Free Learner

Garden warning

If you grow any kind of hot pepper in your garden and you have kids, make sure to frequently remind them which peppers NOT TO EAT.  Tristan bit off the end of a fire-engine red cayenne this evening.  He is okay, but I feel like I've been through one of those Poison Control Center directions: Flush with cool water for 15 minutes.

On the positive side, he didn't throw up, and I didn't panic even though he was panicking.  Poor little guy.

This is why I am loathe to grow medicinal herbs that can be poisonous or simply make you ill, like pennyroyal or lobelia.  I've watched Tristan eat purslane from the edge of the driveway, and seen Anya rub lemon balm between her fingers to inhale the scent, and seen both of them collect catnip for the kitties.  And I had resolved only to grow safe plants, because of the kids.  But the problem with this rule was made apparent to me tonight: I like spicy food, but cayenne peppers cannot be considered "safe" in a household containing small children.  Usually Tristan only picks veggies when I'm out there, with some guidance... but not so this evening.  A ripe cayenne, after all, is a gorgeous thing.

Perhaps next year I'll tie tinsel on the "dangerous" plants.

Quality used goods

Today I bought things from two different Craigslist folks, which put me in a good mood.  I've always had very pleasant exchanges with Craigslist people.  I am still waiting to hear back about a solid wood, 5-drawer dresser someone was insanely selling for $20, which I highly suspect has already sold.

First, I went and picked up 3 dozen pint jars and 4 dozen quart jars from a woman about 15 minutes away, for $3/dozen.  These were stored in very old cardboard boxes that the original jars had come in.  Check it out:

Whoa!  Holy 1950's, Batman!  I love how "Mom" appears to be in her dotage already.  And catch that bit of sparkle on the glass....

The woman I purchased these from had had gardens and had canned for many years, even while raising 6 children.  We chatted about gardening for a while, she said she was glad to give the jars to someone who would be growing their own food, and it was nice to see younger people gardening.  We agreed that our college town farmer's market has extremely high prices.  (There's a granola snob factor, around these parts.)  She said I should put newspapers covered with straw under my cucumbers, while for my part, I recommended Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (for about the 100th time).  She also threw in two dozen "spaghetti jars" for free.  I thought maybe Ball made some sort of specially decorated jar for tomato products or something, but no--  These turned out to be commercial spaghetti sauce jars which are actually, when you take the label off, 26-oz regular mouth Mason jars.  I have to remove a few more labels, but the 26-oz size should be good for applesauce.  I am not sure how to adjust canning times, but I can treat them as quart jars if need be.

Second, I bought 18 hardcover Time Life Nature books from the 1970's, most of them never opened, for $40.  You might think these would be rather dated, and it's true they say "man" and "mankind" everywhere.  This is something I will soon have to discuss with Anya.  When reading non-fiction books to her, I routinely swap out many of the male pronouns for female ones on the fly, and when reading to herself she usually reads only small bits at a time.  She therefore has not yet realized that older books pretend all people are male.  But hey, I have to explain this at some point, right?  In other respects I like these books much more than recently published ones.  The newest science books for kids have so many photos and graphics that they are often visually confusing, and you have to hunt for the text.  It's all sidebars and footnotes and captions, and the little bit of real information is largely given in "random factoid" form.  The old Time Life books do have many gorgeous photos, as well as diagrams and maps, but there is a lot of text, sometimes several pages of small type in a row.  This seems like a better balance, to me.  And the photos seem well chosen, from a time when every illustration was costly, rather than now where the goal seems to be a cornucopia of color and the maximum number of different fonts per page.

Yes, when it comes to newly made things I have become a curmudgeon.  I used to buy T-shirts at Target, but now the material is so thin and shoddy I will have to go elsewhere.  I looked at some waffle-weave thermal blankets at a store recently, and they were so thin and badly woven that in places they looked like gauze (so much for "thermal").  And then there are the stories about food items that still have the same price, but the sizes are just a bit smaller, which they hope you won't notice.  Instead of 12 ounces of cereal it's 9.8 ounces; instead of 32 ounces of mayonnaise it's 28.  We have rampant, galloping price inflation in the US, which has now hit roughly 13.5% per annum.  If you bought jeans or lettuce or printer paper or gasoline today, then by this time next year the cost would be (as a rough average) 13.5% higher.  I say "would be" because companies are finding ways to avoid sticker shock, mostly by giving us junkier and junkier crap.  Corporations are trying to hide price inflation by cutting the quality and the quantity, and trusting to the indiscriminate nature of the impulsive American consumer.

