Not all local farms are created equal

There is a local farm that I pass everyday going and coming home from work.  They have a nice little farm stand that I have bought from when I first moved here, but not recently.  I have said before it is important to support your local farmers and to buy your produce/dairy/meat from them, HOWEVER, you also need to make sure you are buying from a farmer you can trust.  This picture above is not a picture that I took (wish I had stopped and taken a picture at least from my phone), but this is the vehicle I saw driving out of that particular farm I drive by everyday.  This vehicle is for spraying pesticides/herbicides, which is the reason it is so important to buy organic produce.  These chemicals are sprayed directly on the food you buy from the grocery store and sometimes from the food you can buy at a local farm.  When going to a new farm stand or market, just simply ask if they are organic.  Not every organic farm will be certified organic either, which this is not actually important.  Many organic farmers are not certified because there are a lot of steps and hoops to jump through ($$$$$$$$) in order to become a certified organic farm, but many farmers practice organic farming and will gladly tell you that they're produce is safe from any harmful chemicals.  If you ask and someone says that no they are not organic, then say thank you and shop elsewhere.  Don't feel bad that you walked away because you're in search of an organic farmer that you can feel good about buying your food from. 

Now, some produce that is sprayed with chemicals is safer than other produce.  Fruits and vegetables that have a porous outside like berries, potatoes, leafy greens, and apples are things you should buy organic.  Other things like onions and corn have been tested to have less pesticides.  There is a handy-dandy list with the Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 to use when you are at the grocery store or at the market.  Organic produce at the grocery store can be a little pricey so if you are looking to save some money this can help you decide what you need to buy organic and what you may not need to buy organic.  Of course, it is best to buy ALL organic, but that sometimes isn't possible with smaller budgets these days.  This is another reason why you might find yourself saving money if you were to start your own organic gardening and then you wouldn't have to worry about the produce you buy from the grocery store.  It's best to have your own garden, but if you're shopping at the farmer's market, make sure you are buying from a farmer you can trust and that you won't see one of those contraptions in the picture coming out of their farm.

Another tiny harvest

 The other night I had another little harvest from my little garden I have going on here.  This little 4 foot long bed was originally a small perennial garden.  I was given a few perennial flowers from my grandmother and I planted them here in front of the house.  They were nice, but I decided if I'm going to be growing something I should be growing something I can eat!  So, out came the shovel and out went the flowers and the rocks I had surrounding it.  I cleaned up the area a bit and then tossed in a whole bunch of different lettuce seeds.  I had a container that had random lettuce seeds in them that I had intended for this very use.  There's some regular lettuce mixes, swiss chard, some spinach, and who knows what else.  I just know I love salad and I love having different greens.  Greens only take a few weeks to come up to a point where you can cut them and many will continuously grow until it gets too hot.  Greens don't like hot weather.  I should have planted these quite a bit earlier, but I still got some nice baby greens out of it to add to our salads.  I kept the tall grass around the little lettuce patch to give them a little bit of shade because our little house faces south here and it can get quite hot, especially right now! 

From this harvest I got about a good handful of greens, which I should be able to get another couple of handfuls before the summer is over.  This is the only thing I have growing directly in the ground right now and I love it!  I can't wait to have many more gardens like this when we move into our own house.  Greens can easily be grown in containers too and are very happy in long window boxes.  You could probably keep them going through the winter if you have a grow light to aid in the little bit of sunlight we get in the winter, depending on where you are.  I also had some cuttings from carrots that I had thinned out as well, which I will share later. 


This just goes to show, that it DOES NOT matter how big or small your garden may be or where or what it is in.  It's not necessary to dig into the ground in order to grow your own food and take a step towards being more self-sufficient.  Like I said before, many plants are happy to grow in containers or in small spaces, or wherever you see that you have some room.  The amount of greens that I picked from my little garden, would probably cost about $2 for the same amount of baby, organic greens at the grocery store.  Let alone, the gas driving to get to the store and the gas it took for the greens to be delivered to the store.  My greens were probably eaten within 30 minutes of picking them and I walked about 10 feet from my front door to get them. 

