Figuring out first-hand food
Let me just say one thing. It was Kevin’s idea. We’ve got four overwintered collard plants that are ready for their Little Shop of Horrors audition. Every day, they send up seed heads in what I am trying to make a vain effort to reproduce. To that end, every day I go out there with [...]
I know I’m not the only one who has trouble thinning seedlings. In fact, I struggle with the whole philosophy of planting more seeds than you need just so you can snip the life out of two-thirds of them just as the little proto-plants stretch their legs. Is there a reason we can’t simply figure [...]
The miracle of composting is that it turns garbage and poop into fertilizer, but there’s just no getting around the fact that, before it’s fertilizer, it’s garbage and poop. Forget that at your peril. Yesterday, Kevin and I forgot it. Because we’re thisclose to getting pigs this spring, we went to visit a local pig [...]
I’ve often wished Kevin and I could trade brains. Not forever, of course. I want to give his back as soon as I understand why he likes everything to be big and/or dangerous, and why he’s not afraid of things that scare the bejeezus out of me. And I’m sure he’d want to unload mine [...]
It sometimes feels like Starving is an exercise in which Kevin thinks of things and I write them down. Those of you who follow this space know that he is the mastermind behind the chicken coop and the sabiki rod, the turkey pen and the chicken plucker. Also, the stump pulling, the less said about [...]
It’s time to play my favorite springtime game: Annual or Perennial? Since we started growing food, the distinction has been a continual irritant. Why is it that the things you want to eat, like tomatoes and peppers, grow on persnickety plants that have to be handled just so and then die in October, while plants [...]
Do you want the good news or the bad news? We’ll start with the good news. The good news is that our hoophouse has successfully extended our growing season. Granted, it’s gotten an assist from the warmest winter in human memory, but it still felt good to be out there in January, harvesting the parsnips [...]
This year, in planning our garden, we made a mistake. Surprising, eh? We planted a lot of winter squash. We picked two varieties: Delicata, and a giant kind I don’t know the name of but what we call Sasquash. We chose Delicata because it is supposed to taste very good. We chose Sasquash because it [...]
If there were statistics on such a thing, I would be willing to bet that the data would show that chicken owners are much more likely than your average American to have a garden. Chicken-keeping and vegetable-growing come from closely related impulses. You want to eat eggs, you want to eat squash, and you like [...]
When I lived in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of paying the occasional visit to a woman named Frieda. Her last name is lost to me, but I remember vividly how much I enjoyed spending time with such an erudite, interesting human being. She was a mathematician by training, but she seemed to know [...]
Tamar Haspel has been writing about food and health for over a decade. She recently moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod. She’s adjusting well. [Read More …]
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