The garden is finally bursting forth! The tomatoes are fruiting and outgrowing their cages. The zucchini are finally getting bigger than 4-5 inches. The bean plants are growing new sets of leaves.

I dug a few carrots for dinner tonight. I didn’t realize digging carrots would be so hard! The soil around them has gotten pretty well compacted, so they didn’t want to come out. Next time, I’m making sure they’re in nice, loose soil.

I’ve decided that yes, I am going to match Shetha’s five car-free days, even though she didn’t ask me to. That will take me through Wednesday, August 4 (11 days total).

I’m still not matching Family on Bikes’s eight months. But I am pondering why I can’t or won’t, and will write about that later, maybe at the end of the challenge.

But of course they’re absolutely right. If I want fresh veggies in fall and maybe winter (I’m not too sure about this winter business), I have to start the seeds early.

And I never did plant broccoli this year, so maybe that would be a good thing to try. Hmmmm….

Thank you to Cooking Up a Story — a great resource for people interested in food!

But now the tomato plants are doing well, although there’s still no fruit.

And we should be eating zucchini within a day or two.

The carrots and green onions are finally getting big enough to eat. I put in some Walla Walla onion starts, too. Our neighbor had too many, so she gave me a bunch. I planted some individually, which will hopefully turn into real Walla Walla onions. We’re just using the tops of the rest.

We also harvested all of the remaining lettuce! We’ve been taking leaves as needed, but with hot weather here I decided to just pull the rest before it bolted.  There was at least four or five gallons of lettuce, so we gave some to neighbors. I’ll be replanting the lettuce area with carrots and bush beans.

The fava beans and peas are now gone, too.  I harvested three big bowls of fava beans before pulling the plants…which came out to about two cups once they were shelled. The favas did make a good cover crop; they do keep out the weeds, and supposedly they put nitrogen in the soil too. But it wasn’t a very efficient method of growing food.  The peas didn’t do very well, probably because of the weather, but we did eat fresh peas with a couple of meals.

The strawberries are about done, so I don’t have anything to preserve at the moment, but I did buy a water bath canning kettle for later. I did the strawberry jam in my big stock pot, which worked fine, but it doesn’t hold many jars and doesn’t have a proper rack. So now we have a kettle for doing applesauce and tomatoes when the time comes.  I’m thinking about peaches and blueberries, too.

In my last garden update, I didn’t have specific gardening goals. I’ve decided on a couple over time. My current goals are to grow enough tomatoes both for eating and canning, and to have enough enough zucchini to eat at least twice a week.  I now have four tomato plants intended for canning (Heinz 2653 variety) and four intended for eating (with the option to can), and the zucchini plants, as you saw, are beginning to produce.  If I don’t end up with enough tomatoes, I’ll buy some, possibly via pick-your-own.

How is your garden coming along? Is it coming along? I know we’re not the only ones with weird weather.

After making my strawberry freezer jam, our neighbor (a young, single lady) came over with two more bags of strawberries! She also gave us some strawberry plants, as hers are spreading too far.

I decided to try the Small Batch Strawberry Jam recipe that I’d seen at Cooking Up a Story, and made three jars of jam plus a little extra for the refrigerator. This recipe requires no pectin, which means the jam is a little runny (or may even turn out to be syrup). However, no pectin also means you can make it any time with any amount of berries; you don’t have to worry about measurements.

I did include a few partially green berries, on the advice of another website, because they are supposed to contain a small amount of pectin.

The canning process was totally not scary. I did buy a jar lifter and canning funnel, but I just used a stock pot I already had, with a small round rack (which I also already had) in the bottom. You do want a rack of some kind in the bottom so that boiling water can circulate under the jars. I should have bought the magnetic lid lifter as well. Trust me, you’ll want one.

The jars successfully sealed (POP!), so now I’ve got five half-pints of freezer jam and three half-pint jars!

You want to start preserving? This is, like, the easiest thing ever. Seriously. Even easier than applesauce (well, at least for me, because I don’t have a food mill).

