Freedom in the Hills of New Hampshire

I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately.

This partly happened by chance. You see, my husband and I have been anti-high fructose corn syrup for quite a time now and we avoid eating anything that includes it. One evening, my husband went to the bathroom and I leapt onto his computer and began browsing Netflix instant view to see if there was anything I could watch really quick in the 5-10 minutes before he got back. Sitting there, in my suggestion, was King Corn. I pressed play. My husband returned and looked slightly crestfallen that I had ursurped his computer again but as soon as I mentioned it was about corn, he sat down and watched.

From the video we learned that thanks to the corn subsidies, America’s food chain is totally messed up. You’ll have to watch it to see for yourself, but I immediately became fascinated about where our food comes from. I then read “Animal,Vegetable, Miracle” and “The Omnivore’s Delimma,” both of which discuss organic farming and the importance of eating locally. As far as organic farming is concerned, I’m won over and I was a hard organic skeptic for many years. But basically, the evidence is that organic farming produces food that contains more nutrients than food produced on artificially fertlized land and it also makes soil that is healthier and less prone to erosion. I’m also completely sold on eating free range eggs and meat from pasture-raised animals, as they tend to have higher amounts of healthy fats and more nutrients than CAFO-raised animals and eggs.

What I am not completely sold on are these books’ arguments for eating locally and supporting local agriculture. Their only argument that resonated with me is that produce loses nutrients and quality the farther it has to travel before eaten. So a tomato consumed in January from Chile is less healthy and tastes worse than one from New Hampshire (well, for me anyway) consumed in July. Logical. I dig it.

The rest of their arguments…well:

1) It’s important to support American agriculture because it’s American. Yes, fine, let’s all take a break and chant USA! USA! USA! It’s still not a good reason. Why should I refuse to buy from other countries just because they’re foreign? My husband’s not American. I guess I shouldn’t have married him?

2) If you eat locally, you save blah blah blah barrels of oil that are used to transport food from way over here to way over there. Yes, and if I never travel more than a day’s walk or bike ride from where I live, I’ll save that much oil, too! It doesn’t, however, mean I’m going to do it. Ironically, Barbara from “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” drove from Tuscon to Virginia then up to Canada, then back to Virginia and flew to Italy during her year of eating locally. The fact she drove a hybrid takes away some of the oil, I guess, but sheesh. I guess that’s why the bi-line isn’t a year of living locally.

3) The Europeans  do it—and look how cool they are! Argh. I hate this argument. Americans have a love-hate relationship with Europe, meaning that half the population looks up to Europe and wishes we were more like them while the other half hates Europe and wishes they would go away. We have a very difficult time realizing that it has its faults, just like every where else in the world. But both books made points of glorifying how European countires have  their own food cultures that they still rely on to guide them when they eat (Finland’s revolves around only eating food that looks like shit) and how sad it is that the US doesn’t (never mind that it  does or did and, much like Britian, it suffered tremendously during World War 2). Europeans, they argue, support their local farms and are a lot closer to where their food comes from. Well, yes and no. My host family was very close to where their food came from. My host Oma kept chickens, so we always had fresh eggs, and she made tons of jam and marmelade. My host dad kept rabbits and got ducks before I left, all for food. And they had a huge garden and two cherry trees the supplied most of the produce in the warmer months. When we went to a Richterfest, the hosts slaughtered a sheep and had it roasting on a spit. The other two sheep remained grazing peacefully in a field nearby…

But this experience is not really the norm for most Europeans today, just as it isn’t for most Americans. My host family was exceptional being that my host parents were not only from small farming villages but also lived in East Germany, where being close to your food source was a big plus. When I lived in Berlin and visited Finland, just trust me when I say a lot of stuff is imported, frozen foods are eaten a lot and people don’t spend hours crafting the perfect midday lunch as Italians were portrayed in the two aforementioned books. Unless they’re professional cooks, they just don’t have the time.

Having said all that, I will most certainly check out the farmers market this summer to see what kind of produce it offers and will continue to patronize local pick-your-own farms for apples, blueberries and strawberries because the experience is fun and fesh strawberries are always worth it (I swear, everytime I buy them at the store, they rot as soon as I leave).

