Planting Season Begins

Last year was an interesting experiment. I placed starter plants and seeds in the ground in May and by the end of the summer had quite an overrun little deck. My cement garden worked well though I was really concerned that my plants wouldn't get enough sun. I arranged the plants by their need for sunlight and in the end the biggest issue was not having enough soil or big enough containers for the crops I tried planting.

I ambitiously attempted a couple of deep-root requirement plants like zucchini and cucumbers, as well as some serious sun-lovers like Brussels sprouts and peppers and I think I'll need to rethink those for this year. Of course, this year, instead of purchasing our produce weekly from our farmer's market, we will be driving out to our local family farm to pick up our bushel of fresh picked organic vegetables, herbs and flowers for our CSA portion. This alone will drastically reduce what I'll want to plant on my deck, since I know I'll be getting great quality deep-root vegetables, I can have fun planting I-can't-get-enough-of [fill in the blank].

I have so far been at a loss of where I was going to purchase seeds. I already know that I will be purchasing locally produced organic soil from New Earth Farms. In previous years, I purchased starter plants from local gardening shops (like McDonald's Garden Center) or family farms in the area (like Stoney's Produce - they sell really great "standard-items" but also fantastic varietals like lemon balm and eggplant. I love browsing around to get great ideas for the garden!). This year though, I'd love to use up all the unbleached egg cartons I've been saving up and teach Aoife about growing our own plants.

I bought some seeds last year from one of our farmer's markets but really wanted this year to use heirloom seeds only. Fortunately this morning while I was on Etsy, I found a great store that sells heirloom seeds - and I am so excited about it! I love Etsy - it's a great entrepreneurial start-up for home mamas and it's completely homemade, which means my items aren't made in a factory in China (which I love).

On my "for-sure" list to be planted this year are:

• tomatoes: cherry or pear
• summer herbs: basil, dill, Italian parsley, rosemary
• greens: lettuce, Swiss chard, spinach
• herbal flowers: chamomile, echinachea, and Virginia mountain mint

Just browsing around to find seeds makes me excited to get my hands in the dirt - it is always therapeutic! On a closing note, I found this super great remedy from an heirloom seed seller on Etsy, The Bear Foot Shaman:

"Recipe to alleviate almost anything that ails: First get some sunlight - and not behind sunglasses, next drink a big glass of water, and if you are all cooped up reading this, get out and get some fresh air, if when you do go outside the air is not fresh - find a way to get to some fresh air! Last, while you are out getting your fresh air, find a rock that likes you and carry it around for awhile."

Green Holiday: Anniversary

Joshua and I just celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary this last weekend. We talked about a lot of options on where we wanted to go, but the consensus was ultimately that we wanted to try a "Stay-cation"... a Be a Tourist in Your Own Hometown idea (Google it, it's huge). Heading out to the oceanfront during tourist season is something we haven't done in the five years we've lived here, but heading down in the beginning of spring seemed like a fair idea.

Joshua and I usually see our anniversary weekend as a great way to put our feet up, relax, eat great food, soak in a spa, get a massage, enjoy a celebratory drink and take it slow. Of course, with a toddler, all these things are not usually possible, but since Aoife is so much a part of our family and a part of our love we thought it would be great to make it a family getaway. Our prayers were answered as we woke up Friday afternoon to a weekend forecast of mid-70s and all sun.

The Accommodations:

• We really love the attentiveness and individual personalities of small business bed and breakfasts. We decided on the Beach Spa Bed and Breakfast, an eco-friendly B+B just three blocks from the Virginia Beach Oceanfront. It won awards from B+B.com as the #1 spa in America. We can totally see why after we experienced such fantastic customer service, delicious breakfasts, lovely room and amazing spa shower (not to mention extreme graciousness with us for travelling with our toddler)!

