Beautiful Pest

Invasive species can be beautiful. One example: the butterfly moth (Paysandisia archon), a stowaway in shipments of palms going from its native Argentina to the European mainland. Now thousands of them are happily devouring palm trees from the inside out all along the Mediterranean. But despite their voracious appetite for trees, they are lovely to draw.

 

Rain on me

Tags

irrigation, sustainability, water

Harvesting rainwater

 I’m not an expert on irrigation, but the cool new rainwater collection system at our local Master Gardeners demonstration plot seems like a no-brainer to me. Worldwide consumption of water is rising fast — twice the rate of the population — but fresh water makes up less than 3 percent of all the planet’s water resources. When a scarce resource falls right out of the sky, it makes sense to harvest it. That’s exactly what the folks at the county demonstration garden are doing.

Fruit trees... demonstrating!

Rainwater can be collected from any relatively clean surface (rooftops and pool covers, for example) and then used for irrigation, flushing the toilet, washing the car,  rinsing garden tools  — just don’t drink it.

The system at the demonstration garden uses rain gutters on a small outbuilding to capture water:

These gutters capture 160 - 240 gallons per 1" rainfall

Even a tiny toolshed can yield a surprisingly large volume of fresh water. According to a formula from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, a 10 x 10 foot surface collects approximately 50 gallons for every inch of rainfall.  The main tank for the demonstration garden holds 1800 gallons, and it was full:

Next stop after the rooftop: the storage tank

The thick, vertical pipe visible at the corner of the red building is the first flush diverter. It’s a simple device that catches the first flush of water during each rain — the rain that rinses off any dirt, bird droppings, acorns or leaves that might have landed on the roof recently. Once the diverter is full, the remaining water passes over it and runs into the storage tank. See the plug at the bottom of the pipe? That’s where the first flush water can be drained, between rains.

Storage tanks can be made from all kinds of clean containers. .. however,  the Cooperative Extension folks warn that you need to be very careful about what has been previously stored in them. New or never-previously-used fuel tanks, fiberglass containers or septic tanks are what they recommend for larger capacity. There are also polyethylene tanks manufactured for use in the sugar industry, which are cheap to buy and easy to rinse for repurposing as water storage.

Light colored tanks should be painted dark green or black to prevent light penetration. If you bury your storage tank, color doesn’t matter.

Distribution is by gravity or a small pump

(We’re down here in a subtropical climate zone, so temperature extremes are never a problem. But in colder climates, exposed storage tanks would need to be durable enough to tolerate water freezing and thawing during the winter. The recommendation is high-density polyethylene, and a domed top or overflow pipe to allow expansion.)

The demonstration garden slopes gently away from the water containment tank, so gravity alone was enough to provide pressure for drip irrigation. But it’s a big garden, so last week a small electric pump was installed at the base of the storage tank. Now the Master Gardener volunteers can sprinkle, mist and hose to their hearts’ content. If you don’t have electricity in the vicinity of your water storage, a gasoline pump will work.

I’m intrigued. I think a set of rain barrels and some spiffy new catchment gutters on the art studio might be a good fall project. After patiently answering my many questions, the County Extension agent gave me some sources of additional, more detailed information. I’ve listed them below. Happy harvesting!

Virginia Rainwater Harvesting Manual

Rainwater Harvesting

The Texas Manual on Rainwater Harvesting

Harvesting Rainwater for Landscape Use

The herbivore vs locavore smackdown

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, gardening, sustainability, vegetarian

 

Okay, I’ll just come right out and say it: The 2008 Local Food Challenge was not the transcendent experience I anticipated. Suddenly confronted with surviving on mostly starches and dairy, I gained five pounds the first week and promptly developed chronic indigestion.  Chocolate and avocados haunted my dreams.  Was it enlightening? You bet. Was it fun? No way.

On the positive side, the Challenge provided an ideal opportunity for The Perfect Man to master his techniques for making butter and cheese.  And, in the absence of spinach or broccoli, we discovered that fresh-picked kale makes a very respectable quiche. But drawbacks included large amounts of gasoline required to round up a very limited variety of veggies… and large amounts of time required to prepare basic ingredients.

I have enormous admiration for the brave souls who shepherded their entire families through the long month of local-only menus. Ang Jordan at Gulf Coast Local Food is at the top of that list, because she’s right here in south Alabama, where sustainability is a new and exotic concept. (Ask someone in Mobile if they support CSA, and they’re likely to assume you mean the Confederate States of America.)  Then there’s Cafe Mama, who writes about her local food quest in prose as spare and sweet as poetry. And Sarah Beam makes it all sound easy at Recipes for a Postmodern Planet.

