Friday, July 1, 2011

It's a smelly world

For about the last 2 year I have tried really hard to live a clean life, eat clean, keep a clean and environment friendly home and yard. During this time I have experimented with a few different cosmetics like deodorants, shampoos, soaps, laundry and dish soaps. I had a successful soap making experience a few winters ago and have been able to use my own soap for showering, I do use it for my hair during the week when I am working but I find it doesn't leave my hair very soft and manageable at all and after awhile it tends to look a bit stringy even after using a conditioner of lemon juice and vinegar. So I bought a bottle of rather expensive clean shampoo at a health food store a year ago and use it o n the weekends, that seems to balance it out. During the week I am rarely social, the only place I go is work so I really don't care how my hair looks. On the weekend I clean up and put on my "good" clothes, even though I am still not overly social but I prefer my hair to not feel and look like I have a burnt hay bale on my head. This morning I ran out of "weekend shampoo" so I rummaged through my sink cabinet and found an old bottle of "unclean" shampoo (also found many other things, I need to rip that cabinet out) so I used it and I was overwhelmed at the smell in the shower and have been able to smell it all day. It was just plain shampoo, no fancy scent like Herbal Essence Passion blast or explosive fruit bomb or anything like that, just normal shampoo. (supposedly not scented) When you stop layering all kinds of scents everyday you tend to be more sensitive to the scents out there, I am often overwhelmed at other people's smells as they go by. It seems the whole world is over scented. I smell it all now, it may just be a deodorant or a scented body lotion, perfume and aftershave is almost intolerable to me now, I almost have to stop breathing when someone walks by me leaving behind a wiff of that. Yet I can clearly remember having a bath with a scented bath oil and washing with a scented body wash, maybe even using a scented body scrub (how dirty was I anyway back then) and then the scented shampoo and conditioner, once out of the shower using a scented body lotion and then a deodorant and the make up and finally ending with a good dousing of perfume...yikes,how people didn't fall over in my wake is beyond me. At the time I obviously didn't smell all that. Now I smell it all, I smell toxic cleaners in people's homes , I smell fabric softeners and laundry soaps. I never used to notice any of these things which just shows how we slowly become desensitized.....to everything, television, the media, food addictions, money, greed, the language around us. It happens so slowly that we don't realize it. Monster size changes can happen in our lives but if they happen slowly enough we don't even notice. Things in our environment can happen and we don't notice....or do we? Are we noticing now that we are running out of oil? Or will there have to be no oil before we notice it, like I had to go to no scents before I even noticed them? Monumental things happen ever so slowly, things like Monsanto and Genetically modified food. We slowly got used to our food being modified and changed to something that isn't food anymore. Not only did we get used to it slowly we are even liking it and are demanding it....yup. We want bigger strawberries in the grocery store in December and we don't care          how they get that way, we want cheap meat and we don't care what's in it. We have compromised taste, quality and health for convenience, aesthetics, quantity and affordability, and we didn't even notice what we compromised. I seems to me that you could fool us North Americans into almost anything if you did it slowly enough....how dangerous is that?
I once heard a story of a pastor in in a very staunch and rigid church in Europe somewhere that wanted to move the church piano from the left side of the stage to the right (have no idea why) but he knew the congregation would not except such a huge change so he moved it over 1 inch every week until it was on the the other side and no one noticed.
Are you slowly being moved? I know I've been, and I am trying to make my way back, by wearing a burnt hay bale on my head ........ only during the week.
Check out The Story of Cosmetics. The Story of Stuff is good too. I love these videos, they are made so that all of us can understand them.


Here is a story on that shows what can happen when we don't pay attention and compromise way too much. I'm using the word compromise because I just can't seem to find a word that explains what we have done to end up here. If you have a better word let me know.

Check out what happened to the tomato while we were sleeping, or being too busy developing new perfumes.


