Instant gratification

Today I took a short break from planting and yard work to taste the first home-grown alpine strawberries of the season. This variety is perennial and everbearing, which means two things: The berries return every year with minimal effort on my part, and they keep coming all summer (that is, as long as I continue to pick—otherwise the plants think that the season is over and start to go dormant). Two great features to have in a garden plant, if you ask me!

Alpine strawberries are known in gourmet circles as fraises des bois, a high-priced delicacy appreciated by foodies the world around (e.g., read an article by Maine four-season gardener and author Barbara Damrosch—you must register to read the Washington Post online, but it’s free). Chez moi, however, alpine strawberries simply are easy-to-care-for plants that give good eats.

Because the sweet, tasty fruits are small (you’d need to pick dozens just to fill your palm), hide under leaf cover, and tend to dry up quickly after harvest, they require careful hand harvesting—hence the hefty price tag. Given these difficulties, I find that the easiest approach to alpine strawberry harvest is to eat them in the garden. Yup, you heard me: plant to mouth, with only the lightest, briefest passage between the fingers. Gratification doesn’t get much more instantaneous than that.

Another nice feature (IMO) of alpines is that they don’t send out runners like full-sized strawberries; however, as the plants grow, you can divide their clumps to expand your strawberry bed or border.

One more interesting tidbit about my plants: They are true survivors. I originally sowed organic seeds from Johnny’s several (5?) springs ago, in black plastic seed flats. However, when I was putting the rest of the plants in the garden, the strawberries looked so tiny and pathetic that I figured they needed more time to grow and should be planted in fall rather than spring. So, I left the flats outside near the garden and watered the spindly seedlings (occasionally, anyway) throughout the season. Come fall, I got busy and never got the plants in the ground, so the flats were left, forgotten, next to the garage. There they passed the winter under several feet of snow.

The following spring, as I was weeding, prepping the garden, planting tomatoes, and so on, I caught a glimpse of something green among the dried-up leaves in the flat. Not believing that anything might have survived a New Hampshire winter in a plastic seed flat—and certainly not the sad strawberry seedlings that I had chucked aside the year before—I guessed that the green must have been from a growing weed, like a maple tree or some crabgrass. Still curious, I examined the greening leaf more closely, and sure enough, it was a strawberry leaf—and many more plants were starting to green up! So out came the water and a bit of seaweed fertilizer, and before I knew it, the plants were looking perky. A short time later, I transplanted the baby strawberries to the garden, where they have thrived ever since.

BTW, if you’re interested in reading more about organic farming and gardening … check out Four-Season Harvest by Barbara Damrosch’s farmer husband, Eliot Coleman, at your local library. It’s a classic! Also check out their website, Four Season Farm, to see that they practice what they preach.

A new take on biofuels

Background: Switching to Biofuels Could Cost Lots of Green, on Washington Post online—you may need to register, but it’s free and worth it.

This article really got my hackles up, because although I believe that biofuels should be explored as an alternative to fossil fuels, this approach is beyond irresponsible in so many ways—not only in how many dollars the federal government will have to cough up to implement its plan.

So, what’s wrong with it?

• Subsidies: The federal costs of paying off growers in the form of subsidies is already a problem for other crops. For example, the American public pays less than “real” costs for conventional milk because conventional dairies get kickbacks from the government. My mother’s cousin who lives in New Brunswick, Canada, used to say that when he crossed the border into Maine, he had three things on his shopping list: gas, cigarettes, and milk. (Thankfully, he has given up his nasty smoking habit, so his list is shorter now.) The subsidies also hurt organic producers, who don’t receive such subsidies, because the price differential between their products and the conventional ones is artificially high.


• Mass plantings: When the federal government subsidizes a crop or a new potentially lucrative market is created, farmers—who have a hard enough time making ends meet as it is—are encouraged to plant massive single-crop farms of the new crop. Mass plantings reduce the diversity of not only plants on the farm but also the flora and fauna that live in the same ecosystem.


• GMO seed: You can be sure that where there are massive single-crop plantings, there are genetically modified (GMO) seeds. Why? Well, the marketing hype is that they’re less risky—hardier, often with built-in pesticide protection. And they simply cannot be contained; it has already be proven that GMO crops can, through the ancient forces of nature, intermingle with non-GMO crops far and wide (not to mention possible effects on insects and animals). And I don’t want no GMOs in my food—they’re bad news!


• Pesticide use: Farmers that don’t use GMO seeds with built-in pesticides surely are going to apply the pesticides to their crops to increase the survivability (and hence the profit) of the crop. Unfortunately, applications of the common broad-spectrum pesticides kill off the good insects (like bees and butterflies) as well as the bad ones (aphids, chewing beetles, and borers). What’s more, pesticides can drift from conventional crops to organic ones, and their negative effects on non-insect populations (from livestock to humans) have been documented.


• Sustainability: Increasing interest in a new crop decreases sustainability in many ways. It is not difficult to imagine a future surplus in corn-for-ethanol crops. In contrast, a program to recover and repurposed used cooking oil (as championed by many biodiesel users, who drive so-called frymobiles because the exhaust smells like a Fry-o-lator) would not only help restaurants (which are obliged to dispose of the stuff in some way) but also create a market for a product that otherwise would be added to an ever-growing surplus of trash.


• Energy use: Offering a replacement fuel doesn’t address the main issue: Americans consume many times more than their fair share of energy on this planet, and substituting one fuel for another doesn’t make the problem go away.

Don’t get me wrong; I think that biofuels can be a great alternative fuel and an important part of a sustainable energy plan! I’ve even seriously looked into the requirements for using used vegetable oil as fuel and converting a car to biodiesel. I just think that using primary materials is unwise, unhealthy, wasteful, and irresponsible when biodiesel could be a secondary product recycled from erstwhile waste.

On second thought ...

It doesn't really matter what you think, as long as Blogger works for me, right? So I'm going to poke around a bit more to find the features I want to use, set up tags, etc. and then start posting away.

My old blog (with all posts from November 2006 till yesterday) is still at my webhost for now, but I'll bring over the old posts, bit by bit. I'll eventually catch up and have everything in one place. How gosh-darned organized and efficient that will be. ;-)

Blogger?

So I’m thinking about moving my old blog to Blogger … where it would be integrated with GMail, iGoogle, and other Google paraphernalia. It also would be easier to find, what with a “real” URL and all. Whaddaya think?