The Food:

• We wanted to eat at local small businesses that were tasty and close to our B+B so we could leave our car parked all weekend. Here's what we came up with: We ate Friday night at Pi-Zzeria, where we shared a great huge salad and a small pizza (sans pepperoni and mushrooms, of course). They brought out a little lump of pizza dough for Aoife to play with while we waited for food since it was so busy, but the wait went quickly and the company was fantastic (as always).
• Saturday afternoon we picked up curried chicken sandwiches from Taste Unlimited for a picnic on the beach (that was the plan anyway... we were too hungry to walk any further so we gobbled it up on site!).
• Saturday night, Joshua and I enjoyed a really amazing intimate dinner at Zoe's. A girlfriend came by to watch Aoife so we could enjoy our anniversary dinner alone. Steaks, Scotch, edamame hummus and chocolate souffle were the orders of the night and we had a wonderful time in their really funky and comfortable dining room.
• Sunday afternoon we stole our first taste of frozen custard for the season at Kohr's at the beach. Unfortunately, Aoife missed the taste since she was already napping, but we were too happy to be driving in the car with the windows down eating custard to notice!

The Entertainment:

• Friday evening, we went to the Virginia Beach Convention Center to check out the sports expo for the annual Shamrock Marathon. The marathon took place on Sunday, but on Saturday they ran some shortie fun races, including an 8k. Our B+B was only two blocks from the race route, so runners and family members and friends were jogging up our street both Saturday and Sunday morning, making it exciting to sit back on our deck and enjoy our coffee.
• Saturday morning, Aoife got to dig her little shovel in the sand and make sandcastles at the oceanfront with her favorite friend, Amanda, while Joshua and I enjoyed a couples' massage in our suite. The married couple that performed our massages made us melt into the spa tables and completely soothe away all our stress and knots. It was completely delightful.
• Saturday afternoon, after we got Aoife all cleaned up from her beach excursion and we nibbled a bite to eat, we headed out for a round of putt-putt at Jungle Golf, just three blocks from our B+B. We loved showing Aoife the elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe and gorilla! Of course the sunny weather drew out huge crowds of people, but it was fun playing around with the family!
• After loading up Sunday, we enjoyed a little picnic in a local park and decided we weren't quite ready to head back home, so we called up our local family farmers at Pungo Naturals to see the newborn baby sheep and baby goats. There's nothing quite so sweet as newborn animals!

On the Library List

I've been completely consumed with the topic of food lately. I get the question all the time: what do you eat? "Food" is my standard reply.

The concept that is hardest to define at this point in American cultural history is what is food? I have thoroughly enjoyed the ideas presented in Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, that helped me over a year ago really formulate proper ideas on how to feed my family. Ideas that weren't entirely foreign: I knew to shop the perimeter of the grocery store and skip the aisles, I knew it was important to eat food seasonally (it's cheaper and fresher) but what surprised me was the politics. Yes, the Nixon conspiracy that drove prices down but gave us less real food to eat. I didn't know about the corporate group lobbyists that created the US Food Pyramid or the sugar lobbyists that helped persuade for a higher RDA of sugar in our diets to increase their economic benefit.

As an American consumer, I was prompted to ask, "why don't I know this?" Simply put, I didn't care. I had other worries, the food was there, I didn't care how it arrived there, who had picked it, how long it's been there, what had been done to it to preserve it in near-ripe state... I didn't ask and most people in the market were just like me. I'm learning more about sustainable agriculture, family farms, fair-trade and equal-trade organizations that support farmers and workers. I'm learning about the effects of conventional farming, both on the land, on the air, the watershed, the farmer, the consumer and on the product itself. Most of what I've found has been alarming, but looking at such an overwhelmingly large system of consumerism and apathy, I can't change the system, but I can change what my household eats and how we consume.

I know that every time I purchase something (or choose to not purchase something else) it's a vote. I make a selection with my cash that informs the corporations, my government and my fellow citizens which things are important to me. It's been a year since I started attending pick-your-own farms for local seasonal produce, seeking out farmer's markets, foraging in my local woods, supporting family farms and began reviving the ideas of canning and preserving that I grew up with, into my own home.

This summer, we are share holders into a local organic farm that offers us a weekly CSA of vegetables, fruits, berries, herbs and flowers and cares for our goat, through which we get fresh unpasteurized milk and cheese weekly. We will be increasing the amount of pick-your-own farms we attend this year and I will be more closely monitoring the local growing calendar to choose which weekends I will be canning, dehydrating, freezing or eating the selected seasonal crop. My daughter needs to know where food comes from, and she will learn it by first understanding the food shed that is around her: what grows seasonally, locally and most of all, sustainably.