How Industrial Farming 'Destroyed' The Tasty Tomato

Florida workers harvest what they can from the DiMare Farms tomato fields, a month after the January 2010 freeze that caused a statewide crop shortage.
EnlargeJoe Raedle/Getty Images
Florida workers harvest what they can from the DiMare Farms tomato fields, a month after the January 2010 freeze that caused a statewide crop shortage.
text size A A A
June 28, 2011
If you bite into a tomato between the months of October and June, chances are that tomato came from Florida. The Sunshine State accounts for one-third of all fresh tomatoes produced in the United States — and virtually all of the tomatoes raised during the fall and winter seasons.
But the tomatoes grown in Florida differ dramatically from the red garden varieties you might grow in your backyard. They're bred to be perfectly formed — so that they can make their way across the U.S. and onto your dinner table without cracking or breaking.
"For the last 50 or more years, tomato breeders have concentrated essentially on one thing and that is yield — they want plants that yield as many or as much as possible," writer Barry Estabrook tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "They also want those fruits to be able to stand up to being harvested, packed, artificially turned orange [with ethylene gas] and then shipped away and still be holding together in the supermarket a week or 10 days later."
Tomatoland
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
By Barry Estabrook
Hardcover, 240 pages
Andrews McMeel Publishing
List Price: $19.99
Read An Excerpt
Estabrook, a freelance food writer whose work has appeared in The AtlanticThe New York Times and The Washington Post, looks at the life of today's mass-produced tomato — and the environmental and human costs of the tomato industry — in his book Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. The book was based on a James Beard Award-winning article that originally appeared in Gourmet magazine, where Estabrook was a contributing editor before publication ceased in 2009.
Estabrook says the mass-produced tomatoes in today's supermarkets lack flavor because they were bred for enduring long journeys to the supermarket — and not for taste.
"As one large Florida farmer said, 'I don't get paid a single cent for flavor,' " says Estabrook. "He said, 'I get paid for weight. And I don't know of any supermarket shopper who tastes her tomatoes before she puts them in her shopping cart.' ... It's not worth commercial plant breeders' while to breed for taste because their customers — the large farmers — don't get paid for it."
As a result, customers have become accustomed to the flavorless tomatoes that dot supermarket shelves, says Estabrook.
"I was speaking to a person in their 30s recently and she said she had never recalled tasting anything other than a supermarket tomato," he says. "I think that wanting a tomato in the winter of winter — or wanting a little bit of orange on the plate ... is inherent in a lot of our shopping decisions. We expect an ingredient to be on the supermarket shelves 365 days a year, whether or whether not it's in season or tastes any good."
Let's Call The Whole Thing Off?
Though most of our tomatoes come from Florida, the state isn't necessarily the best place to grow the crop, says Estabrook. Most tomatoes are grown in sand, which contains few nutrients and organic materials. In addition, Florida's humidity breeds large populations of insects, which means tomato growers need to apply chemical pesticides on a weekly basis.
Barry Estabrook is a former contributing editor at Gourmet magazine. He currently blogs at politicsoftheplate.com.
Trent Campbell
Barry Estabrook is a former contributing editor atGourmet magazine. He currently blogs atpoliticsoftheplate.com.
"In order to get a successful crop of tomatoes, the official Florida handbook for tomato growers lists 110 different fungicides, pesticides and herbicides that can be applied to a tomato field over the course of the growing season," he says. "And many of those are what the Pesticide Action Network calls 'bad actors' — they're kind of the worst of the worst in the agricultural chemical arsenal."
Florida applies more than eight times the amount of pesticide and herbicides as does California, the next leading tomato grower in the country. Part of this has to do with the fact that California processes tomatoes that are used for canning — and therefore don't have to look as good as their Florida counterparts. But part of this also has to do with consumers.
"It's the price we pay for insisting we have food out of season and not local," he says. "We foodies and people in the sustainable food movement chant these mantras, 'local, seasonable, organic, fair-trade, sustainable,' and they almost become meaningless because they're said so often and you see them in so many places. If you strip all those away, they do mean something, and what they mean is that you end up with something like a Florida tomato in the winter — which is tasteless."