Call me a curmudgeon, but my mood soured by the middle of the second week — around the time that I ran out of innovative ways to cook sweet potatoes.  When I turned to my fellow bloggers for inspiration, their posts sounded so…so… chipper. Was it possible that I was the only cranky Challenge participant, a vegetarian doing without vegetables, grumpily counting the days until the local-only pledge would finally end?

Well, bad attitude and all, I may have actually whittled away at the old carbon footprint much more than I thought — just by being a longtime herbivore. According to a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, raising animals for food results in more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. Yikes.  But here’s the good news: even a modest reduction in meat consumption takes a big bite out of fossil energy use. 

 On Saturday, I accompanied The Perfect Man to a last-chance plant sale at Mobile Botanical Gardens. All the unsold plants left over from their annual autumn sale were offered at bargain prices. Fun! We brought home two big Bengal Tiger cannas, a new Louisiana iris for the water garden, a pot full of pineapple sage and a tiny container of the whimsical succulent my grandmother calls “hen and chicks.” Our loot is pictured below, but excuse the camera strap dangling in the upper right corner. It was early, and I needed some coffee.

 

Forbidden Fruit

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, food, gardening, green living, sustainability

                                               With apologies to Titian.

Last night, I dreamed about apples — tart, juicy Granny Smiths; shiny Macintoshes; Golden Delicious with the mellow taste of autumn beneath their skins. I dreamed of glistening chunks of apple piled on a plate, just waiting to be speared with my fork. They looked delicious. And then…and then…

I woke up. It was Day 6 of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, and if there are apples grown within my 200-mile range northward from the Gulf coastline, I haven’t found them. Nor bananas. Nor rice. What I HAVE found in generous abundance are sweet potatoes. I got out of bed and had a plump, baked sweet potato for breakfast.

As a longtime vegetarian with a big organic garden, I didn’t realize how dramatically my diet would change with the onset of the October challenge month. Before last week, the major part of my daily food intake consisted of fresh fruits and vegetables, grains and soy. I occasionally ate bread, and my moderate dairy consumption came mostly in the form of homemade yogurt and cheese. I drank lots of juices.

Now, under the 200-mile rule, most of those fruits and vegetables are off limits. It’s planting time in our subtropical gardening zone, so all our winter greens and cole crops are mere seedlings this month. Kale, bless its fast-growing heart, will be ready to start eating next week. But the rest — four types of lettuces, three types of cabbage, the broccoli, cauliflower, collards, field peas and butternut squash — are weeks and weeks away from harvest. So, I’m eating LOTS of whole-grain bread and LOTS of our homemade dairy, which has been an unpleasant surprise to my fruit-and-veggie-based digestive tract.

Suddenly, shopping for vegetables has taken on a treasure hunt aspect. My Saturday trek to the weekly grower’s market was disappointing (plenty of candles, flowers, handmade soaps and honey, few edibles) until we spotted a table selling eggpant. Yay! And a pint jar of blueberry preserves from a neighboring county. Yesssss! I found some leathery-looking Alabama green beans in a neighborhood market this weekend, and — hallelujah! — some fresh squash from a grower in Lucedale, Mississippi (50 miles from home). I discovered on Saturday night that tiny red potatoes, roasted in the oven, taste even better when they’re seasoned with thankfulness that the soil they were pulled from lies only a little way down US Highway 98. Like pieces in a culinary jigsaw puzzle, we fit together a half-dozen zucchini here and a handful of green tomatoes there, as we find them. I’m learning that practically every item in the average grocery store —  roughly 50,000 different items — has been hauled here from somewhere far away. I’m learning to be flexible. I’m learning a deep appreciation for simple meals.

But man, oh, man. An apple sure would taste good.

2008 Eat Local Challenge, Day 2: A peek inside the pantry

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, food, gardening, sustainability

My significant other, The Perfect Man, designs and builds homes. His houses are not large, but he uses light and form to create a comfortable sense of spaciousness. A cupboard tucked here, a window seat there, a cozy set of bookshelves… and the result is a house that quietly comforts and nourishes the people who live within its walls. When it comes to square footage, substance beats size every time.