As I keep pursuing knowledge about food, how we grow it, how we eat it, how to keep it, etc. I started looking to a couple of books to add to my library bag the next time I'm out in town. I've added them to my side bar, so you can quickly click to their Shelfari page and read about them, but I'm including a couple of highlighted texts that I'm particularly interested in.


Sharon Astyk wrote several books that are on my "must read" list, but this one is my "must-read before things start growing this summer" list. Astyk contributes this book as a practical guide to eating locally and seasonally, not just as a fringe movement, but on a community scale. "Independence Days tackles both the nuts and bolts of food preservation, as well as the host of broader issues tied to local diets. It includes: how to buy in bulk and store food on the cheap, techniques: from canning to dehydrating, tools: what you need and what you don't. In addition, it focuses on how to live on a pantry diet year-round...and how to reduce reliance on industrial agriculture by creating vibrant local economies."



Robyn O'Brien is a mama whose daughter suffered a violent allergic reaction and spurned her on to investigate the "toxicity of America's food supply, and trace the relationship between Big Food and Big Money that has ensured that the United States is one of the only developed countries in the world to allow hidden toxins in our food--toxins that can be blamed for the alarming recent increases in allergies, ADHD, cancer, and asthma among our children". This looks like a really great book for information for anybody who eats food in America. It is important for us to be informed instead of surprised when the ails of the system make us ill.



Recently, I took a history class just for the joy of it. The course reminded me of such incredible changes in our landscape in recent past and this book excites me because I forget at times that Americans didn't always eat the way they do now and that for the greater part of our history, all peoples ate locally and seasonally; it wasn't just a hip new concept driven out of California. The tag for this book says it all: "A portrait of American food - Before the National Highway System, before chain restaurants, and before frozen foods, when the nation's food was seasonal". What perhaps interests me most would be any conclusion that Kurlansky would make about the continued effects of globalization and out-sourcing our food. This book would be incredible research in studies supporting regional agriculture.


Kingsolver wrote this book as a nonfiction narrative regarding her year of going counter-mainstream and moving north to start a locavore lifestyle. She chronicles her studies of "you are what you eat" and her journey "away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it". Her focus of putting the kitchen back in the center of family life and non-monoculturing farms back in the center of the American diet makes this a book I can't wait to read!


*Note: Quotes in italics are taken from the book descriptions given on Shelfari.

Green Holiday: Thanksgiving

Trying to continue to make the most of our resources, minimize waste, eat a SOLE food diet and encourage others to have Green Holidays, I've included a little sneak peak into our November festivities. This was my first year hosting Thanksgiving and cooking a turkey without my mom, but we tried our best and made sure we were making tribute to seasonal, local food as well as traditional family favorites!

Grandma Balaban's Holiday Spinach Balls (photo above)

• organic frozen cut spinach
• organic seasoned stuffing mix
• local free-pastured eggs (from Peace and Plenty Farm in NC)
• hormone-free parmesan cheese (from Trader Joe's)
• organic sea-salted butter (from Maine)

Mom's Olive Tapenade

• green olives & black olives
• toasted pecans
• organic omega-3 mayonnaise with flax seed oil
• water crackers

Betty Magill's Cranberry Salad

• fresh organic cranberries (photo above)
• organic grapes, celery, orange and tart apple
• crushed pineapple
• all-natural vegan gelatin
• organic fair-trade white sugar
• organic walnuts
• organic cream cheese

Old-school Mashed Potatoes

• organic local potatoes (from Weeping Radish Eco-Farm in NC)
• organic sea-salted butter
• organic milk

Mom's Sausage Stuffing

• organic celery, onion, apple, fresh sage
• organic seasoned stuffing mix
• fresh nitrate-free venison sausage (gifted to us from our Texan rancher family)
• homemade vegetable stock (photo above)
• organic dried cranberries

Brined Turkey with Cider Gravy

• organic, free-range, heritage turkey
• organic, sea-salted butter
• fresh organic sage & rosemary
• salt brine mix from Williams-Sonoma (photo above)
• unpasteurized, fresh, domestic apple cider
• organic, unbleached, unbromated flour

Drinks

• fresh homemade chai (served both chilled and hot)
• organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee
• unpasteurized fresh domestic apple cider

Green Holiday: Birthday

This year for my birthday I wanted an autumn birthday... something with pumpkins, a hay maze and something involving a wheelbarrow. I found a great autumn festival at Carter Mountain Orchard in Charlottesville but it was a bit of a drive for the five of us, so my girlfriend found a wonderful little pumpkin farm in Richmond which allowed us to spend the night in a hotel, swim with Aoife and enjoy my favorite grocery store in Richmond: Whole Foods!