Furthermore, this foray into food and finding out where it comes from led my husband and I to decide that when we buy a house, we definitely want to get some land with it, anywhere from two to five acres, so that we can have a little farm. By little I mean a garden to grow vegetables, some fruit trees and some chickens. By farm, my husband means we-are-going-to-grow-everything-ourselves-including-wheat-and-I-want-goats-or-maybe-sheep-along-with-chickens. I think he’s insane because he has no idea how much work it involves, not to mention the fact that we’re both city folk, and not to mention the fact we live in New Hampshire, a land of trees, rocks, long winters and precious little topsoil. We have almost no knowledge of farming or raising animals. But we agreed we’d make a plan (we’ll call it our “Five Year Plan”) that will lay out step-by-step how we’re going to do this. We also agreed that if the chickens are a success, we’ll get a pig. This is due to the fact we both read an article discussing how good acorn-fed pork is. Lasse gets to do the slaughtering.

But it is exciting to have a plan, however crazy it may be. We have a goal to work towards while we live in our tiny little apartment, which makes it all a lot easier.

Gardening in New Hampshire is a lot harder than gardening in Kansas. In Kansas, you just went outside whenever it got warm enough, turned over some dirt, planted some seeds and then watered occasionally until you got a plant.

In New Hampshire, this process is complicated by a few matters. First, it doesn’t get warm enough to plant things that are suseptible to frost until May or June, so you have to start your seeds inside in trays or just buy the friggin plant. Secondly, if you try to just go outside and turn some dirt over with a shovel, the first words out of your mouth will be “f—-ing rocks!” They don’t call it the Granite State for nothing: every time you put your shovel in the ground, you will hit a rock. Sometimes it will be really small, other times it will be the size ofa table and you either get some dynamite and blast it out (unlikely) or work around it. This is why most landscaping in New Hampshire incorporates boulders. They had to do something with it. Aside from the rocks, you have the whole tree issue, which was also not a problem. Where there are no rocks, there are tree roots. There are also tree branches blocking the sun. Both must be dealt with. I get the feeling that farmers who settled in New Hampshire must have been really desperate, otherwise they would have never settled here to farm.

Because of these two issues, most gardeners in New Hampshire opt for raised beds. They buy dirt, build large beds above ground to put the dirt in, then tansplant the seedlings as soon as they’re big enough and the weather is warm enough.

Fortunately for me, I live in an apartment and don’t have to deal with these problems. Still, the husband and I want to have a bit of a garden. We want to try our hands at raising food. It’s been ages since I’ve gardened and I’m getting really tired of paying high prices for herbs at the grocery store, only to have them rot on the way home. I swear, they have some sort of built in sensor that says “Okay, we’re out of the store…turn brown now!” So, we’re going to attempt a balcony garden.

We have 6 window boxes which will be hung on the balcony, two containers on the ground, and four topsy turvey planters that I’ve heard work really well. We also have innumerable milk cartons that I’ve repurposed because I’m classy like that. But hey, whatever works works.

To begin with, I bought a few seeds (cilantro, parsley, basil, oregano, green onions, carrots and swiss chard) and planted the herbs in one window box to get them started. Then I knocked the darn thing over while shutting the blinds. I scooped all the dirt back in, but figured I’d better replant since who knows what happened to the seeds? A few days later, they started to sprout. A few weeks later, and I realize I have no idea what is sprouting since it good be the original seeds or the later ones. So I transplant out some of the seedlings to keep until I know what I have growing. Yesterday, I try some and realize that I pretty much have 8 plants of cilantro growing. A google image search told me that my basil had finally sprouted. So, I decided to take the sprouting tray we bought finally and try starting my herbs again in there, this time with labels.

In addition to planting herbs in the sprouting tray, we decided to try sprouting our tomatos and peppers in there, too. So, eventually we should have in our balcony garden Bell pepper, hot pepper, cucumber, big tomatos, plum tomatos, swiss chard, carrots, green onion and the herbs. Some people say start out small and see what happens. I say, start out big and learn from your mistakes!

If the bell pepper and tomatos don’t sprout or don’t get big enough soon enough (very likely, I should have started them in March), we’ll just buy the stinking plants. On the plus side, my swiss chard (planted at the same time as the others), sprouted yesterday. This means that the dirt is warm enough for swiss chard, which starts at 50 degrees but must not be warm enough for tomatos and peppers, which start at 70F. So I’ll be working to get that temperaturer up. Think happy, sprouting thoughts everyone!