Make Dirt

Composting is so easy that I find myself getting frustrated and sometimes angry when people do not. I can certainly understand feeling overwhelmed by it, as the one composting book I've ever bought made me feel unqualified to bury food.

Three years ago when I bought my house I didn't care about any of this. My dad immediately noticed a spot in the yard where there had been a pile for composting. I wasn't sure how to do it so he gave me simple instructions.

Use a hoe or some other tool to make an indentation. Put vegetable waste in that hole and cover it up with the dirt or organic material, like grass clippings or leaves (to keep the flying bugs away). Water it. 

That's it. Make sure that spot is in the sun. It's so easy.


Dirt + vegetables, fruits, breads, grains, egg shells + sun + water + time and bugs and worms and it seems like magic but it all = dirt 

My goal is to create the right conditions for dirt to happen so I can plant seeds in said dirt, then transplant the plant into my garden. If they can survive all that, I hope to nurture that plant so it will grow food for me.

Until this year the only seeds I've sewn were outside: corn, quinoa, okra, peppers, spinach, sunflowers, hollyhocks, hyacinth. This year I've started a variety of foods and have easily killed 2/3 already though none have been outside.

I especially don't like paper cups because I can't find a healthy balance between drying out and molding over. It's difficult. I don't want to start my food in plastic, so I have to search for a better alternative. But for now, random plastic containers with holes poked in the bottom are working a lot better than paper cups.



I'm amazed at how delicate plants are when they're inside compared to being outside in the elements. On one hand it seems like sheltering, protecting is a good idea, but when I actually do that - a lot die. Plants need stress. I want to make their life easy but by keeping the light, temperature and moisture at a constant, any little fluctuation in one seems to cause my seedlings to stress out and die. I'm not sure how farmers do it.



A few weekends ago I went over to Christopher and Roxanne's for a vegan dinner. We first went on a woodswalk to forage for wild edibles, then brought home our harvested greens, cooked some and ate the others raw.



The stemmy green things mixed in with the beets were harvested that day. I thought they were "spicy mustard greens" but when I google-imaged that phrase, I didn't find anything remotely like what I was looking for. I'll have to update this. Dogfooooood, what were you feeding me??

In any case, while growing my own food led me to a higher experience, foraging for wild-grown food took it one step farther. They understand the value of composting so their rule is to return all the unused food back to where it was gathered. It was an uplifting experience so I sent them a Thank You postcard. I love Roxanne's reply "I'm not sure what you're thanking us for...."



The circle of life. It's crazy, man.

Precisely 24 hours ago from this very moment

...Ethan (my future nephew) was playing with my phone and here's the video he took!

Oooh, Girl, Oooh

******************* 
I just found a draft blog post. I don't save drafts; I sit down and write something and delete it if it sucks. I never start to write a post and then come back to it for later revisions, so I did not notice this draft and have no idea how long it's been sitting there. I could guesstimate by looking at the dates on these photos but I don't feel like it. 

I'm posting it exactly as I found it, goofy ass title and all.
 *******************

Circa: Sometime in 2012

Oooh, Girl, Oooh

I love taking pictures of those nothing-moments that no one else would care to chronicle. It's a documentary about me, for me, by me. I know feet pictures are popular to some and questionable or annoying to everyone else, just like food photos, duck faces and so on.

Not in the foot fetish way, but man, I get feet pictures; I look at a picture of my feet later and a memory comes flooding back. To everyone else it's just an old pair of Chucks, but I think of me sitting behind the health foods store on my break, eating damaged produce and thinking about how dumb I am for being so silly and confused over a boy.



But really it's just a picture of my feet.

And then I think of a different picture of my feet, where I'm at a new job and working with someone new, fourteen years younger than me, who a year later would be one of my closest friends and my roommates girlfriend (they're recently broke up, ugh).



And for some reason that photo reminded me of Teresa.

Tower Grove Park Photo Op

On a whim I called Jessica and thirty minutes later we were at Uncle Bill's. I thought I'd eaten there before, but the inside looked completely unfamiliar to me. Anyway, here's the window we sat next to:



We went to Tower Grove Park for a while; it's my absolute favorite park in St. Louis. Don't get me wrong, Forest Park has a great Art Museum, History Museum, Zoo, a lake with paddle boats, multiple golf courses, soccer and baseball fields, the Muny, the Jewel Box, the planetarium which bridges across I-40 to the Science Center, miles of trails and I'm sure I'm forgetting a variety of other amenities. But the place is HUGE - 1371 acres - and surrounded by interstate and crazy busy streets... kind of segregated from the community in that way.