I made up a batch of my grandmother's 14-karat cake in little cupcake form with all organic goodness and lots of love. We carpooled up to the city and enjoyed supporting the local farms by choosing a pick-your-own field (which I'm a huge fan of!) After picking at least 10 pounds of pumpkin, enjoying the great picks at Whole Foods and driving home, I was surprised with a birthday party with friends the weekend I returned home!

Joshua had ordered a cake that resembled my gift from him: a new digital SLR camera, with telescope and macro lenses and Photoshop package. I love supporting local businesses and my friend Beth made a really great cake with a mini-fondant representation of me on top.

I felt as though my reputation as being a greenie has finally permeated all areas of my life, because for my birthday I received fair-trade pottery and fair-labor jewelery and a live autumn plant!

Recipe: Pumpkin Apple Buttermilk Muffins

Ingredients:
Cooking spray
1 cup organic all-purpose (unbleached and unbromated) flour
1 cup organic whole-wheat (stone-ground) flour
1 teaspoon (aluminum-free) baking soda
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
3/4 cup packed organic dark brown (fair-trade certified) sugar
3 tablespoons unsulphured blackstrap organic (fair-trade certified) molasses
1/4 cup expeller-pressed safflower oil
2 large local free-pastured eggs
1 cup canned pumpkin

2 medium peeled organic MacIntosh apples (one diced, one shredded)
1 teaspoon organic pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup local cultured buttermilk

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Coat a 12-cup muffin pan with cooking spray.
3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients: flours, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg.
4. In a large bowl, whisk the sugar, molasses, oil and 1 egg until combined.
5. Add the other egg and whisk well.
6. Whisk in the pumpkin, apples and vanilla.
7. Whisk in the flour mixture in 2 batches, alternating with the buttermilk. Whisk just until combined.
8. Pour the batter into the prepared muffin pan and sprinkle with the pumpkin seeds.
9. Tap the pan on the counter a few times to remove any air bubbles.
10. Bake for 20 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center of 1 of the muffins comes out clean.
11. Let cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Run a knife around the muffins to loosen them and unmold. Cool completely on the rack.
12. Eat the yummy muffins!!

Pick Your Own: Blueberries

It almost seems natural now, this is the fifth pick-your-own weekend I've shared with my family and it just seems to be a very normal way to bring in our relaxing Saturday morning. We wake up, brew a little organic direct-trade (or free trade if we run low of the good stuff) coffee, serve up a little fruit, pack up the sweetheart, grab our reused plastic containers and drive out to the farm. This last weekend was open season for blueberries so we went to Pungo Blueberries who we found on PickYourOwn.org and happened to have beautiful bushes ripe for the picking. When we drove up there were already about a dozen people in the front fields and there was an attendant directing traffic (to me, never a good sign... I like quiet farms and empty parking lots. Makes me feel like I found it on my own and I'm the only person who knows about it. But I do acknowledge that empty parking lots don't keep farms open, so I'm glad I wasn't alone). I was nervous that the berry bushes would already be picked over but when we got all saddled up and over to the grove, we were really surprised how easy the picking was.The berry farm is only open four days a week and since the farm is open on both Fridays and Saturdays, the attendant was rather surprised we still made out with five pounds. We actually left earlier than expected (after only about forty minutes), Aoife had been woken from her nap to go out to help us pick and well, she wasn't happy about it.

