Camille has put a lot of work, love, and intention into this garden next to our front door. It is now mostly pollinator friendly perennials – Sweet William, Miniature Dahlias, Echinaceas, Butterfly Weed, Milkweed, Gladiolus, Purple Tradescantia, and some remnant Mondo Grass.

We wandered out after dinner to have a look at what was happening in our little slice of the world.

A wheel bug nymph and carpenter bee checking each other out.

Echinaceas are great! So many colors, so dependable on their spring return. Each one is like a firework caught in time.

Retirement is great! I highly recommend it. Unless you’re a bee.

I love harvesting them – pawing through the soil, uncovering each new spud with anticipation – kind of like scratch-off lottery tickets, only better tasting! I love the fact that they store well – often “discovering” some in our pantry when we’re looking for a quick, comforting meal. I also love their ability to generate an enormous return on a relatively meager investment. Average potato yield is 10 times the amount you planted! For me, potatoes embody the concept of getting more than you bargained for out of humble beginnings.

We are fortunate here in Chatham to have a number of hidden gems in our little town, testaments to the inspired foresight of those who believed in the significant future benefits of community based investments. Chatham Marketplace, the General Store Café, “The Plant” at Lorax Lane, Angelina’s Kitchen and more are testament to the beneficial effect that local businesses can have on the quality of our lives.

Finding opportunities to invest your time, money, or patronage in current or future community “gems” will often pay off in ways you may not have imagined. Making new connections with the people, food, and businesses our community has to offer enriches your life, and the life of our community. Making it a habit of frequenting these local institutions is like brushing the soil off another mound of potatoes. You often reveal more benefit than you bargained for.

Now, back to harvesting potatoes!

With all the CSA action going on around us, we hardly have to grow anything in our own garden.  But Bob could no more stop growing food than a fish could stop breathing water, so this year he decided to plant more of the things we end up buying at the grocery store.

That would be potatoes, onions and garlic.  Now, of course we get some white potatoes in our CSA boxes and in the fall we get enough sweet potatoes to see us through the winter, but we like the whites so much, we end up buying them even in the summer.

Bob and I come by our love of spuds honestly, being as how we both have Irish ancestors.  We love them baked, boiled, roasted, in soups and salads, deep fried, scalloped and mashed with gravy.  We especially like the creamy taste of fingerling potatoes, so Bob planted several varieties of those.

The first potatoes to mature were the Red Thumbs.  Planted in March, these ninety day potatoes were ready to harvest this week.  Bob dug up the bed, set up wash buckets and brought in seventeen pounds of beautiful potatoes all cleaned and ready to throw in a pot or pan.  What an amazing return on the initial investment of the pound of seed potatoes he used to start the plants!

We had them with margarine and chives the first night.  Baked with beets, onions and carrots (also from the garden) after that.  Yesterday I made a tasty potato leek soup.  Next up will be potato salad.  Naturally, we’re sharing them with our neighbors, too.

Potatoes have more available protein than soy beans, which explains why the Irish population doubled from four million to eight million in only sixty-five years after potatoes reached their shores from the Andes.

For those of you unfamiliar with the great potato famine, there’s a lesson to be learned.  Mono cropping can be fatal!  Unlike the Incas, who preserved potato biodiversity by cultivating thousands of varieties, the Irish farmers grew primarily only one kind of potato – the “lumper.”  Tragically, a blight struck down the lumper, causing them to rot in the fields and a million people starved.  Another million fled to the new world, likely our ancestors among them.

I’m keeping an eye out our kitchen window for Bob to dig up more tasty tubers as the other potato beds mature.  And while fingerlings don’t store well, I think we can keep up with them.  It’s hard to imagine ever having too many potatoes!

It wasn’t long before our conversation turned to food and gardening and we remembered Farmer Jason telling us that parnips were on his top five list so we decided to come up with our own list.  We asked ourselves, “If we could only grow five vegetables which five would we grow?” Here’s what we decided on:

TOP FIVE MUST-HAVE
Beets
Cabbage
Onions
Potatoes
Tomatoes

Beets do double duty, providing greens as well as the sweet beet root.  Cabbage is magic and extremely versatile.  Much of the world subsists quite nicely on a diet of beans, rice and cabbage. Nearly every meal in our home begins with an onion.  We both have Irish roots, so potatoes are a must.  Plus they are delicious, satisfying and store well.  Tomatoes are indispensable for TLTs (Tempeh, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwiches) in the summer and spaghetti sauce in the winter.

Well that only whet our appetite, so we went on to create four more top fives.

