Comments on: New Feature: People Who Hate My Garden

By: ksteinhoff

ksteinhoff — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:42:34 +0000

Jan, Jan, Jan,

Manure tea is a bad idea. You have no idea how long it took to toilet train Farmer Matt. We don’t want to do anything that would cause him to forget those skills.

Now, there’s always four-year-old Malcolm…

By: FlaNative

FlaNative — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:39:18 +0000

It’s not about competing. Matt’s garden is about growing your own and being somewhat self-sufficient, and having the satisfaction of eating a food you produced.

By: FlaNative

FlaNative — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:36:53 +0000

Food is politics – pure and simple, and it’s too giant of an argument for me to waste my time.
Bottom line: we’ve gotten used to generic, rock-hard tomatoes that can be shipped halfway around the world. Those ugly tomatoes (Florida has trademarked the name Ugli for a new breed of an old breed) are indeed more flavorful.
Why does it cost more? Do the math: You’re not dumping tons of unnatural fertilizers (you’re using manure tea right Matt?), and pesticides to produce a million-foot field of tomatoes that look exactly alike. A third of your tomatoes may rot or be inedible — there goes the cost.
But they sure as hell taste great — like a real tomato, which we’ve also forgotten about.
Bigger is better: the more you grow, the less it will cost, of course.
But one 5-gallon bucket and one Big Boy or Homestead tomato plant (cost: free 5-gallon bucket, $1 for dirt, $7 for plant) can yield well over 80 pounds of fat, homegrown tomatoes at 10 cents a pound.
Satisfaction of locking your lip around a fresh tomato sandwich oozing with real tomato juice? Priceless!

By: GPrimm

GPrimm — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:48:54 +0000

I don’t understand how small growers can compete. Big agribiz, buying fertilizer, fuel and such by the trainload, can get by much cheaper and thus afford to sell much cheaper.

I also don’t understand why they insist on altering “fresh” produce. I brought home some cucumbers the other day that had so much wax coating them, they felt like bars of soap.

And Laine’s right, the labeling rules are pretty lax. Their “organic” may be nowhere near the same as how you understand the word.

By: ksteinhoff

ksteinhoff — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:56:57 +0000

Back in the 70s, I was doing photos to illustrate a newspaper story about family farmers in the Glades.

Shortly after I shot this picture

http://ken.steinhoff.net/Deportees/pages/deportee%2036.html

the farmer showed me a corn borer, a small worm, that had been eating the ear.

When he crushed it between his thumb and forefinger, I realized that this was the difference between corporate farming and the small farmer: in this field, it was one man against one worm.

By: Laine

Laine — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:51:40 +0000

And just a side note, if you go to say, the big healthy “whole” food markets, they charge ALOT of the organic produce and you still aren’t sure if its organic, really.
You get the pleasure of knowing you grew it, what’s in it, and the taste is almost always better, because you get to actually let it ripen on the vine, instead of lopping it off prematurely so it can survive the rigors of transport.
Also, you’re helping teach future generations how to grow food, which is something that is getting so lost just by a generation or two.
I’m am SO for the homegrown garden.

By: ksteinhoff

ksteinhoff — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 03:03:45 +0000

Miz Sarah, Mam,

I found out why the produce lo0ks so green in the Big Super Market the first time I had a color photo assignment in a local Publix store.

The lights in the produce department have a green cast; the ones in the meat counter shade to the red and the ones in the bakery are yellowish.

Oh, yeah, the lights in a funeral home are warm-colored, too.

It’s all about marketing.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:10:32 +0000

My biggest stumbling block when it comes to growing my own food has been, sadly enough, purely aesthetic.

Yes, Mark, we have a nice grocery store with a gorgeous produce section.

So gorgeous, in fact, that I caught myself fondling the cilantro the day after we’d planted our own. I needed some for a batch of black-and-white chili. I had some in my own garden. I’d used it the night before on pulled pork tacos.

And yet, here I was, admiring the grocery store cilantro. It was bundled up so nicely, like an herb bouquet. It sparkled from having just been sprayed down. And it was GREEN! My God, how do they get it so GREEN!?

I’m proud to say I resisted the siren song of grocery store cilantro. My cilantro is growing up very nicely. It’s green. It’s delicious. It doesn’t quite look like I’d find it in a magazine layout, but so what?

Now, don’t get me started on the home-grown tomatoes. Ugly little bastards they are.