Lettuce greens are one of the EASIEST things to grow and they grow fast.  You have a lot of options when you grow salad greens.  You could grow lettuces that form heads and keep them in the ground longer until they have grown to a fair size or you could cut them when they are only a few inches from the ground and have baby greens.  Many greens will continue to grow back after cutting them like this, sometimes they're called "cut and come again" greens, which is exactly what they will do.  They could be grown outside in your garden or you could have pots or window boxes with all different types of greens.  Another option with greens is to grow micro greens, which are huge in the culinary world.  Buying micro greens can be quite expensive, but growing them yourself is a cinch.  Almost anything can be used as a container, as long as it is at least 2-3" deep.  Those plastic containers that greens come in at the grocery store are perfect  and you can use the cover as a drip tray.  If you are using something like this, just poke holes in the bottom of whatever you plan to use and make sure you have something underneath it to catch the water.  Place soil in the container and throw in your seeds.  If you want micro or even baby greens, sow them very thick.  You don't have to evenly space them or anything just sprinkle them on top of the soil.  Throw a little more soil on top and water it.  The seeds will germinate within a few days and when they have a couple little leaves you can chop 'em off!  Micro greens pack a TON of flavor because all their flavor is in that tiny little leaf.  Micro greens also don't need to have sun to grow because seeds don't need the light to germinate, they just need the sun to continue to grow so you can keep them anywhere at first.

So, if you don't know where to start with your vegetables, start with lettuce.  It's easy and you'll have results within a few weeks. 

Favorite day of the week :)

Friday is my favorite day of the week! One reason is because it's my day off (!!!!!!) and it is also the day of the farmer's market near me.  I LOVE farmer's markets.  Especially the one I go to because I always find great produce there and since I don't yet have my own full garden to eat from, I am glad to buy from the local farmers that I know are organic and I want to support their business.  There is one farm I buy most of my produce from, and he is also the most popular vendor there because he's got the most amount of produce, it's fair priced, and it is all VERY good.  Today I came away with some red butterhead lettuce, beet greens, baby swiss chard, green beans, basil, sage, calendula flowers, onions, zucchini and squash, cucumber, radishes, and broccoli.  From other vendors, I got some yummy big tomatoes, green peppers, shallots, and some pretty multi-colored carrots. 

What a bounty!! Was it really cheap?  No, but this will feed us all week with nice big salads, grilled veggies, and herbs for some extra flavor.  Almost all of the veggies will be used in salads, which we eat pretty much everyday, if not twice a day!  If for some reason I don't end up using all my herbs, then I usually dry them and store them for the winter.  As for the calendula flowers, yah they are really pretty to keep on the table to look at, but my bundle from last week is steeping in olive oil to make an ointment and the bundle from this week I am drying to make a hand salve.  Calendula flowers actually help heal skin wounds and irritations, so it's sort of like a natural first aid cream, without the nasty petroleum base.  I'll be mixing some dried calendula and lavender flowers with cocoa butter, beeswax, vitamin E capsules, and olive oil to make a hand salve that will smell and work awesomely!  All of these ingredients can be found at natural health food stores and most everybody has olive oil in their pantry.  Beeswax I found was actually quite cheap, I found a good sized block for about $4 and you only need a little bit. 

If you don't have a lot of room, time, space, whatever for a garden to solely feed your family from, then the next best thing is the farmer's market.  If they are organic (you will want to make sure, though most at the market are) then they have the same ideals you have when it comes to feeding your family.  You want good quality produce that you know has no harmful chemicals applied to it.  For many farmers at the market, this is their full-time job and working the markets is how they feed and support their own families.  With gas prices going up, prices at the grocery store are going up to and you're really only paying for the travel of the food to get to the store.  Let alone having to travel there and back home yourself.  This is why it is so important to support our local organic farmers because if everything else goes down the tubes, at least you'll know where you can find good food.  Most of the things we really need in life, we can find in nature: gardening, hunting, fishing, sun, wind, and rain.


Let me remind you, this is all still a learning process for me, but I feel it's important to share.  While I may not be able to do all of the things I want to do right now with gardening and such, I can learn about it and share it and do more with the coming years.  If you are like me and have limited gardening space, a great book with a lot of info is Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces.  Also, if you have any questions about ingredients in beauty products or gardening feel free to leave a comment with your questions :) 

Delicious things come in tiny packages

 

 First off, I'd like to apologize for the poor quality of my pictures.  My boyfriend, Chris, is the one with the digital camera and he brings it to work with him to take pictures of cool stuff he finds in the woods and fish he catches.  So I'm left with my un-fancy, un-smart, camera phone.

Yesterday morning I noticed I had quite a few ripe strawberries after coming back from my morning run! So while making breakfast, I went out and picked them off and took some pictures to document my tiny harvest.  The berries don't look small in the picture, but that is a small plate and they are probably about the size of a fingernail - still delicious!  That is my small strawberry plant that I have sitting on my steps in a little 8" pot and it looks like I'll have quite a bit more berries to harvest in the coming weeks!  Strawberries are an easy plant to keep in a pot because they have shallow roots and are quite happy even in a 6" pot.  Strawberries are also perennials so once we have our own house (we rent a tiny house right now: tiny house, tiny harvest) I can plant my little strawberry plant in the ground and keep the harvest coming!

