community.

This year I had the privilege of meeting two very wonderful women, named Beki and Tina, who live no more than a 20-minute walk west of us in a pretty neighborhood. They have an enormous backyard and a couple weeks ago at an open-mic night, Tina said the magical words, "I want to have a communal garden in my backyard." My heart melted with joy. Even though I am planning a garden, it is another part of my dream to have a community of other growers in alliance with me - to share with, to trade with, to learn with. 

When I lived in Maryland, I was fortunate enough to have a boss at the state park who was a small-scale farmer. She let us help her (ok, she paid us, but she really didn't have to because we all jumped at the chance to help her) create raised beds on her sloping backyard, concoct a fertile mixture of composts and soil in said boxes, and reap the benefits of her harvest: her wife cooked us amazing meals using their own vegetables (and some wineberry pie that could make them millionaires were they to start selling it). My boss started her seeds indoors as well and had a coldframe, which helped to extend her season.

Besides that I had a sweet summer gig working part-time for another organic farmer. She had a mere five acres and supplemented with produce from a neighboring, bigger farm, but the woman made a bloody killing at the farmer's market. I helped her both in the fields and at the market and was bitten by the organic gardening bug. 

If you have never experienced this phenomena, please, PLEASE go to your local farmers market this summer and try fresh produce. Having been brought up strictly in the grocery stores with their weeks' old produce from foreign countries, I had no idea that a store-bought pepper could taste any different than one fresh from the fields. I could not have been more wrong. I was hooked. I was also introduced to fresh strawberries, which was a new concept. I thought all strawberries were behemoths that were almost crunchy and had tasteless white insides. When I tasted my first strawberry right out of the dirt, I could have wept. Soft, red on the inside, and sweet, sweet, sweet - I ate so many that summer that I was sick of strawberries by August.

Working with Tina will be my first experience as a fellow farmer sharing in, well, whatever it is we'll share in. My main focus at the moment is that she's interested and willing to develop a chicken coop in her backyard and maintain a flock of egg-producers. If you have never had farm-fresh eggs, I encourage you to try those as well (along with fresh strawberries). I told her we'll go in for all the chicken whatnot because I am a diehard fan of fresh organic eggs and it's a step closer to self-sufficiency and independence from grocery stores.

The chicken situation in America is the focus of a great deal of controversy right now. An average grocery store has those eggs for at least two or three weeks before you even get to them, so they're already 'old'. Most eggs that are cheap come from factory-farms where chickens are contained in a 12x12 inch cage. They are kept in daylight-like conditions most if not all of the year to encourage them to keep producing. This not only strains their bodies, but the confinement and constant sunlight is stressful to their brains. They are also fed a steady diet of grain, which is not natural - so they are actually producing eggs that have fewer vitamins and less health benefits. The chickens are not healthy, and they are certainly not happy, if you care about that sort of thing (which I do). They cannot exercise or forage, and when they naturally stop producing eggs, they are starved by the "farmers" until their bodies go into emergency mode and produce more eggs. 

Now, the tricky part is that there's very little standard for what you can put on an egg carton, except for the "organic" labe. Organic means that they are fed organic grain, not that they are necessarily allowed to roam and forage on their own. Many eggs cartons will say, "Free-range" or "Cage-free," but even this is misleading - because there are no federal standards for what these terms really mean, it is likely that the chickens are foraging on the floor of a warehouse. They may not be caged, but they are not allowed access outside - where sunlight gives them access to valuable Vitamin D and access to grass allows them to forage for protein-rich insects.

It's a tricky situation. At the very least, purchasing "organic" eggs with "free range" markings on the carton is a better bet than the regular grocery-store eggs. Not only are you purchasing healthier eggs but you are telling the grocery store (and therefore the market as a whole) that you do not accept the abusive practices of most egg-producing "farms." These eggs are often three or four times the price of the cheapest ones in the grocery store, but as a test, I encourage you to buy one of each. Take them home and in two separate bowls, open an egg from each. The organic and potentially uncaged chickens will produce an egg with a thick albumen (clear part) and an orange-golden yolk. The factory farm eggs will be dull and limp because they come from unhealthy chickens. It is truly worth the money. 

And if you're adventurous, you can look up local farms in your area to see who sells eggs. Then you can visit the farm and ask to see the chickens. Here in Bend, Jim Fields runs a farm and he'll gladly show you his beautiful ladies - they have their own penthouse and a protected area for picking at the ground. He tosses them kitchen scraps which they eat up with great relish as most livestock will do. Jim's chickens' eggs are some of the best I have ever tasted - he sells them just a day or so after collecting them from what I understand, so you're getting them right out of the henhouse.

These are just some of the reasons I'm peeing my pants with excitement to help Tina raise chickens. Besides that, it will just be so damn fun to bike over to their house and visit our collective hens and bike back home with a dozen fresh eggs for breakfast.

spinach and lettuce.

Like radishes, spinach and lettuce prefer cooler temperatures (like around 60-65 degrees) which makes them perfect window-sill plants for the fall or winter. They're great plants for people who are antsy to start growing something long before spring rolls around. 

January 29: Erin and I score at the thrift store once again and find a long, rectangular container. It's metal, so we glue down plastic on the inside (hopefully the glue does not impart toxic chemicals through the plastic) and fill it with basic indoor/outdoor potting soil. We stuck some spinach lettuce seeds in, watered, and set on a windowsill that doesn't get nearly as much sun as I'd prefer.

Feb 3: A mere five days later, the lettuces have produced the first, tiniest or sprouts (the image currently on the blog page is them). On the 4th, the spinaches sprouted as well.