TOP FIVE RAW
Butterhead Lettuce
Salad Turnips
Spinach
Sugar Snap Peas
Sweet Red Pepper

TOP FIVE COOKED
Artichokes
Asparagus
Mushrooms
Shishito Peppers
Sweet Corn

TOP FIVE EASIEST TO GROW
Cucumber
Green Onions
Lettuce
Okra
Tomatoes

TOP FIVE DRIED
Black Beans
Chick Peas
Rice
Soybeans
Wheat

We already have more than twenty five vegetables and herbs growing in our garden and have yet to add artichokes, cabbage, or sweet corn.  And we’d need a bit more acreage to grow enough beans and grain to replace what we currently buy.  Lucky for us our neighbors at Edible Earthscapes are growing black beans and rice!

At the end of the day, it’s fun to make lists and I feel confident that if we were limited, we would live a healthy, happy and sustainable life eating our top twenty-five.

Prolific and inexpensive, greens are packed with an impressive array of vitamins and minerals including vitamins B1, B2, B6, C, and E, calcium, carotenes, copper, folic acid, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus and potassium.  Our immune systems are bursting with vigor from eating so much kale, chard, spinach, beet, turnip, and mustard greens.

Greens weren’t a part of my childhood.  I was raised in the north on northern vegetables, many of them frozen, taken from the freezer and plopped into the steamer as solid bricks of peas, corn, broccoli, spinach, lima beans or brussel sprouts.  My least favorites were okra, a slimy mound of fibrous discs and frog’s eyes and the whole leaf spinach which made me gag as the long veins worked their way down my throat.

It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I began cooking with fresh greens.  It began with stirring a pound of chard into a pot of curry and evolved into greens as a side dish in its own right. This time of year, we’re eating half a bushel of greens a week.

Each week we pick up our weekly half bushel of fresh picked produce from Edible Earthscapes.  This week it was packed with kale, chard, mustard greens, mizuna, carrots, and salad greens. This past Friday, Bob brought home a grocery bag full of kale and a half bushel of radishes, turnips and carrots, greens attached from Central Carolina Community College’s Land Lab.

The challenge of turning all of these greens into food can be daunting.  Last night while I stood at the sink, rinsing and chopping greens, I couldn’t help but stare at the enormous kale plant outside our kitchen window, crying out to be harvested.  “Any day now” I thought “Bob’s going to walk inside with his arms full of kale.”  I caught myself hoping today wasn’t going to be that day.

Last year I froze a fair amount of greens and that worked out great.  I just wash and chop and put them into plastic freezer bags and squeeze out the air.  We cooked and served these frozen greens at a New Years Day party and they were just fine.

This year, I’ve challenged myself to keep up with the greens by cooking them as I get them to eat that night or keep for another meal.  Save the freezer space.  Get the vitamins at their fullest. It doesn’t take that long to fix them up when we get them and a grocery bag full cooks down into six or seven cups which takes up a lot less space in the refrigerator.

Here’s what I do.  I chop an onion and sauté it in peanut oil in a large pot. I put all the greens in the sink and rinse them, then stack the leaves on the cutting board and chop them into bite sized pieces.  I’m finicky enough to remove the large veins from everything but the chard but that’s up to you.

Stir the chopped chard stems and the heavier greens (kale, chard, mustard greens and collards) into the onion, add a couple of tablespoons of tamari or soy sauce and cover to let them steam.  After a few minutes, I stir the greens up with the onion and add the lighter greens – spinach, turnip, radish and mizuna to steam for another minute.

This delicious green vitamin dish is now ready for storage or can be cooked a little longer and served immediately.  And that’s how easy it is to keep up with the greens!

“Guantánamo” was the name I chose for the 250 square foot garden I created in front of our house at Oilseed Community where we spent the first two years after moving to North Carolina in 2007. There were three underlying reasons for the choice.

The first was due to my profound disappointment in my country’s choice to incarcerate and torture human beings without due process of law. I understood that some of the inmates at the prison in Cuba were criminals, but that does not demand a rescinding of legal and human rights – concepts previously supported by the United States of America.

The second reason was  due to the name my friend Lyle chose for his garden some years back. Lyle’s garden is named “Cuba”, a name chosen by the inspiration he gained by learning about how the island nation of Cuba responded to the abrupt ending of their petroleum addiction after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cuba reacted to the loss of its Soviet supply line by instituting land reform, and encouraging farmers and agronomists to retool Cuban agricultural production to methods that did not require petroleum inputs, for fuel, fertilizers, or pesticides. This amazing story can be learned though a documentary produced by The Community Solution  entitled “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil”

In North Carolina, if you want to take more food off your garden than the deer do, you need to fence your garden in, giving it the look of a place more suited toward the incarceration of edibles than the nurturing of them. Lyle’s garden, surrounded by it’s eight-foot high fence, provided him and his family a space to produce their own food, without the need for fossil fuel inputs. My first exposure to gardens with tall fences was at Lyles’ when he provided Camille and me a room for a couple of nights on an exploratory visit we made to the area in April 2007. Needless to say, I was captivated by the concept.

