Plant Garlic

About three weeks ago we welcomed our son into the world. He was due around the time first frost was predicted for our area. In the days before his birth we got a small cold snap that crippled tomatoes in the garden. We picked all the basil the night before and made double batches of pesto. After his birth, and with the support of my parents and husband, I was able to spend a couple precious minutes in the garden planting garlic.

I love growing garlic. You plant it in the fall, right around first frost, giving it just enough time to grow roots but not so much time that it will put up a lot of growth that would be killed by the cold winter temperatures. Most of the fall chores for the garden involve pulling out spent plants and preparing beds for winter-- tucking garlic bulbs into the soil is a forward-looking exception. 

The early rooting helps keep the bulb from being heaved out of the ground by freezing. Then the garlic waits under several inches of mulch through the winter. In the spring it will be one of the earliest things to come poking through the soil, green and hopeful. You can clip and use the slender curling scapes the hardneck garlic puts out in early summer. Harvest the garlic late in the summer when the stalks and fronds have begun to yellow. Let the heads of garlic dry in a cool dark place. 

Junior Urban Land Scouts!

This text comes from the field book of one of the campers this summer.

It is fall-ish now: cooler, crisper skies, shriveled leaves, and more rain. It is a fine time to be an Urban Land Scout-- there's still so much ripening and dropping these days. This week also marks the start of Junior Urban Land Scouts at the Boys and Girls Club. I am thrilled to get to work with them and eager to see what lessons come out of our time together. More on that project as it progresses.

On the subject of progress: one of my goals for the ULS (and now JULS) is to get the levels and actions refined, well documented, and more modular (i.e. in a pdf) so that other groups may confidently start their own Urban Land Scout tribe, junior or otherwise. Likewise, I hope to host a foraging tour in November akin to the earlier "gleaning tours" and "Tour de Plants." Both the Junior Urban Land Scout curriculum and the tours are simple and easily adapted to locale. Would you like to host one in your city? Send me a message and I'll set you up with all you need...which is not much at all once you have the dee-sire.

Dissemination (or Ash's Food Musings, Level 6)

At its base level, the Urban Land Scouts are about increasing awareness in the hopes that a change in awareness will lead to a change in behavior. One of the ways we do that is by talking about, writing about, and otherwise disseminating what we learn. In order to earn the Level 6 badge the Scout "shares information freely and teaches others what she knows." Most often this is in the form of a blog post (hence the punny image on the badge.) While you obviously don't have to be posting to the web to share information or teach others, the emphasis on blogging is a deliberate reminder that Urban Land Scouting is a contemporary effort. We're not neo-luddites longing for steam-powered appliances and horse-drawn transportation. We're working with what we've got, where we are. Lucky for us, we've got the world wide web.

Ash has been churning through the ranks of Urban Land Scouts and recently posted this short piece about her journey thinking about food. We repost it with her permission.

Food Musings

Anyone who follows my posts is well aware that food and where it comes from occupies much of my thought and energy of late. It all started almost two years ago when I went on a food de-tox that forced me to become aware of what I ate and the effect food had on my body and soul. I started thinking about food as medicine for my body and about food as energy. Of course, I couldn't think about food as energy without recognizing that perhaps, like all fuels, some sources of energy are more harmful to Mother Earth and her Creatures than others. We're all aware of the damage fossil fuels have done and continue to do to our environment. It turns out that the way we get almost all of our food in this country is having an even greater detrimental effect on Mother Earth and her Creatures.