Tower Grove Park is just under 300 acres, in a residential area surrounded by houses, two and four family flats, apartments, a bicycle shop, grocery stores, schools. It has soccer, baseball, kickball corkball fields, lots of paths and trees and each pavilion is more interesting and ornate than the next. It's my kind of scene, man.





In any case, we stopped to walk around for a bit near the ruins. I wanted to climb to the top and asked Jessica to take a picture. I only knew she took two of them but of course later I discovered she took seven different ones...

I guess this one was a test, to make sure she knew how to use the equipment.


But THIS photo?


Extreme Close-Up from the picture above.

Last Chance!

Today's the last day I'll be able to respond "Thirty-Four" if someone asks how old I am.



While I'll miss dividing my age by 17, I do look forward to an entire year of dividing my age by five. And to think, a year ago today I wrote about dividing by eleven!

I'm not even sure why I care about dividing my age by any number when my faulty math has resulted in one $65 pizza and another time where I invented "future money" while trying to split up a dinner bill. Between two people.

I've never been good at calculating math in my head. I've always wanted to be one of those people but I'm just not. The other day I bought a kombucha and after my discount plus tax, it's $2.82. I handed Dexter a five, he rung it out and then I handed him two pennies. He looked at the pennies, then me and asked, "What's that gonna do?" I thought about it and wasn't 100% sure of the answer so we just laughed and pretended I did not retroactively hand him any pennies. It takes a level of effort for me to get the answer.

I want to envision:

  5.02
- 2.82
=
  2.20

But in my head I see it as words and a sentence, not numbers.

Five dollars minus two dollars and eighty-two cents plus two pennies.

I'm not even sure why I'm posting any of this and actually taking time to create links. I was supposed to do a simple day-before-my-birthday post.

My dad was right.

=================================
Listening to: Country Teasers - I'm a New Person, Ma'am
=================================

Weekend Update

Friday Night :: Origami


Saturday Morning and Afternoon :: Earth Fair


Saturday Night :: Vegan Cooking Adventure


Sunday Morning :: Origami


I've spent the rest of the day doing chores. Boooring.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Listening to: The Intelligence - Little Town Flirt
-----------------------------------------------------------

Ingredients ≠ Warnings

I'm amazed at how much of an interest I've taken in food, growing food, the chemicals in our Frankenfoods and trying to understand what I'm eating and what's happening inside me when I eat and drink things. I've strayed far from my junketarian roots. I highly recommend listening to Radiolab's Guts. And reading Twinkie, Deconstructed. I'll admit that book is difficult to read cover to cover, but it's worth it to pick up a copy at your library and peruse its contents. Or just click on one of the many links I've provided (those links are the very reason why you aren't going to visit your library. Hmpf).

Tonight as I perused the web from my phone, I came across a few more things I need to eliminate from my diet, 13 Banned Foods Still Allowed in the US. It always freaks me out to read what the US embraces as food but other countries outlaw.

The 13 Ingredients?

(It is advisable to clink the link above and read the full article.)

No, no, no. I mean, yes, one of those ingredients are on the list, but the photo is totally unrelated to this article. I took it a few days ago while on a recon mission for Kelly. And seriously, how did Ammonium Sulfate not make the cut? Among other things.

Before you read the list, take out a piece of paper and write down a few of the ingredients you've never heard of. Research one of those. And by research, I mean: Go to google.com and type in or copy/paste the ingredient you'd like to investigate. Click at least one link on the first page of the search results. Skim the article.

1-4. Coloring Agents (Blue 1, Blue 2, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6)

Found In: Cake, candy, macaroni and cheese, medicines, sport drinks, soda, pet food, and cheese

5.  Olestra (a.k.a. Olean)

Found In: Fat-free potato chips

6.  Brominated Vegetable Oil (a.k.a. BVO)

Found In: Sports drinks and citrus-flavored sodas

7. Potassium Bromate (a.k.a. Brominated Flour)

Found In: Rolls, wraps, flatbread, bread crumbs, and bagel chips

8. Azodicarbonamide
Found In: Breads, frozen dinners, boxed pasta mixes, and packaged baked goods

9-10. BHA, BHT
Found In: Cereal, nut mixes, gum, butter, meat, dehydrated potatoes, and beer

11-12. Synthetic Hormones (rBGH and rBST) 
Found In: Milk and dairy products

13. Arsenic
Found In: Poultry

-----------------------------------------------
Listening to: Arrested Development ... amping up for 26 May
-----------------------------------------------

Surprise! We're on the air in four minutes

Jodi invited me to Recycled Records to shop for Record Store Day. Sounded fun, so we met up before 3 and when I said, "I think I'm ready to take off," she looked so sad and asked, "You aren't going to get on the air with me?" I had no idea she was asking me down there to cohost a Rock N Roll Armageddon show!



