Garden, take 1

I've been reading. Not that that's news, but I've been devouring everything I can find about sustainable gardening, eating locally, and being a good steward of our planet. Sounds cheesy, huh? Not so much when you consider that popcorn, cookies, and gas station crackers have a preservative made from butane...or that a cow fed solely on corn wouldn't live past two years old because its liver would explode.

OK, with that preface, where can I go now? Hm...stepping down off my soap box for a bit, I suppose. After doing all this reading, the next logical step was to start a garden. I want very much to take control over what Matt and I put into our bodies. I feel that we have a responsibility to our bodies to keep them as healthy as possible by making good choices. We can also do our part to influence the food industry in a positive way by putting our money where our values are: at the Farmer's Market, with the locally grown veggies at HT, and at restaurants that support local food.

On Saturday (4-3), Matt and I spent the morning wandering around the Piedmont Triad Farmer's Market. It has been a seriously cold winter around here. Lots of snow and super-low temperatures. As a result, there was almost no locally-grow food available yet. We saw collards, kale, mustards, and spinach, as well as these awesome planters full of lettuces. There were also sweet potatoes and regular potatoes galore.

However, the most abundant items were plants. It was so lovely to spend the morning walking along rows of green growing things. :) We bought eight heirloom tomato plants (four German Johnson and four Mortgage Lifter), garlic, Moroccan peppermint, African blue basil, stevia, Greek oregano, creeping rosemary, parsley, Cuban oregano, and aloe. I potted them all in plastic pots with the cheapest topsoil I could buy from Home Depot. I went ahead and installed those cheap, ugly metal frames for the tomatoes and put multi-colored aquarium rocks on top of the soil to help retain water and keep the squirrels out. Awesome.

The same day, I planted some seeds I bought before Spring Break! I bought long rectangular planters and filled them with the same cheap topsoil (which is gross and full of clumps and sticks, but oh well). I planted organic Swiss chard, spinach, and two varieties of lettuce. I also planted an heirloom cucumber that's round and yellow, like a lemon. I covered the soil in these pots with aquarium rocks too.

I chose the heirloom and organic varieties for a very specific reason. There are a tiny handful of major corporations (six, if I remember correctly), that control 98% of the seeds distributed world-wide for food purposes. Many of the seeds and plants distributed by these corporations have been genetically modified. Possibly the scariest modification is one called a "terminator gene", which prevents plants from reproducing naturally. This requires farmers and gardeners to buy new seeds or plants every year. There's another modification which increases resistance to diseases or pests, but only with the application of a specific chemical to "turn on" the resistance. Guess who sells the chemical? Ten points to anyone who said it was the same corporations which sell the seeds. So anyway, I don't really want all those genetically modified foods in my system. Who knows how the altered DNA might affect me? I mean, a terminator gene. Scary.