Independence Days: The Gardening Year Begins

Soon, my newly planted seeds will be baby plants like these from a previous season.

Today, the 2013 garden season officially began. I could argue that it actually started in the dark days of January, when I placed my seed order and got an exciting post-holiday present to the house: an apricot tree, a peach tree, and a rhubarb plant. But today I planted my first seeds, so it feels official.

In the spirit of starting a new gardening season, I’m starting to record this year’s Independence Day Challenge results.

What is this challenge? It’s not a writing challenge, but a living challenge for those of us who are interested in living a more earthy-crunchy life in a very practical way, and it’s mostly but not exclusively concerned with food.  I first found about this challenge several years ago from the blog of farmer-author-environmentalist-mom Sharon Astyk. Since I love to garden and to eat locally and am more than a bit obsessed with food and food systems, I jumped right on it. I’m not sure if Sharon is running an official challenge this year (though since she’s a farmer, she’ll be covering all the category challenges, in a more serious way that I am), but I’m continuing it anyway as a way of tracking my efforts.  To quote Sharon, “the whole idea is to get the positive sense of your accomplishments – it is easy to think we haven’t done anything to move forward, but in fact, we all do, almost every day.  We just think of accomplishment as a big thing – a whole day spent putting up applesauce or a hundred tomato plants.  The Independence Day project makes us count our little accomplishments and see that we are moving forward.”

The challenge categories (again from Sharon’s site), are:

Plant something: A lot of us were trained to think of planting as done once a year, but if you start seeds, do season extension and succession plant, you’ll get much, much more out of your garden, so I try and plant something every day from February into September.

Harvest something: Everything counts – from the milk and eggs you get from your animals to the first dandelions from your yard to 50 bushels of tomatoes – it all counts.

Preserve something: Again, I find preserving is most productive if I try and do a little every day that there is anything, from the first dried raspberry leaves and jarred rhubarb to the last squashes at the end of the season.

Waste not: Reducing food waste, composting everything or feeding it to animals, reducing your use of disposables and creation of garbage, reusing things that would otherwise go to waste, making sure your preserved and stored foods are kept in good shape – all of these count.

Want Not: Adding to your food storage or stash of goods for emergencies, building up resources that will be useful in the long term.

Eat the Food: Making full and good use of what you have, making sure that you are getting everything you can from your food, trying new recipes and new cooking ideas, eating out of your storage!

Build community food systems: What have you done to help other people have better food access or to make your local food system more resilient?

And a new one: Skill up:  What did you learn this week that will help you in the future – could be as simple as fixing the faucet or as hard as building a shed, as simple as a new way of keeping records or as complicated as making shoes.  Whatever you are learning, you get a merit badge for it – this is important stuff.

This week’s progress:

Plant something: Eggplant; cutting celery (which should have been started 2 weeks ago, in theory!); jalapenos; Oregon Spring tomatoes (these are the ones that can go out before it’s reliable “last frost” as long as they’re small enough to cover); peas for pea shoots; a mix of spinach, buttercrunch lettuce, and arugula  for baby greens

Harvest something: Pea sprouts in a salad, but there’s not much to harvest yet, considering the garden beds just emerged from the snow. (However, it looks like some of the kale survived, despite the row cover blowing away, so that will change soon.)

Preserve something: Made meat sauce for the freezer for easy, tasty meals

Waste not: Rearranged the kitchen to make staples easier to find and planned to use up some items (like the last of the Bisquik–the last ever!), and some tiny amounts of various beans. We also did all the usual for us: composting, recycling, donating or passing on items instead of tossing them, trying to reduce packaging and unnecessary purchases in the first place

Want not: Did a BJ’s run and stocked up on rice, tomato paste, and other staples.

Eat the food: Made a fabulous stew with freezer beef, roasted tomatoes from the freezer, and wine we’d “stored” this summer when we were a bit more flush. Eating the way through frozen leftovers, and greatly enjoying our freezer beef, frozen vegetables, and frozen and canned fruit.

Community food systems: Getting eggs from the Cat-Herder’s co-worker. Starting seedlings for friends with less space. We haven’t made it to the indoor farmers’ market for a few weeks–perhaps a good thing as it’s hard not to overspend.

Skill up!: (I hear this with a ping and in a goofy voice, like “level up!” Yes, I’m a geek): This is more a “realizing where we need to skill up,” but we looked over the yard and decided where the chicken coop’s going, though it may not happen for another year. Met some chicks (as in baby chickens–I guess I do have to specify for my naughty readers!) and talked about what kinds we’d like, but decided we don’t enough information. Fortunately we know several people who keep chickens (see above).