Feb 9: First sight of first set of true leaves (actually the second set of leaves when a plant starts growing). We water when dry and rotate the container. Today we also ordered our seeds from two Oregon companies: Nichols Garden Nursery, and Territorial Seed Company. Besides what we grow ourselves, I know we'll purchase other seeds and plants along the way, because once you start gardening you develop an obsessive habit to collect as many plants as will fit in your living space.

Feb 17: We had to thin the lettuces a few days ago as they are already too crowded. The first true leaves are getting bigger already and are showing the typical jagged shape of lettuce. 

When it's time to really start gardening, it is wise to make plantings of spinach and lettuces every few weeks so that you have a steady stream throughout the season. They don't do well in hot summers, so it's probably a good time for us to start figuring out where they'll go. I'm considering the front yard gardens, which get very little sunlight (shade in Central Oregon is whole degrees cooler than direct sunlight, a concept that my humidity-soaked brain could never have conceived of in Maryland). 

post one.

So for those of you who don't know, my ultimate dream in life is to be a small-scale farmer. That is, I want to own some land and farm it for vegetables, herbs, fruits, and flowers both to sustain myself and as a way to contribute to my income (either with money or trade). I want to learn to preserve my own foods so that I can drastically cut back on my grocery-store dependence. Lined up on the agenda is also raising and slaughtering my own chickens and learning how to produce some cheese (probably just the easy ones). I also hope to have rain barrels installed at this dream place to collect rainwater for my farm to reduce my overuse of water. Aside from gardening, I plan to have a centrally-located woodstove and chop my own timber for heat. I'll also one day have some solar panels. 

I have a very strong belief that one day this society will start failing (more than it already has) - that there will be food shortages and people who do not know someone that farms or know how to farm themselves will starve to death. This dependence on just about everything but ourselves is terrifying to me, and I'd like to be as self-sustaining as possible, pretty much as soon as possible. 

Thus begins my adventure in suburban gardening in Bend, Oregon. For those of you not local, I will explain why this area is a particularly large challenge. Bend is situated on the east side of the Cascade Mountains, in what's known as a rain shadow. This means that the other side of the mountains get all the rain - when the air comes up over the mountains, it drops the moisture on the west side and by the time it gets to us, it's dry as hell. What this means is less than twelve inches of rain annually. During the summer, it is possible to go an entire month with no rain. Added to that, our high elevation means that AT ANY TIME, during ANY SEASON, we can experience a plant-killing frost at night. The last 'frost-free date' (the time when you can plant things outside without worrying about them dying) is in June - at least a month or two later than other temperate areas. I was told by the Extension service that Bend essentially does not have a frost-free date because we're likely to get a frost in July or August at some point.

So what we have is no water and the potential for summer frost. At first I was pretty bummed about the odds here, but if I can successfully manage a harvest here, than I'll be fine wherever I end up next. (Kind of like learning how to mountain bike at Susquehanna - now I'm set.)

Erin and I will be developing our arsenal over the next few months: first, a seedling table that we created for free by dumpster diving and utilizing scrap wood. We'll start our seeds months ahead of time in some cases and transplant them outside in June. Next, we'll be constructing a coldframe from some windows we found at a dumpster. A coldframe is a box with a heat-conducting surface (like glass) that keeps the inside of said box many degrees warmer than the outside air temperatures. A coldframe can be used to transplant your plants early, or placed over them in the event of a frost to keep them from freezing. We'll also use row-covers, cloches, and whatever other means necessary to keep our plants safe to the best of our ability. Next, we are building raised beds for the vegetables. This will help the soil to stay warmer and give the plants more room to grow. It will also allow us to construct our own soil mix, rather than relying on what's currently on the ground. Finally, we have collected from thrift stores four huge containers (for an impressive collective price of $9) which will each hold multiple vegetable plants and can be brought inside in the event of a frost.

I also spent a few hours collecting close to 40 gallons of rainwater the last time it rained. This amounts to like one week of watering, but it's one week that we'll not have to use a garden hose. I have to find a cistern or big garbage can to hold it all so I can continue to collect snowmelt as well. 

That's the basic plan. We are planning to grow:

> 3-4 types of tomatoes, all of which are considered more "cold-hardy" species and two of which hail from cold-ass Eastern Europe or Russia

> a cold-hardy strain of broccoli

> swiss chard, a hearty green

> spinach and lettuce

> red-meat radishes, which are red on the inside and white on the outside

> 2-3 types of potatoes

> 3 types of onions

> an heirloom parsnip (which I'm looking forward to, as exposure to frost actually improves the flavor... take THAT Central Oregon)

> 2 types of "stress-tolerant" corn - we've been told corn is an impossibility in Bend, which has made us that much more determined to grow it, and if we get one bloody ear, we will be satisfied

> carrots

> 2 types of beans, potentially, one of which is 'cold-hardier' than others

> sweet peppers, one of my personal favorites

> winter and summer squash

On top of these, we'll grow insect-repelling flowers like nasturtiums and coreopsis to aid in the fight against pests. I also plan to have some flower gardens, but that's a later post.

As you can see, the biggest things to consider in your climate are: soil temperature (in Bend, nights are cold so plants will not grow at night like they will in, say, Maryland), frost possibilities, length of season (we're about a whopping 80 days or so), water, and disease-resistance of your plants. Of course you also have to consider carefully your soil composition, location of gardens for available sunlight, and be prepared to fight pests.

I'll be back in a few - I am cooking up a batch of my grandmother's Sicilian pasta sauce. I make a ton at once and freeze most of it for easy future meals.