Growing Veggies (Update)

On May 26, I posted about "Growing Veggies." At that time, the garden was just starting to take shape and nothing was ready to be eaten. What a difference a month makes...

This was taken a few days ago:

In the front right, with the yellow flowers, is zucchini. Immediately behind that is daikon, and behind that is sweet peppers, chili peppers, basil and goya (aka bitter melon). To the right of goya is corn and cauliflower. To the left of the zucchini is a row of morning glory (aka water spinach), the dark green chijimina (similar to bok choy) and behind that is more morning glory. To the left of that row is eggplant, tomato, cucumber and spinach (in the back).

Here is Ayumi with a few days worth of zucchini:


Here's another angle on the veggies:

From front to back: spinach; water spinach; (L to R) goya, basil, chili pepper, sweet pepper; corn and one of the eight cauliflowers.

This has been an awesome experience for me. Watching the plants grow has been magical. And it's a wonderfully enjoyable culinary experience to pick fresh, pesticide- and herbicide-free plants outside your home and to be eating them within the hour. For one, the food tastes great--fresh, delicious, full of life. But also, it's very gratifying to be feeding ourselves food that we know is so healthy.

And it was really pretty easy to do. In fairness, my father-in-law, an experienced grower, was doing all this with us, so that helped. But it was all fairly straight-forward. This is what went into it:

First, my father-in-law used a machine to mix up the soil and plow it into rows. Ayumi and I then spent a few hours forming the rows and smoothing the surface. My father-in-law then applied small amounts of chemical fertilizer (he composts, but the compost was not sufficient by itself--in the future, I hope to learn how to grow veggies 100% organic) and we waited a week. Then we planted seeds and seedlings. We've watered them daily since then. Once every few weeks we've had to pull out weeds by hand. And a few times we sprayed charcoal vinegar (a natural insecticide) to discourage some little bugs who were eating the young zucchini and chijimina leaves. So it hasn't really taken up that much time, and what time we have spent (watering, weeding, etc.) has been really enjoyable and relaxing.

It's about 6pm here, the sun has just gone down below the hills behind the house, so it's time to water the plants. Then I'll harvest something for dinner. I think tonight we'll use moning glory, chijimina and zucchini. Mmmm.....

Food Inc.

"The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous ten thousand."

This is the opening line of a new documentary on how food is produced in the United States, focusing particularly on the industrial food system. I've touched on this issue in previous posts (see: "Support Organic", Dec. 19, 2008; "Organic: Good for Earth", Feb. 3, 2009), and I think it is extremely important.

The way we in the industrial world produce food is unsustainable, destructive to the environment and yields food of dubious nutritional value whose main virtue is that it's cheap. This system is excellent economically (at least if you don't take into account the money spent treating obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc., and the costs of pollution of streams, rivers, lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the air, etc.) but it is terrible in every other way. It persists, I believe, primarily because most people don't know the facts about it. If every person in the United States spent just one single day educating themselves about how our food is produced, that would be enough to bring about massive changes. The facts are powerful and overwhelming.

At least that's how it looks to me. You might disagree. But either way, you owe it to yourself to be informed, because this issue is so important and so universal. This film looks like a great place to start.

Here is their excellent website, which is loaded with information: http://foodincmovie.com/

And here's the trailer: