-licious.

To be honest, I was surprised at how good it was compared to the packaged Trader Joe’s organic herb salad I love. This was just as good, if not better. The seeds were the mesclun salad mix from Southern Exposure, planted in an Earthbox — which means it’s an $80+ salad so far, but that will go down over time.

Also, I’m getting the stuff together to make my own self-watering containers [pdf file] from now on. I’m going to start growing as many sweet potatoes as I can squeeze onto the balcony because a] I love sweet potatoes and b] sweet potatoes love hot weather, which is what we’re looking at for the next few months, especially on my west-facing balcony. I’ve already collected half a dozen 5-gallon buckets for free from the market. Now, I just need some pipe or hose and a way to cut circles in plastic.

Time to head for the locally-owned hardware store!

Food banks face high costs but feeding more people

“The way it’s going, we’re going to have a food disaster pretty soon,” said Phyllis Legg, interim executive director of the Merced Food Bank, which serves 43 food pantries throughout foreclosure-ravaged Merced County.

Food banks across the country are in similar straits: While demand is up, supplies and donations are down. The food banks, like their customers, also are suffering from high gas prices and struggling with the impact of rising food prices on their operations. Some have had to cut back on how much food they give, or how often.

“If gas keeps going up, it’s going to be catastrophic in every possible way,” said Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America’s Second Harvest.

I took Sharon’s Independence Days Challenge to heart. I’d post garden pics, but I can’t get the newly reformatted computer to recognize my digital camera. Argh. Anyway, here’s my update:

For me, the big one was getting over my fear of the unknown by finally diving in and planting seeds on my little balcony. I’d never done that. They’re coming up now, and it really is a thrill to see the little green shoots–except for the beet shoots, which are red!

• Planted: ­ mesclun salad mix, beets, and chives in the Earthbox; a cherimoya tree just to see what happens; also transplanted a gift tomato seedling into a homemade SWC.
• Harvested: ­ rosemary [a sprig now and then for cooking or bathroom air freshening.]
• Preserved: ­ milk [as yogurt].
• Prepped: cleaned and organized the balcony for gardening; got coffee grounds from the Starbucks across the street and mixed them, along with powdered eggshells, into my leftover potting soil from the last failed garden; bought and set up a bokashi compost bucket; mixed some bokashi into the soil for good measure; made a SWC using a 3-liter soda bottle and a 5 gallon bucket; sprouted beans for cooking [didn't like the taste, though]; got more 5-gal. buckets free from the food co-op [used for both storage and container gardening.]
• Stored:­ pinto beans, lentils, popcorn, sesame seeds, herbs, and raisins in a bucket; froze walnuts, pecans, powdered milk, and flour.
• Learned:­ how to amend poor soil and start seeds.
• Cooked something new ­ corn muffins from scratch, flat bread.

Yay!

It’s World Naked Gardening Day–publicradio.org article [mildly NSFW]. Official web site [definitely NSFW].

Take off your clothes and start gardening! But don’t expect me to join you. :o]

It’s billed as a documentary that Americans won’t ever see.. except on the Internet. Google Video has the entire, 1 hr 49 minute film. You owe it to yourself and your children to see it:

On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German cultural tv channel) by French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto – A documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.

[Update: Now I see that the video is no longer available on Google. If anyone knows a link that works, please send it to me! Found it!]

Yeah, I know. I’ve been neglecting poor Bornfamous. Sorry. It’s just that I’ve been reading and learning so much that I needed time to process it all. And I haven’t been able to decide what to share–and certainly haven’t felt competent enough to set myself up as an expert, which is how I feared I’d come across.

I’m not an expert. Just worried. I’m sure you are too, with food and gas prices soaring and our economy plummeting. A couple of years ago, I started reading blogs about climate change, peak oil, and the end of civilization as we know it, but I learned to keep it to myself. Nobody wanted to hear it; it was just too alarming. Besides, who needs more gloom and doom? What about solutions? I couldn’t think of any.

All I could think about was, what can I do to protect my family? And the answer was obvious: food. As oil prices go up, food becomes very expensive. I remembered the energy crises of the 70s and how they affected food prices; it wasn’t pretty. [Now I'm hearing about wheat and corn shortages. There have even been food riots in other countries. Alarmed much?] Even on my little apartment balcony, I could grow some food, so I became a fan of the new urban homesteading movement. I started a small herb garden, pathetic as that sounds–and in a long moment of inattention, let it die. What can I say? I’m lazy. Well, not exactly–I hate using chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia as an excuse. Either way, gardening is not a pursuit for the horizontally inclined.

But I’m not giving up, no! I have a pathetic NEW herb garden [photos forthcoming] and ambitious plans to plant salad greens and a few veggies. I just need to get me some compost, and I’ll be ready to plant. I even found a free, weekly source of worm castings and compost tea!

[However, as Gilda Radner pointed out, "It's always something!" My car is officially out of commission until I can save up to fix it. So it's back on the bus after four years of glorious motoring. I have plenty of experience, pre-Volvo, getting around San Diego by bus and trolley, so I know that getting to the free compost will mean a two-and-a-half hour round trip instead of the thirty minutes it would take by car. Plus, fares since my transit days have gone up to a whopping $6.50 EACH WAY for this particular trip. Now riders have to pay full fare for each transfer. WTF? I don't understand how they expect people to give up their cars for mass transit when driving is actually the CHEAPER option for many San Diegans--even with higher gas prices. Luckily, I'm over 60 and qualify for a senior discount. I'll pick up a monthly pass and save even more, but there's no way around that nearly three-hour trip.]

But I digress. What I really want to talk about is food storage. Because obviously, a balcony garden can only provide so much nutrition. To get through an emergency, whether brought on by man or Mother Nature, having a plentiful supply of food and water on hand is essential.

Sharon Astyk writes persuasively about food security. She has a book coming out and is working on another one called A Nation of Farmers, which proposes that the only way out of this mess is for all of us to start growing our own food in any way we can. Sharon is also promoting food storage, the way our grandparents and great-grandparents did it before supermarkets and processed food took over. We need to get back to these basics, fast.

I was lucky to be able to take Sharon’s online food storage class last month and was overwhelmed by the wealth of information. How to apply it all to my particular situation? That’s what I plan to blog about for the next month or so. Stay tuned…

I couldn’t help myself. I signed up:

Not that I’ve been successful at growing food on the balcony YET. Other than rosemary and chives, but I ate them and that’s a start, right? Damn straight.