Local farm, home-grown produce can’t be beat
This past week has featured heat, humidity, almost daily thunderstorms and summer-like weather, for a change. We sure don’t need the rain, but as long as it is just showers and not all-day or all-night soaking rains, the saturated soil will begin to dry out.
Plants are finally growing at a rapid pace and the expanding vegetation will transpire even more moisture. An acre of corn will suck up and release 3,000 to 4,000 gallons of water a day in summer and a mature oak tree can transpire 40,000 gallons of water a year. Three or four dry days in a row will allow our gardens to dry out significantly.
This is the time of year when we realize that the vegetables for sale at the supermarket cost far less to buy than the ones we grow in our garden. If you try to raise your own food, whether it is vegetables, fruit or meat, it is highly unlikely that you are saving money, if you actually tracked expenses and labor.
Yesterday, I saw fresh asparagus on sale for $1.25 a pound and a huge bunch of beets for $2. Gardening is a wonderful hobby that provides exercise, fresh air, education and an awareness of nature that I think is extraordinarily important, but far too often ignored. Commercial farming that supplies most of our food is a business that is dominated by large operations which can take advantage of economies of scale, tax breaks, subsidies and other special treatment. The result is that it can deliver a product (produce produce?) at a price that is impossible to compete with on a backyard or local level.
Our local vegetable farms cannot afford to sell at supermarket prices, except for brief periods during the growing season. If it is at all possible, we should be buying our food from them. We need local farms to preserve the character of this rural area. It would be a sad state if we had no choice but to buy everything we eat from the big box stores, as is often the case for urban dwellers. Even sadder, it is also a necessity for those who cannot afford to buy local.
The joy of food gardening provides one of the greatest satisfactions and also challenges that I know of. Most homegrown food does taste better than store bought and it is certainly fresher and, consequently, healthier. Most produce loses 30 percent of its nutrients within four days of harvest. Spinach may lose as much as 90 percent within 24 hours. Right now, some gardeners in the Hudson Valley are picking their first ripe tomatoes. There are no supermarket tomatoes that
taste as good as those you harvest from your garden.
Some of these early tomatoes may develop a black spot on the bottom of the fruit that may rot the entire fruit, much to the dismay of the gardener. This is called blossom end rot and it is a physiological disorder that cannot be immediately cured or treated. The good
news is that it always goes away in time as the fruit that ripen later on will be just fine.
Other gardeners are losing their crops to the various insects and diseases that plague us every year. It is frustrating, but also a challenge to learn how to cope with the particular adversary. Life should be a learning experience at all stages, even for old coots like me and gardening offers that opportunity. Youngsters, in particular, need to learn that
food comes from the earth and not from the store.
So, to answer the question I posed as the title of this week’s sermon. My dinner tonight will consist of a salad made from lettuce and other herbs I grew in a window box, followed by a side dish of shiitake mushrooms I picked this morning from my bolts, cooked with some garlic I harvested last summer. I also picked some asparagus from my garden that I will steam. The main course will be
the filets of a smallmouth bass I caught yesterday in the Ashokan Reservoir.
Dessert will be the fresh strawberries I bought at Story’s farm stand in Catskill yesterday. The strawberries cost almost exactly twice as much as the ones for sale at Xmart, but they taste more than twice as good.