Arsenic found in baby formula? Grow your own food!

I saw the interesting juxtaposition of tweets below that appeared side-by-side in my twitter machine.  The first tweet is a "Food Safety" concern.  Generally, finding poisons like Arsenic in food is a big concern, that is currently known as "Food Safety", which has to do with various chemicals that find their way into the food we eat.  The second tweet is a simple reminder that gardening season is starting.  It may not be obvious, but the second (gardening, and growing your own food) is a solution to the first (food safety concerns like arsenic).

How?  To my mind the issue with food safety is the industrialization of the food system.  Maybe a food processing factory is having to spread arsenic to kill rats and the like, and then the arsenic finds its way into the food being processed in that facility.  On the other hand, when growing your you control what goes into that food.  Of course the gardening supply store does have a selection of poisons whose niceified name is "pesticide", so even growing your own food you can pour various -cide's (a.k.a. poisons) on the garden.  Doing so is your choice, and alternatively its your choice to use organic gardening practices.  The thing about industrialized food is you don't have any choice, because the choices are made by businesses who don't have your best interest in mind.

Let's remember some history.  The Food and Drug Administration came into being because of food safety scandals over 100 years ago.  Businesses at that time proved over and over they were willing to sell poisonous crap food to people, while paying off inspectors to stamp the food as safe even when it wasn't.

What isn't clear from the "Arsenic" article linked below is the amount of Arsenic found in food.  Is the amount well below the level the FDA considers to be safe?  That is, for all these extra bits finding their way into food, the FDA has safe levels.  Scientists have found that, supposedly, small amounts of poison are safe to eat, while large amounts are not.  It of course varies on the poison in question.

Even so, there are doubts over the actual safety of the levels the FDA considers safe.  Chemicals have a way of bioaccumulating, not just in our own bodies but in the environment.  If we eat foods laced with tiny amounts of poison, some of the chemicals bioaccumulate over time to build up to a dangerous amount.  The bioaccumulation occurs in the environment, as chemicals find their way into rivers or lakes, are eaten by the animals there, who in turn are eaten, each time the chemicals laced into this animals bioaccumulate to dangerous amounts.

@mauitable Jenna Haugaard
Maui

Arsenic found in baby formula, baby food, energy bars and more. Its found in rice syrup! Demand safe food. http://t.co/hYgWs5eE

Thu Mar 01 16:31:37 +0000 2012

@Transition_Town Transition_Town_News
http://www.transitiontown.info/

: It's grow time!It's grow time! http://t.co/UXo0Z3m5

Thu Mar 01 17:13:05 +0000 2012

Who'd have thought you could reinvent the shovel?

The humble shovel has existed in one form or another for thousands of years.  This means it is a very successful design that you might think cannot be improved upon.  But ...

Put your backyard to work with the books: The Backyard Homestead and The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals

Do you eat food?  Do you eat food every day?  I'm sure you probably do, or you wouldn't be reading these words.  Perhaps you're aware that the quality of your food is important to your health.  After all your body is built out of the nutrients in the food you eat.  What you may not know is the corporatized globalized homogenized pasteurized agriculture system that gives us the food in the mainstream grocery stores, well, that "food" lacks in nutritional goodness.

There's growing interest in local fresh food eaten when the food is freshly harvested.  There's a huge difference between the normal not-quite-food shipped from a zillion miles away, and fresh local food.  This doesn't have to be just a matter of shopping hoity-toity high end organic grocery stores, and doesn't have to mean bustling with the crowds at farmers markets.  You can instead spend months and months of drudgery in your back yard growing your own fresh food.

The drudgery part is one of those stereotypes about gardening that doesn't have to be true.  And the book being reviewed now, The Backyard Homestead, is here to make you feel like it would be extremely simple to plant a quarter acre of ground with gardens and/or orchards and/or livestock and harvest 1400 eggs a year, for example.

The book comes from Storey Publishing and says it was Edited by Carleen Madigan.  It's chock full of pencil drawings of typical garden layouts, advice on growing different plants, combinations of plants that are successful, typical growing areas and growing seasons, plus an extensive section on livestock that makes it seem impossibly realistic you could have a flock of chickens in your backyard keeping you well stocked in eggs and chicken soup.

The book weighs in at 360ish pages and is chock full of information, drawings, written advice, reference material, and so on.