That’s how I feel about my kitchen pantry today. My groceries are all about substance: no frozen veggie burgers, no boxed snack crackers, just a few fresh local ingredients.  At the close of the second day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, there isn’t much in there. But there’s enough.

Breakfast was three locally grown satsuma oranges and a cup of coffee. The satsuma, familiar to most people in the form of canned mandarin oranges, is coldhardy enough to grow here along the Gulf Coast. Late in the nineteenth century, sprawling groves of the sweet little citrus covered hundreds of acres just to our east, in Baldwin County — until brutal freezes in 1894 and 1895 brought a quick and icy end to large-scale Alabama orange cultivation.  Since then, they have become a favorite of backyard grovesmen (The Perfect Man has several young trees) and small farmers. Tiny, leather-skinned and sweet as honey, they are scrumptious replacements for my usual morning glass of commercial orange juice.

I made the short trip to a family farm market across the bay in Daphne, scoring a few more provisions for the pantry shelf: Mississippi sweet potatoes; coarse grits and corn meal from a Louisiana town 20 miles inside my 200-mile limit; local peanuts still in their big, knobby shells. And wonder of wonders, on a rack near the cash register was one lone remaining loaf of walnut wheat bread just waiting for me to invite it home for lunch. (It was made by Jane Holland Smith, The Bread Lady, who works her bakery magic in a special kitchen she built next to her house. She’s always my first stop during our downtown farmer’s market season.)

Alas, the locally grown zucchini I bought never made it to the pantry at all. Atticus assumed that the green oblong was a strange new chew toy. Judging from the expression on his face, it was very tasty.

2008 Eat Local Challenge, Day 1: Little bitty circle

Tags

2008 Eat Local Challenge, food, green living, locavores, sustainability

 

I confess: I’m guilty of wanton lust. It happened in the aisle of our neighborhood Fresh Market this afternoon, when I was suddenly confronted with a display piled high with gorgeous imported chocolates. Here I was, on the very first day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge — an entire month pledged to consuming only foods grown and produced within 200 miles of my front door — and I had wandered smack into the valley of the shadow of Godiva… my favorite luxury.

But I was headed for the produce department, and I was on a quest. The Fresh Market is a wonderful and eclectic grocery, a feast for the senses where classical music wafts overhead through air scented with exotic spices, and I knew it had the most impressive vegetables in town. Even better, every item is labeled with the area of origin. I live in a mostly rural state, in a city surrounded by agriculture: vast cotton and soybean fields lie just beyond the suburbs; I’ve seen sweet potatoes growing out there, and Silver Queen corn. So I naturally assumed that our local grocery stores would be well stocked with South Alabama produce, right?

Well, not exactly. Fresh from South America…Product of Mexico..Washington State…Carmel Valley, California. Feeling deflated, I spoke with a representative of the store’s produce section. He was kind and sympathetic, but he couldn’t help.

“Within 200 miles?” he repeated thoughtfully. “No, we don’t have a single thing. We had some local okra a while back, but we don’t have any now.” Suddenly, I felt the circle drawn on my map start to shrink.

My next stop was the organic produce counter at a spacious new health food market. I was surprised and disappointed to strike out again. The beautiful winter squash, broccoli crowns, tomatoes and onions, piled up in tantalizing pyramids, all wore cheerful stickers attesting to the fact that they had traveled more than 1,000 miles from farms in Mexico. (Amazingly, that’s still considerably less than the 1,500 miles an average food product travels in the US… a practice that gobbles up 100 billion gallons of oil every year. Check out the journey from the farm to your fridge with video artist Molly Scwartz in Watch Your Foodometer.)

“I’m so sorry,” said the young woman at the cash register in the health food market. “We’re working on getting a contract for some local produce. I don’t know if it will be this month.”

So, it’s going to be a skimpy menu at my table for a couple of days, until the first Farmer’s Market of the fall season kicks off downtown. We lost the contents of our freezer (including some of our summer garden bounty) last month when the door failed to close properly. But I won’t starve — outside, the tender baby kale is ready to be thinned. Our homemade yogurt qualifies for the Challenge, because it’s made from milk produced inside my map circle. Likewise the block of homemade mozzarella cheese, which I sliced at lunchtime and enjoyed with a big dollop of the green tomato chow-chow that The Perfect Man created from our summer harvest. Tomorrow evening, when I’m caught up on illustration work, I plan to do a little bread baking. It will be simple fare until Saturday, and then I’ll plot a course for next week.