Interview Highlights

On tomato nutrition today versus 40 years ago
"My mother, in the '60s could buy a tomato in the supermarket that had 30 to 40 percent more vitamin C and way more niacin and calcium. The only area that the modern industrial tomato beats its Kennedy-administration counterpart is in sodium."
On working conditions on tomato farms
"Of the legal jobs available, picking tomatoes is at the very bottom of the economic ladder. I came into this book chronicling a case of slavery in southwestern Florida that came to light in 2007 and 2008. And it was shocking. I'm not talking about near-slavery or slavery-like conditions. I'm talking about abject slavery. These were people who were bought and sold. These were people who were shackled in chains at night or locked in the back of produce trucks with no sanitary facilities all night.
"These were people who were forced to work whether they wanted to or not and if they didn't, they were beaten severely. If they tried to escape, they were either beaten worse or in some cases, they were killed. And they received little or no pay. It sounds like 1850. ... There have been seven [legal cases] in the last 10 or 15 years ... successfully brought to justice in Florida involving slavery. And 1,200 people have been freed. The U.S. Attorney for the district in Southern Florida claims that that just represents a tiny, tiny tip of an iceberg because it's extraordinarily difficult to prosecute a modern-day slavery case."
On undocumented workers
"I've seen estimates that nationally, 70 percent of the low-ranking farm workers are undocumented people from southern Mexico and Central America. These people arrive in this country — they're often shipped here from their home villages — and they arrive in a land where they certainly don't speak English. Many of them don't speak Spanish because they're indigenous so they're more comfortable in these indigenous languages.
"They're stuck in the middle of the Everglades in some trailer camp. They don't know where they are. They're frightened to go to the police because they're here illegally and also because back home, the police are often thugs and you don't want to go to them anyway. So they're completely vulnerable. They don't want to make any noise — they just want to work, make a bit of money and that leaves them totally vulnerable."
On how the Florida tomato industry is improving working conditions
"There's a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) that's named after a small city in Florida. And the CIW is this loose, grass-roots collection of people who've been working, really since 1993, to improve labor conditions. The growers had steadfastly refused to as much as speak to these people until last November when the growers came forward and said 'OK, we will sign off on what's called the fair food agreement,' which gives the workers the right to get an extra penny per pound of tomatoes they pick. They're paid on a piece basis. A penny a pound — big deal. But that's the difference between making $40-$50 a day and $70-$80 a day for a tomato worker — the difference between barely able to feed your family, if that, to a crummy, but OK wage. In addition to that, there's such radical concepts as time clocks in the fields ... the requirement that they put up tarpaulins so there can be a shady area in these fields where people can have lunch and other breaks, which is also a new concept."

A little disclaimer here; I mention every once in awhile that I work at a golf course during the summer, before you jump on me about golf courses being an abomination to the environment let me defend myself by saying that I try to live as clean and environment friendly in my home and yard as I can to atone for my environmental sins at work. I guess I hope it buys me some environmental brownie points. Plus, the course I work at will not be visited by Tiger Woods anytime soon and will never be on TV (unless Tiger does come of course) and so we do not have the money for all the expensive chemicals that makes courses on TV looks so pristine and perfect. We actually have dandelions...plenty of them , should really start making dandelion wine.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Sunday, June 26, 2011

The great bean attack, and some other ramblings

First, let me brag a little bit to my southern friends, the ones that wonder why on earth I would want to live so far north. Check it out. It was so hot even the thermometer was sweating.


We are getting some heat but yet no rain. The golf course needs rain and so does my garden but most of all the farmers are saying if don't get a lot of rain soon (like now) they will have no crops to harvest and this makes me sad. For them it is their livelihood whereas for me I can always do another year without garden fresh organic cucumbers.
Lets have a look at my garden, my garden report isn't all great this week. There was an attack.....on my beans. Someone was attacking my beans. I couldn't find any bugs, they must have ate and ran. I have beans in 4 different beds and they attacked 2 beds, the other 2 are fine.