As Dmitry Orlov says [pp. 81-82 of Reinventing Collapse]:

For decades now, the main thrust of marketing has been to convince everyone that new is better than old, all the while witnessing a steady degradation in the quality of many items.  Taking the case of furniture as an example, it has evolved from solid hardwood to softwood with a hardwood veneer, to particleboard with a hardwood veneer, to particleboard with a faux-woodgrain plastic veneer.  While solid hardwood furniture can be sanded down and refinished, making it as good as new, the cult of the new forces people to throw it out and then pay for a new, shoddy, disposable, but new-looking replacement.  Over the years, I have consistently been able to trash-pick better furniture than I could find in stores, while the overall quality of the trash has gone down continually.  At present, most of the trash I see, even in the prosperous neighborhoods, is simply appallingly bad and not worth picking.

Another way of making consumers dependent on a continuous flow of new products is through the use of fashion.  Here the goal is to make products that are ugly, while simultaneously convincing consumers that a certain kind of ugly is "in" this year.  Next year, a subtly different kind of ugliness reigns supreme, while the previous year's ugliness is simply that -- ugly, and therefore no longer desirable.  The combination of teenage rebellion, adolescent conformism and plain immature silliness offers particularly fertile ground for this type of mass uglification.  The result is, again, obvious: when the flow of fashionably ugly new products stops, the products that remain are just plain ugly, and the self-esteem of those who are forced to use them rather low.

. . .

The last act in the American consumerist tragedy will end with the now naked consumer standing on top of a giant mound of plastic trash.  At the end of an economy where everything is disposable stands the disposable consumer.

As one last example, if you buy non-stick pans you are going to have to buy them all over again in a few years, because inevitably the teflon flakes off.  Lately, I care less about the price, and think more about when I will have to buy this item again.  Stainless-steel and cast-iron pots and pans will NEVER have to be purchased again, so that's what I use.

And if the durable stuff is more expensive, well... keep your eye on Craigslist.

Beetlemania

Well, I've discovered why my blueberry bushes are mostly-dead twigs sticking out of the ground.  I had my first clue when I was out drowning Japanese beetles in a plastic cup and saw them buzzing and swarming all around the apple trees.  "Huh," I thought to myself, "that's not good."  I knew the blueberries and the hazelnuts and the almond tree were getting eaten, but I thought my little soapy water cup would be sufficient to put a stop to it.

Ha!

I finally bought a Japanese beetle trap and hung it up in the apple tree yesterday.  All I can say is, if you see a Japanese beetle KILL IT.  Do not be dissuaded by that pretty green-gold iridescence.  If there is one there today, there will be a hundred next year.

Notice how that green bag seems to be sagging with weight?  You know what's in there?  An absolutely ungodly number of Japanese beetle carcasses, that's what.  I hung that thing up approximately 24 hours ago.  A stiff drink will be required to wrestle that sack of dead beetles off the frame for disposal.

Let's zoom in a bit, just above the trap:

This image gives me the willies, especially because when you try to sweep them into the cup to meet their soapy deaths, half of them play dead and fall right off and you get pelted with the damn things.  I come inside and spend ten minutes in the bathroom inspecting my hair for beetles.

So, in summary, all I can say is: Do not let 7-year-olds, even of the sort who carefully escort earwigs out of the house, convince you not to kill Japanese beetles because they're pretty.  We did that last year, and there's been hell to pay.  This year I just put on SpongeBob before I venture out of doors to commit insect murder, and my kids are none the wiser.

I may actually have to put that revolting green sack in the car and take a short drive, however, to convince Anya that I'm taking the beautiful beetles away to set them free.  *shudder*

This can't be good

If you've ever been to an online survivalist shop, the sort that sells hand-crank flashlights and solar battery chargers and 100-hour candles, you've probably seen ads for Mountain House Foods.  This is a major company selling huge amounts of freeze-dried foods in #10 cans.  They'll even sell you a whole year's worth of food for an entire family, and ship it to your house.  I know most people haven't heard of them, but in the preparedness culture, they're the biggest brand out there.

Well, turns out they will not be taking any more orders until 2010.  They have no more inventory, and all production through the end of 2009 is already spoken for.  In addition to the source I linked to, I've also heard this on a radio show, from the owner of a preparedness store.

Mountain House is such a large company that people suspect it was the US government who bought up all their food.  Individual purchasing could deplete their inventory, but it's hard to see how individual people could backlog the company for 18 solid months.  The US government is also buying up canned butter (see above link), which I have also heard from a second radio source.