I wanted to share that you don't need to have a vast landscape in order to enjoy your own homegrown, organic food!  Many fruits and vegetables have different varieties that are suitable to plant in pots and there are also many ways to get the most out of a small garden.  Since we rent here I haven't tilled up the yard, so I have a few plants in pots.  I used to have regular house plants and I have some perennial flowers outside, but I decided if I'm going to grow something, why not grow something I can eat and use rather than just look at?  I have mostly herbs here that I'm growing on my little front steps garden and I'll be sharing those later on. 

Having your own garden makes an impact on any size.  Even if you have just one little vegetable pot or a couple herbs, those are still your own and you didn't have to drive to the grocery store and pay for the food.  Seeds are very inexpensive, especially with the amount of food you can get from one packet of seeds greatly outweighs how much you would have spent for the same amount of produce at the grocery store.  PLUS you have the benefit of seeing where it came from and knowing that there were no harmful chemicals applied.  Even buying the plant at the store and bringing it home will save you money.  I believe that spending the time to care for your garden and harvesting your own produce is much better than spending the money on the gas to go to the store and then spending the money for the food you can easily grow at home.  Instead of spending that time at the grocery store you could be spending that time watering and caring for your plants and harvesting you fresh, ripe produce.  Nothing is fresher than picking your meal outside and bringing it inside to cook and eat. 

The long and winding road

Over the next few posts I want to share how I came to the realization that the commercial industry is toxic and how I am making my life more simple and natural.  It has sort of been a roller coaster for me, but I think I've found my way.  I remember when I was a kid I had the Tom's of Maine strawberry toothpaste.  I didn't know or think anything of it, I just remember using it and that it tasted good.  Then, fast forward, I'm in high school and my parents and I head to Kennebunk, to the Tom's of Maine store to buy toothpaste there because you could get it pretty cheap and we liked it a lot better than commercial toothpaste.  This is where I discovered Burt's Bees.  I thought to myself, huh, I can actually read these ingredients!  Of course, this was before Burt's Bees became another "natural" or "organic" commercial product...  Anyway, I used their orange face wash and facial scrub, which actually worked great on my skin and it felt and looked better.  I used their famous lip balm as well and tried some of the other products.  Then for some reason, I stopped caring and started using products from Walmart and Bath and Body Work and Avon, because they smelled good!  Which, I'm not denying them that, the stuff smells great, but you need a magnifying glass to try and read all the ingredients on those bottles, and you ought to have a dictionary handy too.  I mean, what girl doesn't love to smell good!?  But at what price? 

So, I'm out of college and living on my own and I'm slowly starting to learn more about organic food and also becoming very interested in cooking and the culinary profession.  My parents had been using Dr. Bronner's peppermint castile soap, which is fairly natural and not full of toxic ingredients, so I'm looking back into checking out the ingredients on my products and slowly becoming more interested in this. 

This is where it really kicks into gear for me.  About 3 or 4 years ago, I learn from my Mother that the ingredients "petrolatum" or anything else petroleum, which is in most lotions and lip products is just oil (we know this already), BUT doing more research they have found petroleum oil in womens' breasts and it has been linked to cancer.  So, looking at all my fancy smelly lotions, petrolatum is one of the first few ingredients and I've been putting it on my body for how many years??? I also learned form a Dr. Oz post that the average woman consumes about 7 POUNDS of that shiny, pretty lip balm and gloss we love so much that also has petrolatum in the first couple of ingredients.  Hear that ladies?  YOU'VE BEEN EATING OIL.  How many burgers can you get out of 7 pounds of hamburger?   Well, 1/4 pound is the average burger, so 28 burgers.  28 OIL burgers.  Yum. 

So take a look at your fancy lotions and shiny glosses to see if you find petroleum in them.  Let me know what you find!  Then, chuck it. Please.

From the beginning

Well, here I am, blog day 1.  The past few years I've gone through a long process of trying to find natural and organic products, eating locally and trying to depend less on commercial and government sources and more on myself.  This is still an ongoing process that I feel is important to share.  I KNOW a lot of people are self-sustained and have been for many many years, but there are more and more that are looking for answers, myself included.  Being brought up in a world where Walmart is the answer to basically every question, I'm attempting to stray away from the pack.  I grew up in southern Maine, where life is more fast paced and everything is at your fingertips.  Now I live in more northern Maine, where life is not so fast and there are a lot more trees, but you still have pretty easy access to just about everything.  One main reason for my "search" is because cancer is quite prevalent on my Father's side of the family and I believe that chemicals that are present in our everyday lives should take most of the blame.  I also believe that it is important to know where the things you use or eat everyday come from and how they are being treated or grown.  I hope when you read this blog you start to think about these things and what is important for you and your family.  So, take a look at something you use everyday either for yourself or your child and ask, do I know what this is?