 So I gathered up some chewed up leaves and went to my local greenhouse and asked for advice, I was told it looks like grasshoppers. Apparently they are very little right now and hard to see and don't make that sound yet (you know, that sound they make) She had a big bag of  'stuff" there that would scare them away and told me you had to wear gloves before even opening the bag, I decided that if you need gloves to handle the bag I don't want it on my beans. So I did what we all do when we want to know something....I goggled it. I learned that the best way to keep grasshoppers away is get chickens.....I sure would if I could, some of you already know that in my fantasies and dreams I have 2 chickens in my backyard but in real life the town bylaws say I can't....and don't even get me started on what the neighbors dogs are allowed to do and yet are legal to have (that's a whole different post) anyway.....here is where I found my info   http://pestcontroloptions.com/insect-control/get-rid-of-grasshoppers-the-eco-friendly-way   So I had to try the flour method. It says to lightly dust the plants in the morning when they are covered with dew and not to do it when it is windy. When is it not windy here? And I did not have an empty salt shaker and there was no dew this morning so I made my own dew with the garden hose and used a sifter as my shaker and as you can see it did more than 'lightly dust" It looks like a snowstorm came through here. Eat that grasshoppers! I will defend my garden from now until the fall with whatever it takes. If this doesn't work I might even put on some gloves and get some "stuff'.



Now, on a happier note, there was a new batch of compost a few days ago. This is always exciting for me because I have struggled with m y composting recipe for a long long time (years) Things started looking up when I got a second bin last summer, now when one is "cookin" the other is being filled, it seems to work much better and faster. I now get 2 batches of compost from each bin a year. One batch from each in the spring and one batch each in the fall.

Compost bin 1, I love this, bought it at a yard sale many years ago (about 7 I think) I like that it has drains in the bottom to collect the compost juice.

Compost bin #2, check out the beautiful brown compost that just spilled out the bottom, nice and soft with no big lumps except for a mango and avocado pit once in awhile, I don't think those things ever decompose. 

In hopes of  Saskatoons, pie, jam, cobbler, crisps....summer goodness

Geraniums are my favorite, they are easy to multiply and winter fairly well indoors. I have a friend who bought a $4 geranium 20 years ago and still has it, it looks like a small shrub now. 

The green wall is moving....slowly

These squash have a huge job ahead of them, they are to cover this arbor

This pumpkin needs to learn that it is to climb up this stick to get to the wire fence
The shade  bed is starting to look a little greener

I love that I get a wiff of lilac as I walk through my gate when I come home from work...such a nice welcome home. 

Potatoes....fresh baby potatoes soon....I hope

Can you smell them?

Tomatoes in the greenhouse



Looking a bit knobby.....means they are organic and not modified I guess

They (whoever they are) say you can't grow eggplant up here but I don't always listen to them (whoever they are) So I  had to try it out for myself, so far so good.

Drumroll.......there will be a peony this year. This peony has not had a flower in about 3 years in the front  yard  (too much shade) so I moved it to the backyard last fall and it like it there.

The 3 sister garden bed is coming along, squash, beans (the non attacked beans) and corn

This itty bitty little green thing is teaching me patience.......asparagus 

This funny looking geranium has only got about 7 leaves on it but has 2 big bunches of flowers on it.

There are high hopes for many strawberries
I was all proud that my strawberries were letting out many runners, I was thinking this was a good thing and then I read online somewhere that you are supposed to cut the runners off until after you have picked the strawberries, if you don't cut them off the plant focuses more on producing more plants and less on producing berrries...achhhh! Will I ever get it all right? So I rushed out in my housecoat (I was reading this at 4 am) and cut off all the runners and now I am watching like a hawk for new runners with my clippers in my hand. How on earth did my grandmother and mother ever garden without the internet for information way back when? No wonder the old party line phone system was always so busy.


look what I found at a yard sale, I have always wanted one of these. A little outdoor fireplace


My lunches for this week is chickpea stew, only I didn't have chickpeas so I put in soybeans, rice, last year's green beans, fresh radishes on a bed of spinach...always. I made a banana loaf for my morning snack and bought a bag of organic apples for my afternoon snack.......I sound like a kindergardener having 2 snack times, but hey, I eat a lot. I have never been one of those girls that can survive on a slice of sticky white  bread and half a grape.
And...speaking of apples, remember the apple tree I bought a few weeks ago? I picked about 15 little wee apples off it the other day. The lady at the greenhouse told me not to let it have apples this year, this was almost painful for me, tiny little hopeful apples getting plucked off and thrown in the compost pail. So sad. I also have dreams of picking my own apples (along with having chickens) The first time I picked apples was in Mexico in my aunt and uncles apple orchard and it was such a thrill, it still thrill me when I pass by an apple orchard. There is just something so magical about a big red apple hanging from a branch and it's edible right there, no prep needed, pick it and eat it.