What you need: Four one-pint containers of strawberries, 1 1/2 cups sugar (or sugar substitute), 1 envelope Ball No-Cook Freezer Jam Fruit Pectin (may also be called Instant Fruit Pectin), five half-pint freezer containers, a couple of bowls, a paring knife, and a potato masher.

• Sterilize your containers and lids by running them through the dishwasher (or wash with hot, soapy water). Place them upright on a clean towel so they’re ready to fill.
• Hull the strawberries. That means remove the leaves and the little bit of flesh underneath them; what you might call the core if it were a tomato. There are strawberry huller gadgets you can use for this. I just use a paring knife to quickly cut it off and scoop it out. Throw the strawberries in a large (12 cups or larger) bowl.
• Mash the strawberries with the potato masher (great job for kids!). You can decide how mashed you really want them – but they should end up fairly liquid.
• In a smaller bowl, combine the sugar and fruit pectin, and mix well.  Pour into fruit and stir. After the sugar/pectin is completely mixed in, stir the mixture for an additional three minutes (another good job for a kid).
• Ladle fruit mixture into the plastic containers, leaving a little headspace at the top (freezer containers usually have a fill line somewhere near the top).  Seal or screw on lids.  Leave out on countertop to thicken for 30 minutes before freezing. Label and date. Put one in the fridge for immediate use if you like.

So all of that? Except for the dishwasher and the 30 minutes sitting on the counter, it took less than an hour. And I didn’t have to handle hot jars or a pressure canner.

How about the costs? I bought a half-flat of strawberries at the farmers’ market for $13, which works out to $8.67 for the four pints I used for jam. The pectin was $1.99. The containers I’m not sure about (I’ve had them for a while), but Ball has a five-pack of eight-ounce freezer jars for $3.49. Oh, and 1 1/2 cups of sugar is about 33 cents. So that’s $14.48 for 5 jars of jam, or $2.90 per jar.  That’s not bad, considering that you’re getting a high-fructose corn syrup-free product, and in my case, locally grown fruit as well. And if you pick your own or grow your own strawberries, you may be able to bring the cost down even more.

Anyone who can afford and has access to these materials can do this. If you’ve thought about preserving, but it scares you, or you think it would be too much effort, you should make this jam.

P.S. This works for any kind of berries, and Ball has instructions for other fruits, too.

So here are the peas. I planted them AGES ago, at the end of February, but they’ve been very slow to grow, and some of them never came up at all. The seeds are a couple of years old, so that’s not surprising. We put more seeds into the blank spaces this past weekend, even though it’s late. The plants are still so small, maybe they’ll be able to catch up!

Next are the fava beans, planted at the same time as the peas.  They’re over 2 feet tall and flowering, so hopefully we’ll have beans soon! The original idea was to plant tomatoes here after the favas were done, but I don’t know whether the timing will be quite right.

Here we have a few carrots at the front, baby onions right next to them, and then all the lettuce behind that.  This past weekend, we put in more carrot seeds and lettuce seeds, and today I thinned the lettuces and brought some young lettuces in for eating.  There’s plenty more in the bed, too, so we’ll be eating salads now!

You’ll notice, also, that about one-third of this bed is overrun with weeds.  I’d cleared out the entire bed, but didn’t get the whole thing planted, so the weeds took over. I’m clearing out and replanting one section at a time, because if I waited until I had the whole thing cleared, I’d never plant anything.

I thought raised beds were supposed to help prevent weed growth, but grass grows everywhere around here if you don’t keep pulling it out and/or killing it. It’s a menace.

Finally, I’ve just put in one lonely tomato plant. I’m planning to grow more; this is just one that someone happened to give me.  I created this bed from a dirt/gravel area next to the raised bed, which was starting to become overgrown with the above menace, grass. I broke up the dirt, pulling out the bigger clumps of grass, and then dumped a bag of compost over it and spread it out.  I made three hills, dampening the compost to make it hold its shape, and then dumped a bag of bark mulch on the bed and spread it around the hills.

The other two hills are for zucchini. My kids like zucchini.

Now, where is all this leading? I know I want my garden to be more productive this year, and I want to really be eating from it, but I haven’t set a measurable goal. Any ideas? What’s your goal for your garden?