The equipment was all wonky and there was an eight-second delay and every time someone went in or out of the building the transmission got all jacked up and part of our instructions nonchalantly included, "if you touch this cabinet and the doorway at the same time, you'll get quite a jolt." Noted.

But the chaos was a lot of fun and I especially liked that we had to share a microphone so we were close-talking between songs. And W00t! Pangea is going to be at the Firebird with Detroit Cobras at the end of next month!

------------------------------------
Listening to: Pangea - Night of the Living Dummy
------------------------------------

Share and Share Alike

If I understand the privacy settings correctly, all of my flickr photos are okay for anyone to use as long as they link back to me. It makes me happy to find they're useful to others, even if the caption above one of my photos says "Monkey Do." Yep. Others are "Sleek and Smart" or "Retro Hair" or even "Messy Side Ponytail" ... mine is called the "Monkey Do."

I was surprised my broken heart found its way onto a page dedicated to helping children after divorce. And I get a few visitors from a page about WyoTech, but I could never really find exactly where the link was coming from.

But the most awesome of all was finding it used for an article, GMOs: An Unexpected Dinner Guest. Specifically, it provides a backdrop for tips on avoiding GMOs.

I took this picture on an Amtrak ride from Chicago back to Springfield two days after my 34th birthday. I grew up very near a major rail yard and a train's engine is rather large; those silos dwarf the train.

The amount of corn in today's silos boggles my mind.



All the more reason to grow my own foods.

Why buy organic?

The search box on Answers.com prompted me with "Ask us anything," so I entered Organic Produce. The first two sentences of the first article I clicked on drove me into such a fit that I am actually typing a blog post.

Why Buy Organic Produce? begins with

Long ago, the organic produce section of the grocery store used to be a small space tucked into the corner of the store that went barely noticed by mainstream grocery shoppers. Things have changed and now the organic section of the grocery store takes up a considerable amount of floor space.

I think it would be better to say 

Up until the 1940s, all produce was organic. 

Things changed after World War II.

This page sums it up best:

When World War II started, the government constructed 10 new plants to produce ammonia for munitions. .... When the nitrogen was no longer needed for bombs, what were they going to do with all this capacity? The answer was, use the nitrogen-rich ammonia for fertilizing the nation's crops. 

Seriously, take a moment to read the full text from which the above quote was taken. The type of fertilizers referred to are not good old-fashioned manure, but instead "chemically synthesized inorganic fertilizers" - originally intended to be ammunition. World War II also triggered the widespread use of pesticides. Yes, these technologies were in the works long before WWII, but the war was the catalyst for our agricultural system to rapidly become an agrochemical system.

In any case, so much of our food is sprayed with intensely toxic chemicals (and sometimes genetically engineered to survive these chemical baths while everything else around it dies), that it's hard to find something to eat that hasn't been poisoned or genetically modified.
So we label those foods as organic. 

Back to the original question, "Why buy organic produce?" 

It doesn't seem like a good idea, to me, to eat a food that was sprayed with, say, an organophosphate pesticide. Explained by the US Environmental Protection Agency,

These pesticides affect the nervous system by disrupting the enzyme that regulates acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter. Most organophosphates are insecticides. ....their effects on insects, are similar to their effects on humans.... they were used in World War II as nerve agents.

I probably don't need to ingest that stuff.

But if you're not convinced, you can read more about organophosphates via Pesticide Action Network, keeping in mind that this is merely one type of chemical sprayed on our food. (PAN has a great Pesticides 101 info page.) The more I read about our food supply, the more motivated I am to buy organic and grow my own food.
 
Oh, and we should probably label GMO foods as well.




I'm sure it's no coincidence these former military bunkers are next to a Monsanto. 
Ammunition was manufactured here during WWII.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Listening to: Crass - So What
--------------------

I'm just a person, a human being.
NO YOU'RE NOT, YOU'RE A PART OF THE MACHINE.
You're a part our machine because we want you to be.
We've got you now and you'll never be free.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Wordless Monday

One Score and One and a Half Decades Ago

Today my parents celebrate their 35 year anniversary.
They didn't have a fancy wedding and I'm not even sure if a photo exists from that day, but here's what they looked like about a year later.


Circa 1979

Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!!!