Garlic and Winter whining

The garlic was planted on Sunday--I photos, but they are not very interesting, so I will spare you. I also took down most of my garden since fall is apparently here. I garden on the rooftop outside my window (I live in a second story apartment) so everything I do is in containers. You need to mulch garlic to convince it to survive the winter. I am hoping that by tucking my garlic boxes within the protective confines of a fort built by my big tomato boxes this will help insulate them. We'll see. If I had a porch that got sun but no heat, I'd try that, but I don't have such a thing.

I didn't have time to truck out to Abma's today so I had to hit the Stop N Shop. I think I have successfully weaned myself off the prepackaged vegetation, but it is frustrating not knowing where stuff comes from...so I spent time looking at labels on the milk and whatnot and picking out things that were at least distributed close by. I suspect this doesn't mean much.

I am beginning to think that winter was not such a great time to get more serious about local feeding. I had all summer, and while I did do some, I didn't do enough. I started to hit my freezer today to help solve the issue, and once my chicken stock thaws (I make stock whenever I make a whole chicken, and this one was definitely a Purdue) I'll be making a soup of roasted garlic and eggplant....the garlic was locally grown, and the eggplant is from my own garden, so that will be better.

I think I will aim for one meal a week that is mostly local for the winter, and try not to stress out over it in the meanwhile. I can get off the supermarket habit when the alternatives are available again...and next summer I will get boatloads of strawberries to enjoy now!

Garlic's here!

My garlic bulbs arrived yesterday! They are lovely. My plan is to plant these on Sunday since it is dark AND rainy right now, and I will be busy after work the next two nights, as well as AWOL on Saturday. So Sunday is garlic planting day! I'll make a photo essay out of it.

In the meantime, enjoy these garlic growing links I found while researching this project:

The Garlic Store on How To Grow Garlic

Gardenwebs Contianer Gardening Forum

Enjoy!

Grocery frustrations

Today, in between various other errands, I had to go buy food. I am sort of fortunate that there are a lot of farmer's markets in the area (though they are winding down now) but I also have a nutso work schedule that doesn't allow me to get to them. Like, weekends are a huge problem for me. But my fridge was mostly bare, and although I have a bunch of things from the garden, I did not have leaf lettuce that was quite ready yet. I ended up driving out to Abma's Farm in Bergan county. Its probably a 12 mile trip or so, and yeah, I wrestled with the whole do I drive 12 miles or go to the Stop N Shop, and I decided that it was better for me to drive 12 miles.

Abma's Farm is a big place, and they have a little farm store where they sell their own produce, as well as stuff from other places. They can tell you immediately WHERE everything comes from, so its OK to ask. They do put "Freshly picked" signs over everything they actually grow. They also have chickens so the eggs and poultry are from the farm. They had a freaking ton of tomatoes, but I am out of freezer space for sauces and have not gone adventuring into canning just yet (maybe next year) I ended up with lettuce, eggs, broccoli, radishes (my radishes this fall are a miserable failure for some reason) and I got NY state apples because I absolutely needed some fruit.

I then got home and harvested what was left of my carrots. Dinner tonight will be some of those with roasted beets and greens (also from the garden) and chicken breast with basil. The chicken breast I got earlier this year at a farmer's market from Hoboken Farms...unfortunately, Hoboken Farms gets their meat from a "USDA facility" meaning that the chicken could be from anywhere. Well, I can't waste it, and its still a dinner mostly from the garden.

I'll blather on about this later, after I've thought more on it (yes, I should have been more organized in starting this project!) but one of the things about the 100 mile diet idea is that it is very flexible, and you can make your own exceptions for things that you can't find locally and can't live without. Spices usually fall in this area. For me, I am looking for locally farmed meat (beef, pork, etc...I am a fairly enthusiastic carnivore even if I don't eat meat every day) and milk and I would LOVE to find a mill for flour (I do bake my own bread) but these seem hard/elusive so far....

The current experiment

This year I am going to try and keep my garden rollng as close to year round as possible. I've got salad greens outside the bedroom window, and the last of the main garden is still kicking out tomatoes.

Its also the right time to plant garlic, so I am giving that a whirl. I bought some hardneck garlic cloves from Seeds of Change. Supposedly this type does better in a cooler climate. Hopefully I won't end up with rotten cloves in the dirt, and there will be nice garlic greens this spring.

The First Post

Greetings to anyone who has stumbled across this blog.  I really hope it will become a useful resource for me and anyone else participating.

I've been an on and off gardener for years, and in the summer of 2006 I decided that since I had a new home with decent sunlight, I would give some container gardening a whirl again.  Simple stuff.  I had moderate success, and then discovered a really nice Yahoo group on container vegetable gardening and got all fired up.  The result was not so much a garden as it was a small farm. 

I live in the NYC/NJ metro area.  I can see the haze of Newark's sodium lights from where I live, and the NYC skyline is not far a way.   My second floor apartmenthas a lot of roofspace outside my windows, and this is where my garden is.  Happily, my landlord was more amused than furious.  

The Yahoo group does tend to be a bit more oriented to social issues than I expected, so from there I was exposed the concepts of the 100 mile diet, reasons to eat locally grown food, and how to preserve what was coming out of the garden.  The combination of the recent food safety scares, an apparent yearning to be a farmchick, and a familial tendency to minor levels of revolt and anarchy made me look into this more closely, and while I found a LOT to be had at the many local farmer's markets, I still find myself more reliant on supermarkets than I think I want to be.  So I went back to the web, as surely there must be a community of locavores in this area who share secrets on where to get things like locally raised milk or other dairy products...and there doesn't seem to be one.  I finally decided I would take it upon myself to start such a resource.  Later this weekend I'll publish a list of links I have found useful, and I would like to encourage anyone reading to share what I have missed.

I don't think I am going to get into a lot of politics here, but I do want to talk about gardening and food, share what is working for me on the rooftop, discuss the best ways to keep the garden's bounty over the winter (I am freaking psyched by the sheer number of cherry tomatoes in my freezer) and all that.  I dip around in ultra amateur photography too, so be prepared to put up with pictures of eggplant and the like.

So please share out the URL and come be chatty.