And when we’re very busy, we’re not always behaving in a frugal way. Oh, we haven’t been out buying flat-screen TVs and designer athletic shoes. It’s just that we’ve been relying more than usual on convenience foods and eating out. So now it’s the end of the month, and we need to tighten our belts (meaning both that we need to save money and that I need to lose a few pounds).

We’ve got a few things on the shelves and in the freezer to use up. So today, I went grocery shopping for the week and spent $22.36.

I didn’t use a single coupon. I generally don’t use coupons, unless they’re for something I would buy anyway and they’re attached to the store shelves. We don’t subscribe to the newspaper, and we don’t usually buy name-brand items, so I don’t feel it’s worth it.

No, I just kept it simple, and bought things that would supplement what we have already.

Here’s the tentative menu plan (dinners only):

• Baked salmon w/ zucchini (I have a slab of salmon from the farmers’ market in the freezer)
• Macaroni and cheese
• Pancakes
• Scrambled eggs
• Black beans w/ salsa and rice
• Split pea soup with bacon (I have a package of bacon ends to use up)

You may notice that I didn’t buy any fruits or vegetables except for the zucchini. We have on hand frozen veggies, apples, carrots, canned beets and canned mandarin oranges.  I might pick up some frozen apple juice another time; I forgot about it today. We also have young lettuces that we can thin out of the garden — yum!

We have both hot and cold breakfast cereals in stock, and plenty of coffee and milk.  We also have yogurt and cheese for a little protein boost.

For lunches, I restocked bread, mayo and peanut butter and bought a package of bologna and some tuna. We already had a package of hot dogs, and I bought buns today.  I often take leftovers for lunch, but I actually don’t anticipate having leftovers from the meals I have planned.

These aren’t the healthiest, most earth-friendly meals I’ve ever planned.  Well, except that they don’t contain a lot of meat! That’s earth-friendly. But they will get us through, and quite comfortably.

More resources on frugal eating:

• The Oregonian‘s Leslie Cole wrote a detailed article (with a video and recipes) last week on feeding a family well on a limited income.
• Jacquelyn at Broad Brains has been doing a series on Breaking Up With the Grocery Store, in which she has decided not to shop at the grocery store for a month. She’s using up her pantry stock and finding alternative ways to get food.
• Like I said, I mostly don’t do coupons, but if you do, be sure to check out Hot Coupon World for resources.
• Katy at The Non-Consumer Advocate is hosting a June Food Stamp Challenge, in which participants pledge to eat on a food stamp budget for the month.

That’s not really what I was going for here — making school lunches healthier so that kids can grow up to be good soldiers? I was thinking more along the lines of doing it so they WON’T die. But at least they’re interested in better nutrition? I’m not sure what to think.

Here are some additional school lunch links for those who are interested:

Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project – Mrs. Q is a public school employee who is eating the school lunch right along with the kids every day in 2010 and reporting on it.

Tales from a D.C. School Kitchen is a blog series from January 2010 by Ed Bruske on The Slow Cook. He spent a week in a District of Columbia elementary school kitchen, observing how food is prepared and served.

Revolution Foods was profiled in the New York Times in January 2010; it’s a company that contracts with schools to provide healthy, freshly-cooked meals made with natural and organic foods. Sample menu: “All-natural honey-glazed chicken with roasted potatoes and garlic braised collard greens.” But the main problem with programs like this? Money.  Oakland Unified School District, for instance, where Revolution Foods is located, is unable to afford this service due to low government reimbursement rates. They have, however, made significant improvements to their meal programs over the past several years.

Berkeley Unified School District, on the other hand, has started a School Lunch Initiative, in partnership with the Chez Panisse Foundation and the Center for Ecoliteracy. They’ve made sweeping changes to their school lunch menus, including use of local and organic ingredients. Perhaps private philanthropy is part of the solution, if the government can’t afford to subsidize healthier food?

Finally, an answer to a Twitter question. @kitchenmage asked — as a serious question, not trying to get people mad – “How many of you parents who hate school lunches are letting your kids eat them? Why?”

Yes, my kids do eat the school lunch, and the school breakfast. We are on the free lunch program, and it does help financially.  They do get healthy food at home, and they’re smart enough to make good choices like white milk instead of chocolate at least some of the time.

