Starting out anew

I've decided to start a new blog here, to see if I can get myself jump started back into the  habit of blogging regularly :)

I've been thinking quite a lot recently about food (duh!), where it comes from, how it is handled getting to our house, food safety & hygiene, and corporate and governmental involvement in the food chain as it exists at this point in time.



I remember my grandmother and aunts (and mother) talking about caring for their cow (milking, making butter, etc), and stories of how they got thru the Great Depression. My grandmother was born in 1897, and had a total of 7 children between 1920 and 1943. My mother was the youngest of the seven (her next older sister was 10 when mom was born), and actually has nieces & nephews older than she is.

So, when my grandmother was born, it was most common for you to be born on a farm, and you raised most of your own food - meat, vegetables, grain, etc.

When my mother was born, and in her early childhood, you might have some chickens, maybe a cow, but you were more likely to get your bread from a bakery or grocery store. You still put up a lot of your own food.

As I grew up, we grew a large garden, preserving food for consumption later in the year. In a typical year, we'd can or freeze green beans, tomatoes, summer squash (zucchini/courgettes), potatoes, sweet potatoes, strawberries, grapes, apples, peaches, and wild berries (both black raspberries and blackberries - in a lucky year, we got to put up red raspberries, as well). Usually there  was some winter squash of some sort (usually pumpkins). Dad liked having a few watermelons & cantaloupes.

We didn't generally put up a lot of meat, but we did raise our own chickens for meat (the roosters) and eggs. That went well, until we had dog problems a couple of years later (or in hindsight, it was probably a fox).

Once mom went to work full time (when I was in high school), the garden got a bit smaller, and while we still put things up for winter, some things we just ... stopped growing. Potatoes are a pain to dig by hand, have to be cleaned, and you have to be careful how they are stored. At some point, the price of potatoes at the grocery store was cheap enough that it didn't make sense to grow them ourselves. Tomatoes, though? We canned LOTS of tomatoes (having 5 or 8 dozen plants was pretty common). And green beans (always Blue Lake). The grape vines and the apple trees were on the property when my parents built their house, and we took care of those, pruning, and actually collecting the fruit (the property had been more or less abandoned for a period before they purchased it). We did more shopping at the grocery store (and bakery outlet, and occasionally a warehouse-type store). And we ate out once in a while, but not very often.

Once my brother and I left home, my parents cut the garden size down by about 2/3, as they didn't need to grow as much, and they were busy.

I've had smallish gardens off and on over the years, mostly depending on how busy I am in the spring months when the garden grows in. I had a few summer squash and a tomato or two in a narrow strip of soil beside one apartment. I converted another flower garden to vegetables and herbs next to our house in WV. Once we moved to Iowa, I considered putting in a garden, but I'd have to remove some of the grass (the yard was sodded before we bought the house, so that means removing the nylon mesh about an inch below the soil). And, well, I don't like dealing with weeds very much. And I'd have to buy or rent a tiller to turn over the soil to make the garden (or hand dig it - yuck!). And since our development is fairly new, our soil is pretty poor (a rant for another time!). I had, sorry to say, gotten in the habit of going out to eat dinner, after 7 years in college, and then another 7 years of living by myself, and working some very odd hours/schedules. And cooking for one is, frankly, a pain, since most recipes serve 4 or more, and I got tired of leftovers.

In 2009, my mom sent me a Mother's Day present: two raised garden bed kits. Takes care of a lot of problems (I get good, loose soil, a minimum of weeds, limited size, no power tools needed), and I enjoyed them a lot. Enough to add two more beds in 2011, and to double the depth of those beds this year. Oh, and I've added in blueberry bushes, and raspberry bushes, and, well, we've had volunteer pumpkins for several years (courtesy of leaving the Halloween pumpkins beside the compost bin, instead of in it). And I've opted to work at home full-time, so I generally have more time to cook these days (that doesn't always mean I like to or want to).

I'm not the only gardener in the neighborhood, but I can only point at 5 other gardens on my street or the one behind us. And mine appears to be the biggest, or close to it. Hmm, I thought this was just a hobby, but it seems to be going somewhere :)

I get much of my family's food at the local(ish) grocery store (Marion Hy-Vee, about 4 miles away), with some coming from a local warehouse store (Sam's Club is about 8 miles away, and Costco has a new location in Coralville, about 30 miles away). I make rare trips to New Pioneer Co-op (30 miles away), but that's not very convenient. And we started a year ago with Iowa Valley Food Co-op, which I like a lot. And we eat way too many meals out. Enough that the kids (DS, age 6 and ME, age 4) complain when I won't take them out for a meal, but insist on coming home to fix dinner.

But I'm working on making some changes to how we get our food, and how we eat. And that's where I'll start next time.