Red State Green

Hi, everyone!

We’re having a bit of a cool spell — it’s only 90 instead of 102 here! — and our summer is going pretty well. I just read Sharon Astyk’s blog, which reminded me to do my Independence days update. It’s been quite dry here, the bit of rain we got a couple of days ago notwithstanding.

Planted: wild garlic, passionfruit, another try at a kiwi (which I think has died already — they just don’t seem to like my yard), grapevine

Harvested: the last of the peas, sage, rosemary, onions, lots of weeds for the rabbits

Preserved: Still drying weeds for the rabbits, just whatever I can pull/cut after they’re fed and before the heat drives me inside.

Ate: the onions, sage, and rosemary while baking codfish … very yummy.

Managed: rearranged my pantry room to rotate and make room for some cases of supplies that came in. Still composting, using rabbit manure on the garden, feeding the bunnies kitchen scraps (they’re quite fond of stale toast) , and using newsprint to line bunny bins. We don’t order the paper, but the ads that come almost every day despite repeated requests not to have them sent at least get some usefulness.

Prep and Storage: I have been using Amazon.com’s grocery store for things that I know I’m going to use a lot of and regularly. They have this thing where you can get a good deal on cases of items delivered on a schedule, with (as far as right now goes) free shipping!!! (the best part) This helps keep my pantry supplied and lets me not have to make trips to the store.

Building community food systems: My usual order with the food co-op.

How about you?

This looks like fun!

Le Tour de Fleece is a spinning challenge done during Le Tour de France (July 4-26). You can pick any challenge you like during that time, from learning to spin to spinning enough yarn for a major project.

My challenge will be to spin every day, I’ll be posting here to let you know how that goes!

(If you’re on Ravelry, you can also join Ravelry’s Tour de Fleece challenge, which is a spin-every-day-they-ride sort of thing. I’ll probably join both since that’s what I’m doing.)

Hope to see you there!

It’s been hot and humid here, with no rain for a couple of weeks. We could use some rain.

Planted: corn, more tomato plants, shallots.

Harvested: chard, onions, peas, blackberries, a strawberry here and there.

Froze the peas, also still drying weeds for the bunnies. Have a couple large bags full now.

Today I’m making broth out of chicken carcasses. We’ll have chicken enchiladas for dinner tonight, using the meat from these two.

Went on another foraging walk this weekend, got some wild garlic and a passionflower plant to add to my back yard.

I’ve also been doing a lot of spinning lately. As soon as I get another skein made I’ll post pictures (I have a camera now!) .

What have you been up to?

Dmitry Orlov does it again: Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation

I’m in the middle of reading this and it’s just a great article.

One quote I really like:

It is an unfortunate fact that the recent centuries of settled life, and especially the last century or so of easy living based on the industrial model, has made many people too soft to endure the hardships and privations that self-sufficient living often involves. It seems quite likely that those groups that are currently marginalised, would do better, especially the ones that are found in economically underdeveloped areas and have never lost contact with nature.

And so I would not be surprised to see these marginalised groups stage a come-back. Almost every rural place has its population of people who know how to use the local resources. They are the human component of the local ecosystems, and, as such, they deserve much more respect than they have received. A lot of them can’t be bothered about fine manners or about speaking English. Those who are used to thinking of them as primitive, ignorant and uneducated will be shocked to discover how much they must learn from them.

This Saturday, as part of the five day long deadCENTER film festival here in OKC (which starts today!), a group of short films will be featured dealing with issues of sustainability and food.

Information below or visit deadCENTER’s website www.deadcenterfilm.org

Sustainability Focus Films

Saturday, June 13^th at 1:00pm

Kerr Auditorium, 111 Robert S. Kerr Avenue

Chase The Can

An aluminum can makes an unexpected journey in this wind-powered video from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality. (4min/OK)

Soil In A Good Heart

”Soil In Good Heart” is a taste of a documentary currently in production by Deborah Koons Garcia, director of  “The Future of Food” (2004). The importance of understanding, preserving and rebuilding this essential resource is the foundation of sustainable agriculture. We are all part of the soil community and we ignore this at our peril! (13 min/CA)

Food For Thought

”Food For Thought” offers us a glimpse at locally produced agriculture and farmers markets, and poses the question of why we import food from all over the world when we are perfectly capable of doing so in our own backyard. Join the filmmaker and the many characters she meets along the way in this interesting, and insightful look into what we eat and where it comes from. (15 min/OK)

Homegrown

”Homegrown” is an inspiring intimate portrait of what it’s like to live like ‘Little House on the Prairie’ in the 21st Century. It follows the Dervaes family as they live ‘off the grid’ on a small family farm next to a busy California freeway. (52 min/CA)

You can learn more about the film and see a trailer at www.homegrown-film.com

Tickets are $10 and a festival all-access pass

can be purchased for $100.

For more information on all the films offered at

the deadCENTER Film Festival,

go to www.deadcenterfilm.org or call 405.246.9233

The “Food for Thought” film has a clip in it that I saw the filming of on one of our foraging walks — I’m actually in one of the scenes (in the background). My ten seconds in the sun.

Anyway, this should be a good film festival!

Photo collection of people’s fridges

After I saw that (and the entertaining link left by another photojournalist who also has a fridge collection from around the world), I went to look at my fridge.