But even if I were making lunches for my kids, I would still care about what all of the kids get to eat. I work in a school. I know they don’t all get to eat properly at home. I’ve seen the kids who bring a bag of cold food from McDonalds for lunch, or a donut, chips and a Capri Sun.

We need to do better for everyone.

—–

Image: heebs lunch, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from crd’s photostream

Why? Because when there’s little or no food, people tend to get violent, and people die, either from the violence or from the lack of food. That seems like the sort of thing Homeland Security should be concerned about.

For instance, look at the effects of the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland. All air travel in Northern Europe and the UK has been suspended for several days now.  I’ve contacted a couple of people in Britain, and both say there are no food shortages as yet, and that Britain is still able to bring food in by ship. Much of the UK’s fresh vegetable supply comes from closer places like Spain, although they do also import fruits and vegetables from South America, which becomes more difficult with air travel restrictions.

But what if the situation continues? The volcano is still spewing ash, and volcanoes in Iceland have been known to continue erupting for months.  Food supplies in Britain and other parts of Europe won’t be cut off entirely, but it will be more difficult to bring in the fruits, vegetables and other items that are normally imported, and prices may go up.

And further, the climate in Europe and even in other parts of the world could be affected, slowing food production.  The Associated Press has reported that

Iceland’s Laki volcano erupted in 1783, freeing gases that turned into smog. The smog floated across the Jet Stream, changing weather patterns. Many died from gas poisoning in the British Isles. Crop production fell in western Europe. Famine spread. Some even linked the eruption, which helped fuel famine, to the French Revolution. Painters in the 18th century illustrated fiery sunsets in their works.
[emphasis mine]

The Guardian has an even better description of the effects of that eruption, which even disrupted the climate of North America.  And we’re just as vulnerable to natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions, here in the U.S.

But disruptions in the food supply don’t just come from natural disasters. They could come in the form of oil shortages — if we don’t have enough fuel to transport food to where we need it, or to run the machinery of the big farms. Or disruptions could come from global warming and climate change. At some point, we may not be able to produce all the food we need due to climate change.

So what do we do about this?  The Department of Homeland Security has so far focused on preparedness, and has left it up to individuals and families to stockpile at least enough food for three days, which won’t be much help in a famine.

We can be conserving energy and driving less to prevent oil shortages. But we can also be working on making our homes and communities resilient and self-reliant, through the Transition Towns movement or just by learning to grow and preserve food locally. Because someday, we may be glad we did.

From what we’ve seen (and there’s only one episode to go), Oliver did a great job developing relationships with people in Huntington and getting them to try cooking and eating his dishes.  He’s gotten both grade school and high school students eating healthy foods at school, although budgeting has been an issue, and one school cook in particular has been resistant to his methods.

The big question remaining is “Will this have a lasting effect?” I’m sure they’ll be addressing this in the last episode — although it’s really only been six months or so, and that’s not much time for creating or measuring lasting change.  This AP article cites a survey which says that children at the Central City school we actually buying fewer lunches after a month on Oliver’s program — they were bringing lunch from home instead.  Hopefully things have gotten better since then. The AP article also reports that the school principal has enthusiastically embraced healthy eating and has lost 20 pounds.

Although I agree that school food should be healthy, I think Oliver could have devoted more time to helping people eat healthy foods at home, too.  If parents aren’t willing and able to support healthy eating, kids aren’t going to be interested either.

Sarah Gilbert, a writer, locavore, and parent of three boys, has written about how families can eat Food Revolution-style on a budget. Her recommendations so far include eating seasonally and getting a handle on snack foods.

I’m also a fan of the Six-O-Clock Scramble, which helps me to cook healthy food with fresh ingredients, even on busy weeknights.

So how can we pass these ideas along to others? I’d love it if you’d share a link to this post (you can use the buttons below to tweet, share on Facebook, etc.), but I’m thinking about non-internet methods, too. What about teaching kitchens, like Jamie’s Kitchen in Huntington? Would people come?

Don’t forget to sign Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Petition! Our collective voice matters.