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Were I live and I have been here all of my life...there use to be farmer's markets on the street corners of most intersections. We would stop there and buy some of our produce. Today, I don't see them any more. At times I do see the occasional water melon truck.
We do get local eggs from the market...other than that, (I visited ND) I'd have to move to and near family who own farms in North Dakota, so as to reverse time, so to speak. Deer meet would be the substitute for cow there. They hunt and freeze their own to get through the winters.
I live in my ex-husbands house (virtually homeless) and even though I have presented the idea to him, to take part of the back yard and turn it into a vegetable garden, he really doesn't seem to keen on the idea.
When I moved from the city to the country 15 years ago, I had a "black thumb". I killed practically every house plant I ever owned. That first summer, I took a pick axe to a small section of our yard, and put in a half dozen tomato plants. They did really well, to my shock. The next year, I doubled that (again with the pick axe), and added cucumbers and beans. It went on from there. Pretty soon at least half the yard was garden, and I got very good at growing things. I interspersed flower beds with the vegetables, to make it eye pleasing and attract bees. DH liked not having so much grass to mow. He bought me a rototiller. I worked seasonally with local farmers over the years, and learned a lot. We bought the adjoining vacant land at tax sale, got a tractor (no more pick axe) and REALLY expanded. We're presently planning a green house. I've added a patch of blueberry bushes as "edible landscaping" and apple trees.
Start small - maybe with a few tomato plants? Your ex may not notice!
Interesting that they use cows with a defective gene to do all of this. The video said that they had to use artificial insemination to pass along the gene. I guess that is because defective genes would normally be bred out of the selection process.
USDA Outsources Research As Seed Industry Seeks Faster Review (http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201105031202dowjonesdjonline000 308&title=usda-outsources-research-as-seed-industry-seeks-faster-review - broken link)
.... program is in part a response to President Obama's request to cut 5% from the USDA's budget, he added.
Opponents of biotech seeds have gone to court where they have won rulings that temporarily barred the planting of genetically modified alfalfa and sugar beets and ordered the USDA to conduct a more thorough assessment.
Biotech companies already spend significant time and money reviewing their products, and it makes more sense for the USDA to use that information through the pilot program rather than starting from square one, said Batra, of the trade group.
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I see nothing wrong with the genetic engineering industry policing itself. After all, it worked great for Wall Street.
Well, I try to avoid that. And even the little that I might be consuming without knowing it, at least I am not promoting the perversion going on in the animal sector by creating demand for meat.
All this does, is make me wish I had my own garden; raise my own cows so as to never have to see another super market again and wonder...what have they put into the food?
Embrace the future? Looks to me like the future will embrace us, in ways we don't even want to think about.
Wood pulp..that's the "added fiber". I kid you not.
I went food shopping today and everytime I saw a box with "fiber" on it I thought of chopped up trees being molded into the food we eat
After reading this article..I'll never view "fiber" in a healthy way again.
Wood pulp..that's the "added fiber". I kid you not.
I went food shopping today and everytime I saw a box with "fiber" on it I thought of chopped up trees being molded into the food we eat
After reading this article..I'll never view "fiber" in a healthy way again.
When I moved from the city to the country 15 years ago, I had a "black thumb". I killed practically every house plant I ever owned. That first summer, I took a pick axe to a small section of our yard, and put in a half dozen tomato plants. They did really well, to my shock. The next year, I doubled that (again with the pick axe), and added cucumbers and beans. It went on from there. Pretty soon at least half the yard was garden, and I got very good at growing things. I interspersed flower beds with the vegetables, to make it eye pleasing and attract bees. DH liked not having so much grass to mow. He bought me a rototiller. I worked seasonally with local farmers over the years, and learned a lot. We bought the adjoining vacant land at tax sale, got a tractor (no more pick axe) and REALLY expanded. We're presently planning a green house. I've added a patch of blueberry bushes as "edible landscaping" and apple trees.
Start small - maybe with a few tomato plants? Your ex may not notice!
Have you ever heard of Big Boy tomatoes, I'm just curious if you have? (My grandpa use to cross breed, tomatoes and roses. Not with each other...ha)
What he (X) tells me is that the neighbor has built his yard up to higher ground and has put in a system so that, rain water, will flood this backyard. That is on the right hand side though. The left hand side, I've been looking at real hard lately.
There isn't allot of shade to that area. I remember our garden my father tilled in our old homestead. There wasn't any shade to that one either. In fact, I believe that is why my father had picked that spot.
From my mother's side of the family (east Texas) I come from I was raised on the fresh farm vegetables of our extended family. Those folk's produce I'm sure is being shipped all across America and into Canada I'm sure. I'd tell the name of the Orchard, but then that would be telling of who I am. I was raised in the rose capital of Texas and that's as much as I will say about that.
As a child, I trotted behind my grandmother and I am familiar with a hoe and how to use one, as she would say, here, I need a row. And I'd get busy. The experience is there, but the kind of life and living arrangements are not as of yet, that I could re-familiarize myself with what I learned many decades ago.
One thing I did not learn from grandmother though, is how to can the fruits and vegetables. I remember some of what she did in prep work, but the finish out part in that hot kitchen, I stayed outside where it was cool. Then she'd show up with a bushel of purple hull peas and there went break time. "Draw you up a chair, here in the shade." she'd say.
We had fruit trees, but the apple tree, she had to finally chop it down. It had some kind of worm, that nested in the trunk and she could not get rid of them. Just an add of caution...I'm sure there is a solution now, that she did not know of then.
Any way, what I'm saying is for me times changed. Life choices, depicted the change to where I can no longer, even though I still live here, I can not go home. Home for me is 40 years back in time travel. The future? I can only hope.
PS: I can still cook a mean, a really mean, blueberry cobbler...grandma's recipe, of course. I can also do a better 'county time lemonade', commercial than the ones they air on TV, today, or pepperidge farm, remembers....
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I can also do a better 'county time lemonade', commercial than the ones they air on TV, today, or pepperidge farm, remembers....