Cute rodents and crisp romaine

                                                            Alabama Beach Mouse  (c)2008 Val Webb

 

                  Sketch: Delmarva Fox Squirrel (c)2008 Val Webb

 

A few weeks ago, Terry Burger mentioned the dwindling fox squirrel population in his beautifully written — and unfailingly relevant — blog.  I had no idea what a fox squirrel looked like, so I did a little research. Here, I quickly realized, is a furry little creature with a cuteness quotient worthy of a Disney animated feature. Big, bright eyes and chubby cheeks.  An abundantly fluffy tail.  A perpetually cheery and inquisitive facial expression.  I remembered reading that funding for species protection has been found to heavily favor cuteness. Public support is strong for penguins, pandas and koalas… but most people find it difficult to get misty-eyed about critically endangered fish, moths or worms.

Nevertheless, the fox squirrel and the equally appealing Alabama beach mouse have been added to the growing collection of little paintings on postcards I’m creating for an upcoming show. Postcards from the Edge of Extinction will open May 9 at the Mobile Arts Council galleries. 

Last night, we dined on the first salads of spring. The leaf lettuces (buttercrunch, romaine, oak leaf and red oak leaf) are sweet and crisp. They taste like sunlight and promise. We picked the tender side leaves at dusk, after a day of soft rain.  Mmmmmm… eating the first harvest of the spring garden always feels like the height of luxury.

Adventures at the International Builders’ Show: Day I

I’ve divided the Builders’ Show posts into three digestible chunks, with sketchbook doodles to accompany each bite.  The show is vast (housed in the nation’s second largest meeting venue, the two-million-square-foot Orange County Convention Center) and so we spent hours hiking long miles of elaborate product displays, attending the continuous lectures and seminars, and venturing out into the surrounding county to visit actual concept houses. 

Highlights this year included a top-secret sneak preview of Dell‘s new waterproof, smashproof, drive-your-car-over-it-proof “Rugged Laptop.” After seeing it during a lecture by Dell marketing chief Mark Jarvis, we got up close and personal with this new super-tough computer at Dell’s exhibit. It’s heavy. It’s square. It looks like the lovechild of a laptop and a Hummer H2. And, with an estimated price tag around $3,000 it has premium pricing in common with the Hummer. But you really CAN drive your car over it, according to the helpful Dell representative manning the booth.

Mardi Garden

Here in the cradle of Mardi Gras, schools and businesses have shut down while the parades roll and the revelers dance in the streets downtown. Warm, damp, windy weather is blowing ashore from the Gulf of Mexico. Suddenly it’s short-sleeve weather again. The garden is calling! We spent all of yesterday turning the patch of soil that will soon be planted with early potatoes, and after hauling and spreading five loads of compost I’m reminded of my unfulfilled resolution to exercise more. Ouch!

     

I’ve completed two more gouache paintings for my show, Postcards from the Edge of Extinction.  Meet the Thick-Billed Parrot (Mexico) and the Splendid Leaf Frog (Central America).  The patterns on the leaf frog’s skin truly ARE splendid… and fun to paint, too.

The Perfect Man gave me an early Valentines Day present this afternoon: a wonderfully intricate Andy English wood engraving, Two Turtle Doves. For Andy’s fascinating step-by-step post on how he created this lovely image — and a photo of the finished print — click here. Prepare to be amazed!

Garden pests, antifreeze and ice cream

Here in the deep South, our pleasantly cool winter weather is punctuated with the occasional three-or-four-day arctic blast of subfreezing temperatures. During these brief periods, much grumbling can be heard throughout the region. We don’t like the cold.

“That freeze last night killed off the rest of my winter vegetables,” we tell our friends at the local feed and seed store, the one place where such garden casualties are treated with sympathy and concern. “But at least the cold will kill off all the bugs.”

Alas, science is rapidly proving that it simply isn’t so. We now know that insect blood contains a protein that works very effectively as a natural antifreeze. The antifreeze protein prevents ice crystals from growing, so the bugs survive frigid weather and are still very much alive (and really, really hungry) when warm days return.

That’s the BAD news. The GOOD news is that the same handy antifreeze proteins are found in some fish blood, and their amazing properties offer hope for future technology that would allow transplant organs to be safely stored at low temperatures. (The antifreeze protein is already being replicated using yeast that contains a fish gene. And, um, guess where it’s being used? Let’s just say, if you’re eating a Breyers Light Double Churned chocolate ice cream bar right now, you might want to go ahead and finish it all up before you read any further…)