I heard this song and thought of Puerto Rico. It really feels like Puerto Rico to me. I love the summer-like weather we’ve been having. Gardening, listening to music, wearing warm-weather clothes and flip-flops, drinking sun tea with fresh mint from the garden, eating salads that are 10 minutes old.
For about 4 months a year in Colorado it feels tropical here too, and I love it. My swing is tropical, too!
Our Seed starter setup
It is the start of the gardening season here in Colorado. All the local stores start to stock seeds, compost, potting soil, pots, shovels, gloves and all the related items a person might need to grow some food or do some landscaping. Cassie was lucky enough to score some free seeds at a local gardening workshop. More seeds than we could possibly use.
We are going to plant a variety of peppers, tomatoes, melons, lettuce, strawberries and some flowers.
I got an early start last weekend but maybe I wore myself down to much. I was sick the previous week and recently I’ve had a fever of 102 for the last few days. It really sucked, mainly kind of a chest cold. It put me down for the count and all I could do was sleep and try to keep warm. Luckily today I am feeling better and I decided to resume light garden work and it was a beautiful day.
We’ve decided to move the chicken from the greenhouse (which was a temporary location) into a home built chicken coup that I am making so she wont eat all the seedlings. More on the coop in coming days.
When I was expanding our vegetable garden I moved some rocks and landscaping fabric. I found a whole lot of bindweed. This stuff lives under any condition imaginable. Its been under wraps for over 3 years and was just continuing to grow. Why can’t food to grow this easily?
Bindweed
Noodles? No…Bindweed!
We bought some compost a week ago to amend the soil in our vegetable garden. It was $1 a bag which I didn’t think was too bad. But it is cow poop, so I dont think they could charge too much. Their marketing spin on it was “Steer Manure”. Makes it sound better.
Chicken bug buffet
It is also time to cleanout the greenhouse where the chickens have been fertilizing all winter long. We use an old cat feeder for the chicken food and Cassie’s mom Charlotte was kind enough to give us a chicken water dish. She actually just happened upon it beside a trash can one day while she was watching the chickens for us when we were in Puerto Rico! That is just plain lucky.
Chickens old house
Due to the chicken needing to be restricted from growing plants we also have to build a section of fence. We were finding parts today and some of them wouldn’t fit in the Honda so they went ON the Honda.
Strapped to the roof
Britton and I went on the Tour De Farms events from the Rocky Mountain Sustainablilty group on Saturday. It was pretty fun. We loaded up the bikes in the Honda Civic and met at the Farmer’s Market in Fort Collins. There we had a discussion about local food economies and the benefits of eating organic. Then we looked around the Farmer’s Market and ate some Grand Junction peaches.
At the Farmer’s Market
From there we headed off on bike as a group to a couple of urban backyard gardens and discussed the importance of this.
In an Urban Garden
Then we rode a little more and saw a couple of commercial operations including an organic nursery and greenhouse operation that is part of a larger farm out in Wellington and a Community Supported Agriculture farm that has over 125 members.
Rows of Food with a Mountain backdrop
It was pretty cool to see over 50 people in a row on bikes going from farm to farm in a 5 mile radius in Fort Collins.
Biking to and fro
The last event at Happy Heart Farm was probably the best. We talked about the importance of transportation in the equation (biking) to reduce our carbon footprint and even had a bike courier deliver lunch from a local co-op. It was definitely a pretty hippie and awesome day. The speaker even talked about moving from a “locavore” society to a “bike-a-vore” society. Which made me think, who eats their bicycle anyway? 🙂
Even the sandwich choices were either vegetarian or vegan -that’s pretty rare. I would have liked to have seen a few animals as part of the discussion on farming -especially for the kids to play with, and maybe a little more diversity in the people who turned out for the event, but overall, it was a great way to spend a morning. And we ended up at New Belgium’s again which made Britton all the happier…
Hanging out at Happy Heart Farm under the old tree arch
When we came home, we hung out with Matt and Jamie at our house for a little while and then slept out in our backyard in a tent to complete the hippie day.
Britton by the tent
The whole day overall was yet another training for Puerto Rico. I believe there are very few organic farms or CSAs there. It would be wonderful to create a farm-stay program where people could stay at the place, work and eat. It gave us renewed vigor and strength that this is going to be one of the coolest things in our lives. We probably would do it here in Colorado except, well, we have a winter season that goes from about the middle of October until the middle of April. I am ready to live like this -well maybe not the whole tent thing 🙂 – year-round.
By Cassie
Gathered up the materials: Eggs straight from our hard working and feisty leghorn backyard chicken, basil (the chickens have helped our grasshopper infestation as well so we have more basil another benefit!), garlic clove, cherry tomatoes, jalapeno, potatoes (all from our garden) and tortillas from a Greeley tortilleria
Purple potatoes are awesome! Unlike red potatoes, the potatoes are purple through and through. Britton didn’t even have to dig much at all to get these out of our garden
We had to use up some of the older store-bought eggs as well. Can you tell which is which? **Hint the local egg is bigger and oranger!** FYI-Free range eggs like these are much higher in omega 3 and have a closer omega 3/omega 6 ratio than industry eggs. This is mainly due to the fact that they can eat grass, bugs and other plants in addition to just feed
VOILA!
YUM!
If you have never heard of the locavore movement, aka real food movement, aka local food security, aka 100 mile diet, aka food sustainablity and related to the organic food movement, this meal is a representative of this. It is not all that hard especially in the summer. Basically, the assumption is that we can use less fossil fuels, bring ourselves closer to nature, feed ourselves nutritious foods and avoid the atrocities that are committed every day in the conventional food industry such as genetically modified (GMO) foods, pesticide residue, chemical dependence and a disconnect from nature.
An example of this: Most egg and meat chickens in the conventional industry have their beaks burnt down when they are chicks so that they don’t peck the other chickens to death because they are so stressed. The local food movement (locavore movement) also avoids the monoculture tendency in the current farming practices which means you can grow a variety of things to eat rather than just fields and fields of corn (most of which is not to eat anyway).
This is a major reason why I am so excited to live in Puerto Rico. I can eat local and healthy here in Colorado in the summer (with a lot of help from sprinklers or it’d be too dry!), but not so much in the winters. I can’t wait until we can eat off of the land year round! In fact, there is often so much food that one family could never eat it all. Imagine: Oranges, grapefruits, passionfruit, mangoes for breakfast, fresh avocados, tomatoes, goat cheese, and eggs for lunch, and salad, beans, fried plantains and maybe some fresh meat for dinner with a fresh lime and mint with local Bacardi rum or a lime slice for a Medalla Light (local Puerto Rican beer). All from your own yard or within 100 miles! And that’s just an idea…I am sure we will have to be very creative in order to use all the different things out there.