Thanksgiving: Hug a Farmer
As mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I started a small garden this year. I was quite pleased with the some of the successes and disappointed with the failures, although it taught me a lot about gardening. As it was a hot summer, I had to water the garden every day. I gave fertilizer to the plants every week and checked them to be sure that they were growing well. I checked on the plants every day. Heck, they were like an extension of my family. Throughout the course of the summer, I got lots of cherry tomatoes:
I also grew strawberries but my yield was low with only a few strawberries per week:
At one point, I was cultivating 5 or 6 yellow zucchini per week, some of which were huge:
but the cauliflower and broccoli yield was underwhelming:
Broccoli, cauliflower and zucchini from my garden
Then, something happened to my beautiful zucchini plant. It looked like rot but my colleague Laurence told me that it was likely a beetle that lays its eggs in the zucchini flowers and basically rots it from the inside. I lost both my plants in the span of two weeks. My sustainable sister Nancy had a similar fate befall her garlic: a 2 mm worm destroyed her crop. This made me realize how difficult it is to be farmer. You are at the mercy of the weather, insects and animals.
As it is fall and harvest time, I went to the local market to buy some tomatoes to make tomato sauce (more about that later):
A bounty of tomatoes at the market
Only $22 for 50 lbs (25 kg) of Italian tomatoes. Only $22! Imagine how many tomatoes the farmer has to sell to earn a decent living. Subject to the vagaries of the weather and pests, a lot needs to happen to get all these fruits and vegetables to our markets and stores. Seeing all this beautiful produce made me realize that we need to appreciate the hard-working people growing our food for us.
On this Thanksgiving, I ask that you hug (or thank) a farmer for his or her hard work.
Good fresh food on our tables is what makes life worth living. Happy Thanksgiving!
Challenge for Week: Did you have a garden this year? How did it work out? If not, don’t forget to hug or thank a farmer for everything that they do to provide us with healthy food for our families!
Hi Sandra – great article. I know from experience too on my balcony how hard it is. I am really impressed about your success. I never imagined before how “sensitive” all the plants are and how much “poison” you could already use. So I am going to hug a farmer next weekend 🙂 Best Alex
Thanks for sharing this feedback Alex! So glad that you enjoyed the article… and thanks for hugging a farmer ;-)!
Hi Sandra
For me some of the tricks about gardening is choosing wht to grow and what can be stored. Potatoes for example are easy to grow and can be stored for a long time in the right conditions. A small plot can feed the family all year. There are tricks to storing carrots too – but carrots aren’t so easy to grow. Zucchinis are always fun – though overwhelming at times.
A weekly dose of fertiliser is probably overdoing it, tbh. Commercial farmers won’t do that, especially the organic ones. It is good enough to get the manure/compost into the soil at the beginningof the year and let the plants soak it up over the season. Watering and weeding is more important. Of course, it is important to get the fertiliser and the plant combinations right: not everything needs nitrogen.
Here in London UK I was picking red and green tomatoes today! Green tomatoes turn red at home. They don’t need to be in a bag or in the sun. And they taste as good in my opinion.
Have fun!
Randy.
Thanks for this feedback Randal! I was planning to try carrots next year. Since it has turned cold here, I am also picking my last red and green tomatoes. Not sure what to do with the green tomatoes but my sister tells me to make ketchup out of them.