The third reason for my name selection was due to the influence of a master kumu hula, Hokulani Holt-Padilla, who I had the pleasure of working with back in 2000- 2001 while working with the Kaho’olawe Island Reserve Commission. One of the many pieces of wisdom I gained from Hoku was that place names are important. She helped me understand that place names are part of what defines the spirit of a place, and its people.

Guantánamo was the name originally bestowed upon the southeastern area of the island by its original human inhabitants, the Taino. Columbus landed at the bay in 1494, promptly changed the name to Puerto Grande, and started the systematic decimation of the indigenous population.

When I told one of my Oilseed neighbors that I was considering naming  the garden Guantánamo, their response was “Oh, don’t say that word!” For them, you see, that word represented the unjust incarceration and torture of human beings, and was something not very pleasant.

So there you have it. My little fortified garden was, from that point forward, known as Guantánamo. I wanted people (at least a few) to associate the name with a place of life, beauty, and sustenance rather than a collection of incarcerated and tortured humans. I was hopeful that our new president would stand by his campaign promise to close down the “detention camp” at Guantánamo Bay in his first few months in office. Since he didn’t, I did, with Lyle’s help. We moved the containers, with food growing in them to their new home next to my new garden, christened “The Sunken Gardens of Moncure”, since it is housed in an abandoned swimming pool.

That story will need to be told, in its own space in its own time, and will likely be titled “A Moveable Feast.”

Our neighbor’s yards are abloom with daffodils  and the mocking birds start yodeling at dawn.  Bob is starting tomatoes and peppers under lights in the back bedroom and has planted carrots and peas in the garden, with onions and potatoes going in next week. I’m having a high time pruning back the pampas grass and washing windows.  Our CSA boxes are overflowing with arugula, carrots, turnips, spinach, chard and lettuce.

Ironically, yesterday was also the seventh anniversary of the day the United States invaded Iraq.

During the past seven years our country has spent about $700 billion dollars in Iraq destroying infrastructure and killing people.  In addition to wounding hundreds of thousands of people, we name among the dead over 4,000 American soldiers, 9,000 Iraqi soldiers and an estimated 100,000 civilians.  And that’s just in Iraq.

Nearly 100,000 American troops remain on the ground in Iraq, with another 68,000 in Afghanistan.  And President Obama is sending another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan this spring in hopes of winning the war there.  A war that has raged for over 8 years, killed over 7,000, wounded more than 11,000 and cost $740, billion.  A war that is logistically un-winnable.

At least one person in Congress is actively pushing to put an end to these wars.  Congressman Dennis Kucinch believes we need to replace the Department of War with a Department of Peace.  Kucinch recently pointed out that according to our Constitution, Congress, not the president, should be deciding when we go to war and when we stop.  He is at the front of an effort to encourage Congress to vote on whether to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan.  He also points out that squandering tax dollars on the war in Afghanistan is something we cannot afford to do.

Afghanistan Debate Begins in U.S. House Early This Afternoon – March 10, 2010

“And it should also be of interest to people that we can’t afford this war. When you consider the fact that you have 47 million Americans who don’t have any health care, they don’t have it because they can’t afford the premiums. You have 15 million Americans out of work. You have another 10 million Americans, at least, who could be losing their homes this year due to foreclosure. You would think that we have other priorities. You would think that it would be time for us to focus on things here at home.” – Dennis Kucinich

With so many reasons for us to bring our soldiers home, it seems like a no-brainer.  That is, until we consider the real reason why we’ve continually been at war since 1945.

After World War II, it was decided that we needed to create an industry dedicated to manufacturing armaments and machines for defense and the Military Industrial Complex was born.

In his farewell speech to the nation, January 17, 1961, president Eisenhower described the transformation and cautioned the American public that abuse of the new system was a possibility.  In other words, we might simply keep ourselves at war in order to keep the industry alive.

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.”

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.” – Dwight D Eisenhower

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

What Eisenhower warned could happen came to pass.  The U.S. now has a complex which keeps our defense budget in the hundreds of billions compared to other countries with budgets in the billions or at most, fifty billion.  In fact, if you look at the defense budgets of all other countries and sort them by amount, it takes the top twenty countries budgets to add up ours.