This is a picture of myself and my child picking apples in my aunt & uncles orchard in Cuauhtemoc Mexico, this was before I had a digital camera, not before they were invented (I am not that old) just before I had one.
My daughter eating cactus jelly...very carefully with the tongs and knife so as to not get any prickles, she looks like she is concentrating very hard on her task, it's a delicate procedure.

Since I was digging through the archives I dug out this oldie as well. Trinidad at http://livinginnayarit.blogspot.com/ wrote about a cactus fruit she used to eat in Mexico and I thought maybe it was this cactus fruit. This picture was also taken in Cuauhtemoc, we would hold on to the red ball which was covered in prickles with a pair of BBQ tongs and then slice the top of the ball off with a knife and then scoop out the jelly with a spoon and eat it. It was full of little seeds almost like a pomegranate but a little smaller, it was so good. My aunt said back in the day when they were poor they would make jam out of the jelly. I have no idea what this stuff is called, if there is anyone out there that can tell me please do.

Since I am digging through old photos and bringing up Mexico memories I will leave you with a little Sunday nostalgia; there are 2 songs that you hear in Mexico all the time. The first one is Las mulas de Moreno which is rather a silly song but has a very catchy chorus and beat, I could never really figure out what the song as about because it goes from throwing lemons out the window to feeding chicharrones to the ducks to a drunk guy watering his machete and sharpening his horse, I always thought it made no sense because I must have lost something in the translation but it really is just a silly song......I think. You won't be able to help it but sing along.



Here are the lyrics in English;

If you want to go get 
The mules of Moreno
If you don’t want to go on foot
Saddle the horse

What do you think? Fine, fine, fine,
Very good, very good, very good,
Very very very very goooood

I got up by sincho
I went through tambojo
When I made it to cojinsillo
I ran into the plumber

What do you think? Fine, fine, fine,
Very good, very good, very good,
Very very very very goooood

I have my caravan
Full of chicharrones
That I throw at the ducks
My love why are you sad?

What do you think? Fine, fine, fine,
Very good, very good, very good,
Very very very very goooood

In a tub of water
I found the drunken guy
Giving water to his machete
And sharpening his horse

What do you think? Fine, fine, fine,
Very good, very good, very good,
Very very very very goooood

When I passed your window
You threw a lemon at me
If I through the lemon back
Why is it even necessary?

What do you think? Fine, fine, fine,
Very good, very good, very good,
Very very very very goooood

In the edge of that valley
I have a goat tied up
If the goat should get loose
What a beating I would give it

What do you think? Fine, fine, fine,
Very good, very good, very good,
Very very very very goooood

If you want to enjoy
The mules of Moreno
Take them by the stream
So that no one will see you

What do you think? Fine, fine, fine,
Very good, very good, very good,
Very very very very goooood

With this I say farewell
To the ranch in San Francisco
Until another year
Swimming through the desert

What do you think? Fine, fine, fine,
Very good, very good, very good,
Very very very very goooood

The second song is an old love song that has been sung by Enrique Eglesias and Pavarotti, it is usually sung by a Mariachi band with the whole crowd singing along, I don't know who the original artist is, the song is Cielito Lindo. Until I goggled it today I didn't even know what the name of the song was I always just called it the ay ay ay song.

Here are the English lyrics ;



Through dark tresses, heavenly one,
a pair of deep brown eyes,
lower as they approach,
a stolen glance.

Refrain:
Ay, ay, ay, ay,
sing and don't cry,
heavenly one, for singing
gladdens hearts.

A bird that abandons
his first nest, heavenly one,
then finds it occupied by another,
deserves to lose it.

(Refrain)
That beauty mark you have
next to your mouth, heavenly one,
don't share with anyone but me
who appreciates it.

(Refrain)
If your little mouth, my dark girl,
were made of sugar,
I would spend my time
enjoying its sweetness.

(Refrain)
From your house to mine
there is no more than a step.
Before your mother comes,
heavenly one, give me a hug.

(Refrain)
Cupid shot off an arrow,
heavenly one,
And though he was playing,
I was wounded.

(Refrain)