Sections cover

• The Home Vegetable Garden
• Backyard Fruits and Nuts (grow your own orchard!)
• Easy Fragrant Herbs
• Home Grown Grains
• Poultry for Meat and Eggs
• Meat and Dairy (other livestock)
• Food from the Wild (honey, mushrooms, etc)

To go along with the Poultry section, the indices contain a list of backyard chicken laws from around the U.S.  In some areas it's subversive and even illegal to raise your own chickens in your backyard.  My friend who does raise chickens has a bumper sticker reading "My Pet Gives Me Eggs" .. think about it

An important section up front covers planning out your garden not only for the available space, but to minimize the work you do.  For example raised bed gardening is described as a big win because the plants are closer to you (you don't have to bend over as far) and the growing conditions can be better.  This section is also important to avoid the drudgery stereotype I mentioned above.

Speaking of which - every page in this book oozes with confidence that this is simple and easy stuff to do.  I sure got excited all over again about the thought of starting a garden or even having some chickens.

There's also a companion book, The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals: Choose the Best Breeds for Small-Space Farming, Produce Your Own Grass-Fed Meat, Gather Fresh ... Rabbits, Goats, Sheep, Pigs, Cattle, & Bees, which I haven't read but clearly starts with the poultry and livestock section of this book and expands on it in a huge way.  That book is also 360 pages and even includes a full color pull-out chart of something or other.

Together these books should help you "Put Your Back Yard To Work" so that you could not only feed yourself and your family, but perhaps earn a secondary income growing food to sell to others.  In these uncertain economic times this could be some personal resilience that could make the difference between life or death depending on how bad things become.  On the other hand earning an income is not quite so simple nowadays thanks to food safety laws that are being used to crack down on organic farming.  Check your local laws before committing to a business plan and buying equipment.

The books are highly recommended and totally excellent.  Backyards across the country could be a backyard local food agriculture resource.  There have been times in our history where this was a matter of national importance (Victory Gardens), and there may well be a time soon when this is again highly important.

Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment - open source distributed DIY solutions to gardening even in apartment buildings

Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.

To find out more about the project:  http://rndiy.com/

 

ooooby Box Scheme - community supported agriculture idea transplanted from New Zealand to Ireland

The ooooby (out of our own back yard) idea originated in New Zealand.  I first heard of it via the In Transition 1.0 movie about the Transition Towns movement.  This video shows a group implementing the idea in Ireland as a community supported agriculture system that's also a gardening training facility.

Part of this implementation is that backyard growers can sell their excess through the ooooby store.

 

ooooby Box Scheme from Tony Armstrong on Vimeo.

Beginning Farmers .org

URL: 

Beginning Farmers .org

Description: 

An effort to create a knowledge and networking resource for farmers and potential farmers, educators, activists, and policy makers interested in promoting small, diverse, locally-based, sustainable farm enterprises.

By bringing together information and individuals we hope to provide a forum for sharing and disseminating ideas which facilitate discussion and provide resources related to the process of starting new farms.

La Vida Locavore

URL: 

La Vida Locavore

Description: 

The blog for anyone whose crazy life includes planting, growing, weeding, fertilizing, raising, picking, harvesting, processing, cooking, baking, making, serving, buying, selling, distributing, transporting, composting, organizing around, lobbying about, writing about, thinking about, talking about, playing with, and eating food!

ECO Mowers

URL: 

ECO Mowers

Description: 

Mowing the lawn doesn't have to involve smelly noisy lawn mowers. It can be a sleek and quiet operation. ECO Mowers has an extensive learning section teaching about the impact of mowing the lawn, plus the products they've lined up to help you do it a better way.

Most of the products they have are reel motors, so yeah it will involve manual effort.

They also carry electric mowers and other gizmos for low impact yard care.

extvideo: 

Composting the Easy Way

Composting the Easy Way (Michael J. McGroarty, http://gardening-articles.com)

Having an ample supply of good rich compost is the gardeners dream. It has many uses, and all of those uses will result in nicer plants. However, composting can be time consuming and hard work. I place a reasonable value on my time, so spending hours and hours turning compost piles doesn't qualify as a worthwhile exercise, at least in my book. Nonetheless, I do compost, but I do so on my terms.

I built two composting bins. Each bin is five feet wide, five feet deep, and four feet high. I built the bins by sinking 4" by 4" posts in the ground for the corners, and then nailed 2 by 4's and 1 by 4's, alternating on the sides.