The grass between the lanes was freshly mowed and the dew was still on the leaves when we went out to pick. I was initially a little concerned about the bushes, because I was finding absolutely no fauna. Read here: no bugs. None. Not even little, tiny, I-missed-the-pesticide-plane bugs. We eventually started to see dragonflies and beetles, which allayed my fears about the amount of herbicides and such that were being used, but I still washed our produce very thoroughly.
The plants had perfectly ripe blue-black toned blueberries, red, pink and green as well, indicative of future growth into the picking season. I appreciate coming early in the season and having first pick. The bugs and birds haven't discovered the ripe and rotted fruit on the ground and the bushes aren't beaten and fields aren't trodden bare from crowds. There's something terribly amazing about a pick your own produce experience. For Joshua and I, as urban homesteaders, connecting even on this basic level with our food helps me to feel like we are doing a small step in the right direction.

Instead of my food being picked (usually unripe, so it arrives ripe--or worse yet, picked ripe and then sprayed with a preservative to help it to maintain its ripe state), boxed, sent to a processing location, unboxed, sorted, packaged, labelled, reboxed, put on a truck, put on a plane, put on a semi, dropped at a distribution location, put on a truck, dropped at a warehouse, put on a produce truck, brought to a store, placed on a display in a stale grocery store under fluorescent lights, waiting until it starts to get bad so they put it on "manager special" status and then thrown in a plastic bag and brought home in a car and shoved to the back of the fridge...

Instead of all that, I can take my family to a farm, pick it myself, laugh with my husband as we listen to ornery old female sisters relate stories of their youth in Sandbridge, teach my daughter about fresh fruit and eating in season and I can place my fresh picked, ripe fruit in reused containers, paying below market cost and enjoying that day the fruits of my labor (no pun intended).

Cement Gardening

Joshua and I have a little apartment attached to our collegiate institute. We really like the idea of having a garden and being able to grow our own food. Of course, having a cement deck does not really help our plight. When my mom came to visit in May, she helped me get the ball rolling with getting plants and seeds in the pots and helped me get a system going.
It's been almost two months now and I thought it was definitely high time to show the progress that has been made. Here's our little cement-deck shot. We live facing a youth sized soccer field that is encircled by Virginia's favorite tree: the Crape-myrtle.Already planted at this time (early June) were our tomatoes, herbs: (Italian basil, oregano, chive, sage, mint), lettuce, cucumbers and seeds were in the ground for our spinach, dill, peas and radishes.I don't think I've ever gotten anything to grow successfully from seeds and these little beans were giving me some serious hope for my future as a green thumb. I bought these seeds from the farmer's market from a local farm and I was so tickled when they started sprouting early! Two weeks later, my beans were looking for somewhere to grow:
Somewhere in those two weeks, I was feeling pretty good about seeds, so I also planted Italian flat-leaf parsley. Such sweet little green blooms of life:My mom planted my cherry tomato plant when she visited in May and it has done nothing but flourish. I put it at the end of my walkway and it gets excellent amounts of sun in the morning and throughout the day. I have neighbors who planted inverted tomato pots (I'm still not keen on the idea) and had a rocky start with it, but have finally started forming fruit. I've already been harvesting mine for a couple of weeks. Check out the growth on these tomatoes:After two weeks, it had already grown over the top of the tomato stake and was looking for more room to grow.Then one morning after my walk I noticed it was full of blossoms and one tiny little green tomato! I was so tickled, I had to take a photo for posterity.No sooner have I uploaded the photos from my camera when I find that my tomato plant is really growing and I have a beautiful cluster of fruit beginning to ripen!One week at the farmer's market I noticed they were selling plants, of which I had already planted most of the basics, but I saw they were offering lettuce. I had sown seed for spinach and a spring mix, but I thought perhaps this "deer-tongue" variety might be fun to try. The six-pack of lettuce plants was being sold for $1.50, so I figured if it bombed, I didn't lose much. They were looking a little tender and I was rather apprehensive whether I thought they would actually take root, but about a week later, I was already harvesting leaves for sandwiches and to accompany salads.Shortly thereafter... they really started to take off. I went on a trip for two weeks and a couple of my plants died from the heartbreak of my absence, but the lettuce plants that did survive did really well. Also, the spring mix of micro greens I planted by seed in the center of the pot were progressing way beyond my meager expectation of my cement garden.Below is the photo I took this evening of my crazy lettuce plants. Yes, they have gone to seed because I can't harvest their sweet leaves fast enough. I'm hoping to dry out the seeds after it goes wild so I can try my hand at deer-tongue lettuce again. It was such a wonderfully mild lettuce and for our climate and sun, grew extremely well.






