The military-industrial complex, on an annual basis, accounts for 47% of the world’s total arms expenditures.  We not only fuel our own wars, we provision the rest of the world for wars and conflicts of their own.

It’s been a long winter of destruction indeed, and many of us are itching to see it end.  I’d like to see the makers of swords get busy making plowshares.  I’m ready for spring and I’m ready for peace.

It was three years ago when we were shopping for food at the natural grocery that we saw a pile of very large squash.  Unable to resist the unusual shape and sheer size, we bought one and took it home.  We used it for a photo op prop before eating it for dinner.  Or several dinners as it turned out.

The crooknecked pumpkin hails from the butternut squash family and has a very small seeds-to-flesh ratio compared to most squash.  There are seeds in the bulb of the squash only.  The long neck is pure butternut.  Even better, we found that it stores well after it being cut, so we could cut off a meal-sized piece and put the rest of the squash back into the refrigerator.

Like butternut, the crooknecked pumpkin was delicious!  So Bob saved seeds and planted them in his North Carolina the next year, after we moved .  We were rewarded by an enormous plant with half a dozen giant pumpkins.  That’s when we discovered that they stored for months without showing signs of wear.  Which explains why the Amish are so fond of them.  We also learned that most of the pumpkin in canned pumpkin that you buy in the store is actually crooknecked pumpkin.

Bob saved seed again and since he’s teaching farmers as part of the Sustainable Agriculture program and Central Carolina Community College, he shared his seeds with his students.

The next year, our crooknecked pumpkins didn’t do so well.  They were hit hard by squash bugs and squash vine borers.  We were disappointed to miss a year.  Or so we thought.

Gerry gave Bob one of the crooknecked pumpkins he harvested last October, grown from the seed Bob handed out in class the year before.  We can’t wait to start hacking off meals from this beauty and of course, saving some of the seed!

We’ve got a tiny farmer in the house. For about a month Bob and I have been noticing little piles of sunflower seeds in unusual places. At first we thought Bob had spilled a few seeds on his way outside to the bird feeders. The first pile that came to our attention was located atop the cabinet just inside the kitchen door. Some of the seeds were whole and some of them had been eaten and were just husks. But then, a few days later, I got up from the yoga mat with a sunflower seed stuck to my knee.

About the same time, we started hearing a mouse in the house. One night, I heard what sounded like something running laps around the hot tub in our bedroom. I got up and went in the other room to fetch my flashlight, came back and shone it into the tub. There was a big-eyed, chubby mouse, perched on the drain in the middle of the tub. I was half asleep, so all I could do was stare. The mouse stared back at me with big eyes and didn’t move a muscle.

Since then, we’ve seen a mouse run right across the room in broad daylight – twice across the kitchen and once across the living room. Bob did a little research and as far as we can tell we are dealing with a wood mouse. My mom said if you start seeing mice run across the room it’s because there are a few of them. Maybe they feel like they have you out numbered. We always assume there is only one and maybe this is the truth. Who can know?

A few nights later, I woke to the sound of a snapping mouse trap in the kitchen and jumped out of bed to investigate. There was a big, fat mouse sitting on the floor a foot from the trap. I put a bucket over it, slid the dustpan underneath and pulled the bucket off. The critter didn’t try to move off the dustpan. It just sat there, staring into space. So I took it and flung it outside.

Triumphantly, I went back to bed, sure the mouse would die outside in the night from the wounds that caused it to go into shock. The next day I searched for its carcass without success.

Lately, we’ve seen a few sunflower seedlings sprouting up in the potted plants. We know we didn’t plant sunflowers in the African Violets, so we can only assume it is the work of the mouse or mice. Strangely, the plants themselves have not been disturbed and there has not been any spilled potting soil. It is very mysterious, indeed.

The weirdest thing about all of this is that unlike other mice that have entered our home, this one has not gotten into the food or left mouse poop on the floor. What it does seem to enjoy is tearing out the fringes from the edges of our silk carpets. And, of course, planting and stashing sunflower seeds it’s brought in from the bird feeders. Bob noticed it had chewed some of the stuffing out of one of his shoes. I had a Western saddle in here for a few weeks and later found little bits of saddle fleece behind the stove.

At this point, we have no idea how to get rid of this mouse. It’s behavior is unlike any other mouse we’ve ever had in the house. It doesn’t seem interested in our food, so trying to entice it into a trap is futile. All the farmer mouse seems interested in is storing up seeds and nesting materials. Which leads us to believe that it must be a female. We may just have to get used to living with this strange little critter.

Yesterday I put my slippers on for the first time in a week and quickly took my foot out again. I had felt something strange under my toes, so I shook it down into the heel and here is what I saw: