foodscout blog

We got our garden started pretty late in the season, but we figured we would try for some summer squash anyway. And we got a good dozen or so fruits off of it which were all delicious.

Suddenly, the squashes started rotting on the plant and then I noticed little holes had been bored into each one. My squash plants were all infested with pickleworms, which are the larvae of a type of moth that is common in the southeast.

From the North Carolina State University website: The pickleworm is the most destructive insect pest of cucumbers, summer squash and cantaloupes in North Carolina. For many years, it was unprofitable to grow cucumbers in mid or late season because of this pest.

Aside from the recommendation for pesticide use, their page is full of great information for a new gardener. After learning more, I realize I should have kept the squash plants in the garden to protect the cucumbers that are starting to produce fruit. From the NCSU webpage: Although cucumbers are severly damaged some years, squash appears to be the preferred and favorite host. Squash flowers, furit and small plants become heavily infested while adjacent cucumber flowers and fruit may remain clean.

We’ve been drinking a green smoothie every day for years. We love eating a light dinner and we love how refreshing and nutritious they are. This weekend, though, we had a green smoothie experience like no other. We made our smoothie with chard leaves, fresh from the garden. The difference is difficult to put into words.

It tasted cooler and lighter somehow. It filled us up far quicker than usual. We normally have about 24 ounces each and it fills us nicely. With this smoothie, I drank less than a glass full (16 ounces) and I was already completely satiated. I have read that our body feels full sooner if our food has more nutritional content. I have also read that food loses nutritional value steadily after it’s been picked. Imagine what 2-5 days of transit and sitting on grocery store shelves does to our produce as compared with organic chard picked 10 minutes prior to eating.

Finally, and this is much more difficult to describe, the smoothie seemed to have an unusual and powerful energy about it. It was like the inside of my mouth was vibrating – while I was drinking and for about 30 minutes afterward. It tasted delicious but I found the green smoothie very difficult to drink because the feeling was almost uncomfortable.

There was no mistaking it. We didn’t make this green smoothie any differently than how we normally do. But it was absolutely different. It makes me wonder how much we have lost by replacing truly fresh foods with the convenience of store-bought produce.

Growing all these little plants from seed, it’s hard not to want each one to be strong and fruitful. But sadly, some do well why others don’t.

We planted 8 cucumber seeds in our garden. 6 Sprouted. Of those, 3 grew up the trellis quickly, while 3 others seemed to stay little and scrawny. Some of their leaves even had brown spots which is likely a fungus.

I kept thinking I could tend to them and help them along with careful watering and extra fertilizer. After a couple of weeks and little progress, I remembered back to my garden expert, Linda, telling me to yank the weak ones.

So I did. Now there is more water and nutrients in the soil for the remaining 3 and they are growing like weeds, so to speak. Many little cucumbers are forming!

Here’s a picture of one of the sad little plants that didn’t make the cut. Taken the same day as the lovely plants growing up the trellis above.

It’s very exciting to see the vegetables starting to form on a plant. But sometimes they arrive earlier than they should. When a plant starts to produce fruit, it puts most of its energy into creating that fruit, rather than into growing and maturing.

Take this red sweet pepper plant, for instance. It was maybe 6-8 inches tall and already this growing pepper was weighing down the plant so that it could barely stay upright and other peppers were not forming at all. Additionally, this tiny little pepper, the size of a small plum, was already turning red, as though it had just about reached its fully size.

So off it came. Now that the pepper is gone, the plant’s precious energy and resources are freed up for growing and eventually producing more and bigger fruit.

It doesn’t get any fresher than going out to your back yard garden and picking your food for lunch. Yesterday we harvested our first vegetables since planting our garden. 4 Beautiful yellow summer squashes were ready to go.

We are so excited about tasting our own home-grown food that we didn’t do too much with fancy recipes.  On the other hand, summer squash is not our favorite food to eat raw because it has a sort of sliminess when you cut it open.

So we enjoyed our squash by slicing it into rounds and steaming them for about 15 minutes. Then we liberally applied nutritional yeast and added a dusting of herbamare (sea salt mixed with herbs). So delicious.

Summer squash from the store is pretty tasty. Summer squash direct from the garden is full of a buttery flavor. Easily the best squash I’ve ever tasted!

At least a couple of dozen more squash vegetables are already forming on our  8 squash plants so we should be enjoying them a few at a time for a while. Next vegetable ready for harvesting will probably be our chard greens.

Garden bed #3 is ready for planting, just in time for some fall greens. We’ve got 2 rows of beets (more for the greens than the roots), 2 rows of red lettuce, and 1 row each of tat sai and collards. They should all be sprouting within 10 days.

We’re saving a little space on the end for whatever else looks good at the garden supply store in the next couple of weeks.

7 Weeks ago we put our first vegetable seeds in the dirt in our 2 raised beds. We’re getting ready to plant a 3rd bed and harvest some of our squash and greens. I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a few things I learned along the way on my first real attempt at vegetable gardening.