The cucumber starter plants I bought I thought would never reach maturity...
...but those words were barely out of my mouth, when my cukes were already reaching out of the box. I quickly learned that cucumbers have really extensive root systems that bury themselves at least 18" and I needed to transplant even though they had already begun to flower.The transplant was a success and my plants were quickly covered in pretty yellow blossoms and fantastic looking cukes!As far as herbs are concerned, my oregano, chives and rosemary came back from the years' prior, and we purchased starter plants for the Italian basil, purple sage and grew parsley from seed. Now isn't that a fantastic looking herb pot?
I have this special love for Kentucky Colonel spearmint. Just after I got married, my dad had a layover in Norfolk before he flew to Iraq and as my own husband was deployed elsewhere, I had this really special daughter-daddy time where I made him lots of fresh mint iced tea. Somehow I always associate bright, fresh, huge Kentucky Colonel mint leaves with that memory and I love having it on hand in case he should happen to drop in, I have plenty on reserve for him!

This is my purple-leaved sage as of tonight. Joshua and I really enjoy frying sage leaves as a fantastic amuse-bouche styled appetizer. It's so remarkably fresh and clean on the palate and it's rather unexpected... I can't wait to preserve it for the winter and have on hand for our Thanksgiving turkey. For as long as I can remember, my mom has put sage leaves under the skin of the turkey with stems of chives, to look like growing plants under the skin... it makes a wonderful presentation after the bird is browned.

This is my sweetie rosemary plant. I've had the same plant now for three years and though it never seems to get amazingly large, it has been very resilient to the changes (4 different pots, 3 different locations, droughts, floods...). Rosemary is most certainly Joshua's favorite plant in our garden (just ask our friends), so I make sure to take extra care with this plant!

We planted zucchini and Brussels sprouts as well this year. I think they got a late start and were not potted in enough soil (part of the drawback of having to put everything on a cement deck), they both are rather floundering this year and though the zucchini continues to produce gorgeous orange blossoms, I have yet to see fruit.

We also planted bell peppers and jalapenos. The jalapenos blossomed and produced fruit first and are almost ready for an initial harvest, which tickles me because I have a great recipe for preserved peppers that I'm dying to try out!

Speaking of preserving, after my cucumbers were done, I transplanted my Italian basil to the cuke pot and they have really dug deep and grown large enough to start me thinking about caprese salad and pesto!

Of course no garden is complete without it's wildlife and Aoife and I have been able to see many stunning butterflies, moths and dragonflies frequent our garden space. But this one takes the cake. I only saw it once climbing on my tomato pot and then I didn't see it again (I'm sure metamorphosis is to take credit for that), but I still have no idea what it is. Any clues?

The dipledenia I killed from last year was replaced with this gorgeous beauty which I can see from my kitchen and I absolutely love. My mom and I have this kindred relationship for dipledenia and I don't remember ever not having one... the climbing aspect of this flowering shrub just captivates me.

I have so many blossoms on it now it has been such a refreshing scent on my porch and a wonderful spray of pink for the Davis ladies who desperately need something girly!
Thanks for sitting with us on our porch... if you stay awhile, I'll be sure to mix up a tall frosty glass of rosemary lemonade or minty iced tea!

Farmer's Markets

I love my farmer's market.

Yes, that photo up above are my goodies from a recent trip to the farmer's market, including free-pastured Americana chicken eggs (whose eggs are green, blue or brown), free-pastured duck eggs, raw and unfiltered honey, farmstead cheese (made from the milk produced on that farm), buttermilk and cream, grass-fed Dexter beef, and all sorts of organic lettuces and fresh produce.

Looking for a farmer's market near you? Check out these resources to get connected to your locavore community:

• Local Harvest: A great springboard of information for restaurants that source locally, farmer's markets as well as CSAs offered by your local farm.
• Organic Consumer's Association: Looking for only organic? Check out the OCA's GreenPeople Directory link to find co-ops as well as local farms producing organic grain, meat, dairy and selling and utilizing non-GMO seeds.
• Eat Well Guide: Another great resource for people trying to find local sustainable and organic restaurants, farmer's markets and grocers in their area. This is also great if you are going to be on the road travelling and you want to know where to find SOLE food around you quickly.
• Edible Communities: This has become one of my favorite "insider" resources. Edible Communities highlights regions' local seasonal harvest. I live in the Chesapeake watershed, so my Edible Chesapeake magazine gives me great advertisements on professional restaurants, regionally sourced products as well as articles and recipes. You can buy a subscription or find this publication at your local farmer's market.