I left 2" gaps between the boards for air circulation. The 2 by 4's are rigid enough to keep the sides from bowing out, and in between each 2 by 4 I used 1 by 4's to save a little money. The bins are only 3 sided, I left the front of the bins open so they can be filled and emptied easily. Photos of my compost bins are on this page: http://www.freeplants.com/composting.htm

I started by filling just one of the bins. I put grass clippings, dried leaves, and shrub clippings in the bins. I try not to put more than 6" of each material on a layer. You don't want 24" of grass clippings in the bin and you should alternate layers of green and brown material. If necessary, keep a few bags of dry leaves around so you can alternate layers of brown waste and green waste.

When we root cuttings we use coarse sand in the flats, so when it's time to pull the rooted cuttings out of the flats, the old sand goes on the compost pile. In our little backyard nursery we also have some plants in containers that do not survive. Rather than pulling the dead plant and the weeds out of the container, and then dumping the potting soil back on the soil pile, we just dump the whole container in the compost bin. This adds more brown material to the mix, and is a lot easier than separating the soil and the weeds.

Once the bin is full, the rules of composting say that you should turn the material in the bin every few weeks. There is no way that I have time to do that, so this is what I do. I pack as much material in the bin as I can before I start filling the second bin. I pile the material as high as I possibly can, and even let it spill out in front of the bin. Then I cover all the fresh material with mulch or potting soil, whatever brown material I can find.

Then when I'm out working in the garden I set a small sprinkler on top of the pile and turn it on very low, so a small spray of water runs on the material. Since I have a good water well, this doesn't cost me anything, so I let it run for at least two hours as often as I can. This keeps the material damp, and the moisture will cause the pile to heat up, which is what makes the composting action take place.

Once I have the first bin completely full, I start using the second bin. As the material in the first bin starts to break down, it will settle and the bin is no longer heaped up, so I just keep shoveling the material that I piled in front of the bin, up on top of the pile, until all the material is either in the bin, or piled on top of the heap. Then I just leave it alone, except to water it once in a while. The watering isn't necessary, it just speeds the process.

Because I don't turn the pile, I can't expect all of the material to rot completely. The material in the center is going to break down more than the material on the edges, but most of it does break down quite well. The next step
works great for me because I've got a small nursery, so I keep a pile of potting soil on hand at all times. But you can really do the same thing by just buying two or three yards of shredded mulch to get started, and piling it up near your compost bins. If you do this, you will always have a supply of good compost to work with.

Shredded bark, left in a pile will eventually break down and become great compost. The potting soil that I use is about 80% rotted bark. I make potting soil by purchasing fine textured and dark hardwood bark mulch, and I just put it in a pile and let it rot. The secret is to keep the pile low and flat, so that it does not shed the rain water away. You want the mulch to stay as wet as possible, this will cause it to break down fairly quickly.

So I keep a pile of rotted bark mulch near my compost bins. When both bins are completely full, I empty the bin containing the oldest material by piling it on top of my rotted bark mulch. I make sure the pile of rotted mulch is wide and flat on top so that when I put the material from the compost bin on top of the pile, the compost material is only 5 to 10 inches thick.

My mulch pile might be 12' wide, but it may only be 24 to 30 inches high. Once I have all the compost on top of the pile, then I go around the edge of the pile with a shovel, and take some of the material from the edges of the pile and toss it up on top of the pile, covering the compost with at least 6" of rotted bark. This will cause the compost material to decompose the rest of the way.

Once you get this system started, you never want to use all of the material in the pile. Always keep at least 2 to 3 cubic yards on hand so you've got something to mix with your compost. If you use a lot of compost material like I do, then you should buy more material and add to your pile in the late summer or fall, once you are done using it for the season.

Around here many of the supply companies sell a compost material that is already broken down quite well. This is what I buy to add to my stockpile. But I try to make sure that I have at least 3 yards of old material on hand, then I'll add another 3 yards of fresh material to that. Then in the spring I'll empty one of the compost bins and add the compost to the top of the pile.

The pile of usable compost will be layers of material, some more composted than others. Kind of like a sandwich. So what I do is chip off a section of the pile from the edge, spread it out on the ground so it's only about 8" deep, then run over it with my small rototiller. This mixes it together perfectly, and I shovel it onto the potting bench.

Having a pile of rotted compost near your compost bins is great because if you have a lot of leaves or grass clippings, you can throw some rotted compost in the bin in order to maintain that layered effect that is necessary in order for the composting process to work well.

Sure this process is a little work, but it sure is nice to have a place to get rid of organic waste anytime I like. Then down the road when I have beautiful compost to add to my potting soil, I am grateful to have done the right thing earlier, and I know that I have wasted nothing.

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