Greenjeans Farm

I finally got the rest of the garden in and we’re getting baby peas and new potatoes!  Pot roast for dinner, damn the hot!  I need some fatty meat and veggies!  Jeff put in a new screen door in the kitchen that slams and Squeaks! We have both decided that there can never be anything that really fits in this house and if it doesn’t squeak it isn’t worth it.   I absolutely love summer.  Flip flops, the river, the sun, eating, planting, eating, harvesting, eating, canning and freezing, eating! 

I have a bouquet of hot red sun flowers on the kitchen table with a bright yellow table runner,  and the freakin’ robins are eating my Rainer Cherries which are almost ready to pick!  A flock of geese flew like two feet over my head this morning!  They just went swoop, swoop, swoop.  No honking. Really spooky, it was like one giant bird!  They are getting better at flying in formation, Potter Valley geese are kind of retarded.   And I saw a bald eagle fishing the pond.   

There are times I just don’t care how funky this house is, you can’t keep a floor clean here and you have to dust and vacumm every day, and bugs crawl in and out – we found a potato bug in the bedroom today,, ugh, they look like little aliens! But otherwise it’s beautiful.  When it gets too hot we sit on the porch with the misters and the fountain going.  The lavender will start to bloom next week so it’s good the garden is done!   There is a climbing rose that grows up the crabapple that is in full bloom and honeysuckle and roses just make the air perfume!      

 When I think of my happiest times I think of my mom and dad drinking a beer on the porch after a hard day of yard work in Tacoma, dad in shorts with  his sandals with socks, brown ones with stripes at the top and his horned rimmed glasses (such the geek)!  Looking at Mount Rainier while it turned all pink and purple in the sunset.   And then I think of Memo’s  five foot back porch and the screen door and her yelling at me don’t slam the screen door, and stop jumping off the porch!  And then I would jump off the porch and cabbage wilting on the porch and running through laundry on the line because it smelled so good!   And that crazy folding stool thing in her kitchen!   

From the Wikipedia Encyclopedia:

A pesticide is a substance or mixture of substances used to kill a pest.^[1] A pesticide may be a chemical substance, biological agent (such as a virus or bacteria), antimicrobial, disinfectant or device used against any pest. Pests include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, molluscs, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms) and microbes that compete with humans for food, destroy property, spread or are a vector for disease or cause a nuisance. Although there are benefits to the use of pesticides, there are also drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other animals.

I don’t know about you, but as an organic farmer I do not list birds, mammals, fish, worms, microbes or most insects as pests.  I gladly welcome them to our farm, in fact we worry when they are not present.  That would mean that their would be no good bugs and birds to eat the bad bugs, no worms to enrich the soil, no fish or frogs to eat the flies and misquitoes.  I have yet to feel the rife competition for food, and there is very little property destruction caused by those nasty little microbes.  If pests include mammals as it does in that definition, does that not mean humans too?  Oh great, lets kill each other so we don’t compete with ourselves for food!  AND lets get those little suckers while they are young! 

I have just read an article in the Seattle P.I., regarding a study of the levels of pesticides in the system of 21 children in Mercer Island Washington.

“The peer-reviewed study found that the urine and saliva of children eating a variety of conventional foods from area groceries contained biological markers of organophosphates, the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II.

When the same children ate organic fruits, vegetables and juices, signs of pesticides were not found.

"The transformation is extremely rapid," said Chensheng Lu, the principal author of the study published online in the current issue of Environmental Health Perspectives.

"Once you switch from conventional food to organic, the pesticides (malathion and chlorpyrifos) that we can measure in the urine disappears. The level returns immediately when you go back to the conventional diets," said Lu, a professor at Emory University's School of Public Health and a leading authority on pesticides and children.

Within eight to 36 hours of the children switching to organic food, the pesticides were no longer detected in the testing.”

Nuff said?  You would think!  “Well chalk one up for the cause!”, I thought to myself,  “Yet another study with the same findings”.  I then went on to read the comments.  Some 40+ comments!  Some stating the article was a “non-story”, not unlike global warming.  Some of the comments stated that Organic food is just too expensive, and is not an alternative since the yields are so low.  There was a lot of talk about washing and peeling being a viable cure to the situation. 

Hmmm….. If organic yields are so low, why is there always a time each year that even after the 20 CSA bushel baskets have been filled some 30 times over the course of the season, I fall in a heap on the kitchen floor and declare if I see one more basket of fruit or vegetables that need to be processed I’ll go into a coma.  And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t peeled a vegetable for over 20 years, conventionally or organically grown! There are vitamins, fiber and most importantly flavor in that skin!  Peeling a vegetable would be like eating a boneless skinless Chicken breast from a chicken that was grown in a cage and fed antibiotics all of its life, what’s the point? (but that’s another story).   Most of all as a farmer I enjoy watching the quail walking across the yards, and the crazy Killdeer that lay eggs in the vegetable garden and then act like they are having a heart attack if you come near their nest.  I love the beautiful colored spiders that take residence in the rose garden.  And I even love the toad families that hide in the rocks and come out at night to eat those nasty little slugs. There’s something exciting about going out before light and feeling having the bat that eats it’s weight in insects each day whiz over your head.  Call me crazy, but I think it’s sweet that my husband has named the tree frog that sneaks in through the open window and visits the overflow drain of our bathroom sink from time to time.  Sure, sometimes there’s a worm in a tomato or an ear of corn.  And a pesky little earwig or two hiding in the cabbage, but you know?  They wash right off, and they haven’t been treated with “pesticides spawned the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II”, so it really doesn’t matter if you eat them anyway!