Live in the Tidewater area? Check out these markets:

• Five Points Farm Market: Located in Norfolk, this farmer's market is open 5 days a week and is housed in an old warehouse building. Many local farms drop off their produce or products at regular intervals during the week and 5 Points sells them. Saturday morning is when I go purchase my dairy, produce as well as dried legumes and meat.
• Old Beach Farmer's Market: Located in Virginia Beach, OBFM is an open air market only open 8-noon on Saturdays. Beyond the standard fare of veggies, there are vendors who sell fresh granola, bread, croissants, dressings and seafood.

Found: Mulberries

I found wild mulberries while walking with Aoife. It made me do a double take… are those really the mulberries of famed nursery lore?

Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush,
Here we go round the mulberry bush.
On a cold and frosty morning.

This is the way we wash our hands,
Wash our hands, wash our hands,
This is the way we wash our hands,
On a cold and frosty morning.

This is the way we wash our clothes.
Wash our clothes, wash our clothes,
This is the way we wash our clothes,
On a cold and frosty morning.

This is the way we go to school,
Go to school, go to school,
This is the way we go to school,
On a cold and frosty morning.

This is the way we come out of school,
Come out of school, come out of school,
This is the way we come out of school,
On a cold and frosty morning.

At any rate, I tipped my hat to Michael Pollan, kept watching the tree to wait until they were ripe, then brought Joshua out with a bucket one evening and we went crazy! Mulberries are white when they are first forming, then they turn pink, red and finally a deep blackberry-purple. Of course, I had to do a little digging online to make sure the leaves and fruit matched up with an edible fruit, since Aoife is still nursing I wanted to make sure I didn't consume something poisonous.
A quick Wikipedia search confirmed the leaves, bark and fruit development to be mulberries and safe for eating. Joshua and I picked almost two quarts of mulberries and after much rinsing, we drizzled on a little honey (from Peace and Plenty farm in North Carolina) and amazing half and half cream (from South Mountain Creamery from Maryland - it's rBgh free and they do not regularly treat with antibiotics. We're buying into a cow share soon, but for now our farmer's market offers SMC's buttermilk, whipping cream and milk and we really love the flavor!). We couldn't believe how fantastic our berries were and can't wait for the wild black raspberries we found to ripen (more on that later).

Pick Your Own: Strawberries

The first weekend in May I went strawberry picking with the family. My gardening meet-up group sends out great reminders at the beginning of the peak season for picking produce utilizing local farms she finds on PickYourOwn.org, which is how we found Flanagan Farm in Pungo. Flanagan's chief crop is strawberries and after picking in their fields it is easy to see why they are third generation strawberry farmers. Flanagan's farm is off the main drive in Pungo, which afforded us a really quality interview with the farm, away from crowds, traffic and businesses. The rows were dry and well maintained and the staff were friendly and personable.

Pungo is renown for their Strawberry Festival that they host every year which draws an amazingly large crowd. Of course, the main event happens during the peak of strawberry maturation, when the fields have already had a majority of their fruit developed. We didn't attend the festival since we were already swimming in berry goodness by the time of the main event.

When Joshua and I went picking up the rows of strawberries there were still blossoms on the plants, there were no bugs and it was still cool outside, offering us a really wonderful first-time experience. In what seemed like no time at all, we had already picked 17.5 pounds of strawberries. Joshua kept finding "the perfect strawberry" and, well, he had 9 pounds of berry in his box to prove it.

What did we do with it all? Well, I hadn't prepared our house to receive all of our very ripe produce, so we froze some of it, we made some of it into buttermilk and mint smoothies and ate a lot of it with cream, but we also tried to get our friends interested in the local farm offerings by dropping off bowls full of berries to our neighbors.