It's certainly possible that we're running low on MRE's, and that's why the government is buying storable food.  After all, the Pentagon ran out of bullets and had to buy them from the Chinese, so it's certainly credible that we might have screwed up and run out of food for our soldiers.  But I think these food items are being placed in strategic locations where government intends to barricade itself during a time of crisis.  Other folks think this means we're going to Iran, but I think this sounds more like a FEMA, refugee camp sort of stockpile.  By "refugee" I mean "starving, homeless person," not necessarily the victim of a natural disaster.

Whatever is going on, it ain't good.

Fermented pickles

I was out at my parents' place over the weekend, and picked three grocery bags full of pickling cucumbers in one day.  It's amazing how much produce can be gotten out of a patch of land.  I said that I would take some home, and my mom said "You're darn right you will!"

And here are two half gallons of pickles beginning to ferment, in a salt brine with mustard, white pepper, and dill:

The plastic caps are perfect for this, because you just loosen them a bit to allow fermenting gases to escape, but once or twice a day you can tighten them to shake up the mixture.

I used my own heads of dill, snipping off the smaller bunches of seeds and shoving them in amongst the cukes.  Here's one head, mid-way through the snipping process:

One online recipe called for 30 heads of dill for a gallon of pickles, which seems crazy to me.  Some of my heads of dill are 8 inches across!  I only used 2 heads of dill per half gallon.

When the pickles are done they'll have a different taste than commercial pickles because they won't be in vinegar, they'll be in lactic acid.  Lactic acid, it turns out, is a fuel for our mitochondria.  It is not, contrary to widespread belief, a "waste product" that builds up in muscles, nor is it responsible for making muscles sore.  From a New York Times article:

As for the idea that lactic acid causes muscle soreness, Dr. Gladden said, that never made sense.

"Lactic acid will be gone from your muscles within an hour of exercise," he said. "You get sore one to three days later. The time frame is not consistent."

The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.

Mitochondria even have a special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found.

I wonder, then, if people would have more energy when they eat large amounts of lacto-fermented foods, chock full of lactic acid?  Or, more to the point, chock full of lacto-bacteria, which inhabit your gut and sit around making lactic acid all day?  All this from cucumbers, water, salt, and a few days' time.

Gardening gone awry

This year isn't going too well in the garden, although I'm trying to keep a stiff upper lip, ignore the fact that I killed my entire crop of seedlings, and take heart in Sharon Astyk's reassurance that this does not necessarily mean my family will starve in the coming Depression.

I really do not know how I offended my broccoli to the point where it looks like this:

I have never read complaints about one's broccoli bolting in the heat, but apparently I managed it.

In the radish patch, I did get some radishes, but I didn't thin them enough and they were mostly pretty skinny.  Here's one that I let sit there until it flowered, and the dang thing was still no bigger than my thumb:

So far, I have only eaten herbs, radishes, and lettuce greens... I could've fried up those little green tomatoes my son plucked off, but I didn't.  I do have enormous cucumber plants full of blossoms, and green tomatoes, and two little green cayenne peppers.  The onions and carrots seem to be thriving, but I'm supposed to be thinning them more, I'm sure, and half a row of onions got over-run by the radishes.

As for my pole beans, what can I say, I am a terrible human being.  The poor things are twining madly around one another like men on a sinking ship, desperate for something to climb, only the "something to climb" has been sitting in a corner of the garage for three weeks:

I'm great at buying and reading books about gardening and raising chickens and making medicines from herbs, but I'm bad at actually doing it.  My hope is that when things really go to hell, I will suddenly find myself more motivated to go out in the 90-degree, soupy, hazy humidity and water those new fruit trees one more time, and the tomatoes again just to encourage them.  Possibly I might even say to hell with my lawn nazi neighbors and plant a big ol' asparagus border and run some hops up the basketball pole.  This year I'm more inclined to sit in the AC and read Sharon Astyk and ponder which solar oven and which pressure canner I want to buy in the next couple of months.  I'm largely an "armchair survivalist"... though with a few veggies I've managed not to kill.

Anyway, it's progress.

Accidental butter

If you've read the Little House books, you might remember what a tedious job it was to churn butter.  The Ingalls family had a tall, narrow churn with a wooden post that had to be moved up and down for perhaps a quarter of an hour.  The Wilders, who were wealthy and had several cows, had a small barrel on rockers which had to be rocked for an even longer time.  By the 1920's some households used smaller crank churns which fastened onto jars, like so:

.

And I've read that one can put cream in a mason jar with a plastic cap and shake it up for 10 minutes or thereabouts until lumps of butter form and rattle around in the buttermilk.

