WEEK OF AUGUST 15

The past couple of weeks have been busy with the dog days of summer.  Time flew past and I had forgotten to update the blog.  Between these busy days I have been feeling parched and anxious for some much needed rain.  Some days no matter how much we water it seems like the only thing to help these veggies is true water falling from the clouds.  During this time of the season we should remember to be thankful for the beautiful bounty the garden has grown and if it means spending more of your time trying to put as many good vegetables to use before they go bad just think of the cooler season about to knock on our door.  The gardens are growing with squash and soon to be cucumber mania.  Our winter squash are blooming and have beautiful little babies on the vines.  Below are recipes and a few interesting notes from some foodies.

Excerpt from the founder of Johnny’s Seed, Rob Johnston, Spring 2008 “The increase in home vegetable gardening is being well publicized this spring, and normally the reason given is economic, like high gasoline prices and sticker shock at the supermarket. I think that these economics are a factor, but not the main factor. Home vegetable gardening was in decline or was static in the US, and I think in the whole "first world," throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and 2000s up through 2006. During those 25 years there were several bad periods economically, but there was no vegetable gardening increase in response to any of them. I think that the main motivation is quality of life, and a regaining of meaningful culture.”

Why Bother?

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

 Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

Below are two recipes to put to good use during this time when you might find yourself wondering how to use a head of broccoli in one meal?

Broccoli Pesto

1 head broccoli

¼ cup toasted pumpkin seeds

¼ cup olive oil

¼ cup Parmesan cheese

Chop and blanch the head of broccoli.  Puree pumpkin seeds in a food processor then add cooked broccoli, Parmesan, and olive oil.  Puree and taste for salt and pepper.  Try it on pizza, pasta, toast, or with freshly cut tomatoes.

Zucchini Sauce

3-4 medium squash or zucchini

¼ stick of butter

3 cloves of garlic

¼ cup chopped onion