As much as we loved the PYO scene, our main reason for driving into the country to pick something that was available at my local market was for the sake of my daughter. We have decided together one of the best things we can teach Aoife at her young age is where food grows. It doesn't grow in a package on a shelf in the grocery store. She needs to see how food is grown, harvested and how superior the taste and quality is when you are close to the source. Aoife has been reared exclusively on breast milk and strawberries are her first taste of "mommy" food.

Turns out, she loved it as much as we did!

Green Holiday: Easter

In my efforts to start eating more locally, I built a holiday menu that was seasonal, local, organic and almost entirely homemade. In efforts to reduce waste and reduce our carbon footprint, I purchased almost everything at the farmer's market with my reusable grocery bags and produce bags and utilized cloth napkins at the table. Here's a listing of our SOLE food Easter menu:

Eggs Benedict:

• Local chicken eggs (purchased from Peace & Plenty farm in NC)
• organic whole wheat English muffins (from the Organic Food Depot)
• oven roasted turkey slices (I don't eat pork... so this were a substitute from the Fresh Market)
• hollandaise made with cream from a local dairy and organic butter from a company that advertises its sustainable business practices

Crepes Suzette:

• Local duck eggs (also from Peace & Plenty farm in NC)
• Locally produced cream (from Homestead Creamery in Roanoke)
• organic butter
• domestic flour (from King Arthur in VT)

Blanched Asparagus:

• locally grown and harvested asparagus (purchased at the Eastern Market in Capitol Hill)

Chocolate Truffles

• locally made chocolate truffles that are made without additives or preservatives using only seasonal ingredients (bought at 5 Points Community Market from Cocoa Noveau: she recently set up an Etsy store so when she bakes for the farmer's market you can purchase her fantastic European chocolates online!)

My only regret was that I didn't take a photo of us enjoying all this fantastic food!!

Patio Garden

It's almost time to start planting. This weekend I'll start turning my dilapidated deck space into my garden. This year will be a little different since we moved during the winter and our new apartment is completely westward-facing. (Read here: only afternoon/evening sun... almost entirely useless for growing vegetables). I have not yet begun researching plants that will be more accommodating to part-sun and shade since I really just wanted to plant cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, beans; all of which are sun-lovers. I have half a mind to plant them in my studio on top of my architect's desk, which would ensure that no pests reach my plants but would also inhibit pollination of the fruit later which would likely pose a problem, at least for my tomatoes.

My rosemary, chives and oregano are already back from last year and are excited about this new season. Our new apartment is on the base floor and is completely sheltered from the rain which also poses an issue for growing. Rosemary is from the arid mountainous terrain of Italy and does well in dry soil but chives and oregano do not. I've started running outside when it rains and pushing my little window boxes into the rainfall so they may get some of the free nutrients but my dipledenia and hibiscus from last year aren't even budging.

This year, Joshua and I have talked about planting lettuce and scallions, both of which would go really well in the large pots that are currently hosting my dead (am I already pronouncing that?) dipledenia and hibiscus plants. My mom may be journeying this way next week and perhaps dirt digging will be a quality mother-daughter activity. Last year my mother planted my garden alone. I was nine-months' expecting and we were biding our time until Aoife came, so I kept her company while she planted all my flowers and herbs.

I won't lie: I cannot successfully grow anything from seed. I buy seedlings and small plants because my green thumb was amputated at a young age: I believe in kindergarten I grew marigolds and that may have been my last successful venture.

I am undecided from where I will purchase my plants this year. Traditionally, I buy them from the McDonald Garden Center, but this year I was thinking about purchasing from something a little more "grassroots". Our local community college has a horticulture club that is sponsoring a plant sale, including a nice list of herbs and vegetables, all of which seem to be well researched for hardiness and resistance to disease. The other location is my local farmer's market: Five Points Community Farm Market which is sponsoring the sale of starter plants. Last weekend while in Washington D.C I went to one of my favorite farmer's markets: The Eastern Market at Capitol Hill. The purple Thai basil and lamb's ear sage they were offering made me wish I lived closer!

I'll post before and after pictures of my deck so you can see how I'm transforming the space into something edible, enjoyable and sustainable. In the meanwhile, I'll start resarching a type of tomato that grows in the dark in dry soil...