A can of beer (husband’s), green onions, miracle whip, lemon juice, lots of free-range eggs (they last a while in the fridge), a leftover boiled egg, the chicken carcass from last night’s dinner I still need to cook down for broth, a box of dough conditioner, condiments, a gallon of milk, a bottle of organic grape juice, some homemade cottage cheese (with the whey from it in another container waiting for me to freeze it for later), a jar of feta a friend made me, my bag of seeds in the top crisper, more beer and some pak choi in the bottom crisper.

Well, it’s relatively clean, at any rate.

So … what’s in YOUR fridge?

(h/t to Tricia)

Seems that summer is here — temperatures in the 90+ range, sunny, and humid.

Planted four more tomato plants, harvested a lot of onions and scallions, some peas, and a couple cups of blackberries (which disappeared like magic! ). And of course lots of weeds for the rabbits.

Made a braid of six of the onions, froze the peas.

Put 150# of gravel into the water barrel foundation, which means I need to go buy some more.

Other than that, just getting ready for my daughter’s wedding next month. 

No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth.

Just been a little busy.

We got the daughter graduated (whew!), the boys are doing their band thing every day, and we’ve been doing a lot of discussion about the wedding, which is in mid-July. Fortunately my daughter has found a place she really likes, and I’m going to take a look at it on Friday and give them the down payment.

(things are sure more expensive these days than 20 years ago when I got married!)

But enough with that. Let’s talk about garden stuff!

Planted more tomato plants since we last talked, and received another grapevine, strawberry plant, and cucumber plant (all from the co-op). I still need to plant those.

Harvested some snow peas (they’re starting to slow down; I got around four quarts from the yard and a half by two feet I planted, which isn’t bad), some excellent strawberries, a carrot, three smallish onions (this variety is about the size of an egg), some salad greens, and lots of weeds for the bunnies.

Been drying more weeds and stacking them along one side of my back patio where I keep the extra bunny bins. Also drying rose petals and leaves to crunch up and add to the rabbit feed. It’s really looking pretty.

I finally got the foundation dug for the water barrel base, and have put in 50# of gravel, which is just a drop in the bucket of what needs to go there. Little by little is how I work; dragging one 50# bag across the yard tires me out for a good part of the day. I got my husband to bring a couple bags over to where the base is — which is good, since dragging them is the worst part. But that tires him out too. What a couple of gimps we are!

Also been working on the Buy Fresh Buy Local blog, updated it and added a post about local food. And I learned something about onions!

So the last week has been pretty productive.

What have you been up to?

Been fun the last couple of weeks, getting ready for my daughter’s graduation, my boys starting the high school band (they integrate the junior high kids into the high school band right about now), and of course doing all my usual.

Here’s the recap:

Planted two tomato plants, and put up a post and twine trellis for them as well as the snow peas. Hopefully that will keep the snow peas going longer, as they got some sort of fungus on them at the end of last season.

Went to another foraging class today! Got to ride around in the back of a king cab 4×4 with five other intrepid souls, including Tricia, who writes the blog Oklavore. Harvested wild onions and mullein today, which I’m going to replant in my garden. This week I’ve harvested a couple quart baggies worth of snow peas, as well as a couple of salads for dinner, and of course lots of ‘weeds’ for the bunnies.

Froze one quart of snow peas. (ate the rest!) Have also been pulling an extra bunch of weeds every day and drying them to use as ‘hay’. The rabbits need the extra roughage and hopefully this will mean I don’t have to buy so much hay for them.

Still composting, etc. Also plugging away at digging this foundation for the water barrel.

Check out the (very) new (haven’t had time to work on it much) blog for the Buy Fresh Buy Local - Frontier Country chapter!

This week my oldest graduates from high school. Then we get to work on her wedding in July. Woo hoo! Let’s see if I survive this.  LOL.

Sharon Astyk’s post reminded me about Independence Days, which I had thought about in the “oh yeah I need to be doing this” but not in the sense of “oh yeah I need to do this NOW”. Thanks for the nudge!

So we’re back on. She has altered the rules a bit … every day you do one or more of the following:

1. Plant something
2. Harvest something (this includes foraging)
3. Preserve something
4. Reduce waste
5. Preparation and storage
6. Build community food systems
7. Eat!

(’Cause what good is having all this stuff if you don’t use it?)

Okay, so here’s what I’ve been up to:

So far this year I’ve planted potatoes, peas, snow peas, lettuce, chard, beets, onions, garlic, and today I put in 14 pepper plants.  I have a bunch of tomato plants started from seed ready to go into the ground.

I’ve been harvesting lots of wild foods (aka weeds but something like 99% I could have put on my plate instead) for the rabbits, along with things like chard, onions, herbs, volunteer lettuces and broccoli raab/tyfon that survived the winter quite nicely.

I haven’t done any preservation yet this year; this is one area that I want to do more in, especially canning/drying the abundance of wild greens we have.

As far as reducing waste, I’m still carting bunny bins to the compost pile, along with bread bags full of the kitchen scraps the rabbits don’t want and dishpans of soapy water. It’s pretty much a habit now.

I did have a couple of my squashes go bad over the winter. I’ve been putting them in a corner of the yard to see if anything grows from them (I didn’t dare open them, they were that bad).

I’m still working on the foundation for my huge rain barrel. If I had known it would be this much work I wouldn’t have gotten it. Once it’s done it will be great, but I’m missing all the rainy season’s worth of rain because I just can’t do more than a very little bit of work on this at a time.

I’m still with the food co-op and the Buy Fresh Buy Local group for this area. We should have a website up by June 1st that I can show you.

And eating is not a problem around this house.

So has anyone else been doing this challenge?