1. Fertilize your plants! Plants need water and they also need food. Your local gardening store will have great advice to share with you about what type of fertilizer is best for your area and particular plants. Just sprinkle half a cup or so around each plant and gently mix it into the soil. Our plants were growing very slowly at first. After giving each one some fertilizer, they perked up and started growing much faster.
2. Soapy water kills aphids. Our okra plants were being attacked by aphids. If you see a lot of ants crawling around on a plant, check the underside of the leaf for aphids and their eggs. Ants “herd” aphids in order to eat the nectar they produce. Take some natural dish soap or Dr. Bronner’s Soap, mix a small amount with water, and gently wash the leaves with it. Do this in the morning so they will be dry before the hot sun comes out and definitely dry before nightfall. Works like a charm. Aphids have not returned.
3. Tomato and tomatillo plants need extra support. My beautiful tomatillo plant was growing like crazy. I had it tied to a stake for support, but it quickly grew  well past the string and I did not tie up the long branches. After a big rain storm, both of the 2 main branches fell from their own weight and split right off. The plant is now down to it’s little stumpy stalk and a new leafy little branch is starting again. I noticed that my 2 tomato plants were quite sprawling as well, so I took the opportunity to tie up all the long heavy branches to the stake using garden tape.
4. Shop at your local garden supply store. If you are not already convinced of the benefits of supporting local shops, then consider a purely selfish reason instead. The workers at Lowes and Home Depot don’t know jack about vegetable gardening. Everyone who works at your local garden shop is an expert in exactly what you need for your particular plant in your particular climate. And if one person doesn’t, they can ask the owner of the store who most definitely will.
5. Check on your plants every day. Look for holes in the leaves and pests. Stick your finger in the dirt to see if it’s dry. Check that each plant is growing. Look for fungus. And just generally get to know your plants so that you can recognize when something is wrong.
6. Keep a garden journal. I regularly need to remember when I planted something or which plant was planted where. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’ll remember. Keep a journal and write down when you planted. Draw a diagram of the garden and where the plants are. Make a note of when you watered, what bugs you found on which plants and what you did about it.
7. Get a rain gauge. Or at least do what we did and put an even-bottomed plastic bowl outside. That rain storm might have seemed like an inch of rain, but more often than not in our town, it was maybe 1/10 of an inch. The plants need to be watered deeply to develop strong roots. Just because the top of the dirt is wet, doesn’t mean you don’t need to water.

All these things are simple and inexpensive but they make a world of difference.

Quite by accident, we’ve discovered a great natural remedy for the awful itch of mosquito bites. As soon as a bug bite starts to appear and itch, scratch it with a dry brush that you’d use for body exfoliation. The immediate benefit is that it will be the most satisfying itch you ever scratched.

Secondly, you will notice that your bite does not continue to itch. If it does, scratch it with the brush again. At most, I’ve had to do this three times before it stopped itching permanently, but usually once or twice does it.

And finally, unlike scratching your itches the traditional way, the dry brush will not break the skin or leave any redness or scabs whatsoever.

We’ve been getting eaten up by mosquitoes pretty good this summer and the dry brush has worked like a charm for us. It also works great for rashes.

Give it a try and let us know if it works for you too!

After mowing the back yard for the first time in over a year, I discovered a baby bunny. He was cornered by the fence and too terrified to run. I managed to fight off the urge to pick him up and play with him, but I did run inside to grab my camera and get John to come outside and see him.

“Should we feed him?” John asked quite sincerely.

“He’s a bunny. His world is made of food.” John immediately felt silly for asking such a question. As though us humans would do a better job of feeding a bunny than he could do for himself. Humans don’t even know the difference between actual food and the boxes full of chemical-laden junk they sell in grocery stores.

But it got me thinking. The world isn’t only made of bunny food. It’s made of food. For everyone.

If there was a food shortage for a few months, most of us would starve to death while edible plants were growing all around us. Or worse, we would have already killed them off with weed killer. They now sell dandelion greens in natural food stores. People pay $3 for a bunch, while mowing over the dandelions growing in their own yards.

Don’t have a green thumb for a vegetable garden? You can still include some garden fresh foods in your diet. Find out what grows in your area. Dandelion, lambsquarters, plantain (not the banana), and lots more are probably growing all around your neighborhood right now. Let a portion of your yard grow wild. See what shows up.

There is nothing more nutritious than wild plants. Just make sure you pick them from areas free of car exhaust, pesticides, and passing dogs.

For the sake of the planet and for the sake of our health, we’ve been eating as much organic produce as possible for several years, regardless of any cost difference. A few years ago, we began hearing about the “Buy Local” trend, felt that made a lot of sense, and now we do our best to buy produce that’s at least from a nearby state, if not from a local farmer’s market. But never being satisfied with “good enough” we’ve decided to do even better.

After dabbling unsuccessfully with planting a vegetable garden over the last year or so, we finally got serious, got professional help, and are creating a beautiful backyard garden. Linda over at Mountain Rainwater helped us by building 2 raised beds to get us started, bringing in some rich organic soil, and telling us what to plant. If you happen to live in the Asheville, NC area and are looking for help getting your garden started, we highly recommend Mountain Rainwater*.

We planted a little later in the summer than is ideal but we found a few items that should still grow well in our Southern mountain climate. From seed, we planted cucumbers, summer squash, a few okras, chard, and cilantro. Presumably, if nurseries are selling any vegetable starts this time of year, it should be OK to plant these already started vegetables as well. We found some peppers, tomatoes, and a tomatillo plant that Linda gave to us.

It’s now our job to keep the cats out of our garden beds, and our soil watered if there has not been enough rain. Currently, we are using city water from the hose which has tons of chlorine and who-knows-what-else in it. In a future project, we will be adding rain barrels, a solar water pump, and some soaker hoses so that our freshest produce possible will be watered with the cleanest water possible. Stay tuned for that!

It’s been 10 days since we planted and already all of our seeds are sprouting up and our pepper plants are starting to produce little peppers. We can’t wait to be able to eat the absolute freshest produce possible on a regular basis. As we learn about what to plant when, and how to keep our garden thriving, we’ll post that information here to share it with you. And if you have any tips to share, we’d love to hear ‘em!

*We receive absolutely no compensation in any form for recommending Mountain Rainwater. We are just truly happy with the service we received.