But in the electric age you can get results extremely quickly.  For instance, here's a method I used the other night:

.

1. Announce to kids that you're making whipped cream.
2. Place heavy whipping cream in electric stand mixer.
3. Turn on medium speed.
4. Suddenly decide to check weather radar.
5. Stand around cursing Internet connection while radar loads.
6. Return to mixer to discover yellow lumps being whacked around in thin white liquid.

.

Ta-da!  Butter:

 

If only I had done it on purpose, I could've bragged about another small "back to the land" / slow food experiment.

An herbal pharmacy

So last year I planted four dill plants-- or what I thought were dill plants.  Two of the plants were purple, but hey, they'd been labeled dill and they must just be a different cultivar, right?  In fact, they turned out to be fennel plants.

This year it became clear to me that I will never again have to purchase dill or fennel seeds, as frilly green and purple plants sprung up everywhere.  These plants get big, too-- some of my dill is 4 feet high.  Seth and I stand by the herb garden and eat dill fronds right off the plant.

Herbs have very high concentrations of certain plant chemicals, which is why such a small amount can flavor a whole dish.  But these chemicals also have health benefits, which is why so many herbs can be used as medicines.  A little bit contains a big dose of medicine, along with the flavor.

Dill and fennel are both "carminative" plants, meaning that they soothe the stomach and get rid of indigestion and the "wicked winds" (flatulence) referred to in very old medical texts.  If you steep fennel seeds in very hot water for some time, to make a strong tea, you can feed drops of the cooled liquid to infants to alleviate colic.  Dill may also work against insomnia (the old Norse word for it was "dilla" or "to lull").

Amazingly, dill neutralizes a class of carcinogens known as benzopyrenes, and therefore helps to prevent cancer.  Benzopyrenes come from burnt things: burnt toast, car exhaust, trash incinerators... and tobacco smoke.  Benzopyrenes are the primary carcinogen in cigarette smoke.  So, if you smoke, you might consider eating a lot of dill, which will reduce your risk of lung cancer.  [However, the #1 supplement for smokers should be N-acetyl cysteine, 600mg twice a day, as this may cut your risk of lung cancer IN HALF.]  Dill, lemon, and mustard can be combined with olive oil or mayonnaise for dressings or sauces, or try dill, lemon, and yogurt on cucumbers.  Or if you get tired of cooking with it, just eat a few fronds after dinner.  Apparently Charlemaigne kept bowls of dill at the table for guests who ate too much, to soothe their stomachs.

Parsley has the same protective effects against benzopyrenes, so tabouli would be another excellent choice for smokers.  My parsley (both flat and curly) could be used into December, even after freezes and being snowed on.  It just kind of froze in place, I guess.  Possibly it would grow in cold frames.

Many herbs protect against food poisoning by killing or slowing the growth of harmful bacteria.  Basil is active against listeria, staph A, E. coli 157 (a particularly nasty strain), pseudomonas and yersinia enterocolitica.  Oregano is active against most bacteria, and concentrated oregano oil can be used topically as an antibacterial (diluted with olive oil as it can sting).  Concentrated oregano oil is so lethal to bacteria, in fact, that you'd want to use caution before consuming it, as you'd wipe out a lot of your good, healthy bacteria.  You'd likely smell like an Italian restaurant for a couple of days, as well.

Peppermint is active against E coli, salmonella, H. pylori (which causes stomach ulcers), and-- get this-- MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant and deadly staph A strain which kills 19,000 Americans per year.  Thyme is active against E coli, staph A, shigella, and others.  Cilantro is better at killing salmonella than pharmaceuticals are, with one study showing it was twice as effective as gentamicin.  So if you don't know where your tomatoes came from, sprinkle them liberally with chopped cilantro.

Rosemary is an excellent anti-inflammatory, effective in alleviating asthma and arthritis, as well as increasing blood flow.  Cilantro improves liver function and helps the body to eliminate toxins.  Coriander, the seeds of the cilantro plant, help to stimulate insulin production and stabilize blood sugar (in animal studies).  Parsley and dill eliminate toxins from the body, by helping our main anti-oxidant to latch on to oxidized junk.

Sage has been shown in clinical trials to prevent a deteriorating memory as we age.  It's also been shown to be helpful in slowing the progress of Alzheimer's (which cannot be said of some of the drugs prescribed for Alzheimer's).

I have by no means covered all the benefits of herbs, but I'm heading off to a 4th of July barbeque.  I'll just end by saying that modern culinary herbs must have been cultivated by our ancestors as much for their health benefits as for their taste.