vegangirl.com

Check out Veggie Trader! A new website that allows you to search for fruits and veggies grown by your neighbors in local back yard gardens. Sign up and you can trade your excess garden vegetables with your neighbors. Yet another way of building a strong local community!

It doesn’t seem like there’s much going on for Asheville yet, but I did my part to help change that by signing up for a Veggie Trader account. If my garden ever manages to produce excess I will be sure to list what I’ve got and hopefully trade with a neighbor for some good stuff that I’m lacking.

Sign up! Eat well! Get to know your neighbors!

Male Chicks

Sometime around 1991 or so, I watched a video on factory farming that changed my life drastically and permanently. Among many horrific images of animal cruelty, was the sight of hundreds of unneeded male chicks being dumped into a grinder at a layer hen hatchery. Males have no value to the egg industry so they are disposed of as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Nearly 20 years later, I see this headline in my Yahoo News: Baby chicks ground alive by poultry producer: activists. My first thought, was “Yeah, no kidding. This is news?” And my next thought was, “Wow, this is finally news!”

This practice of grinding up male chicks is surely at least as old as factory farming. The “news” part is that Mercy For Animals recently caught it on tape. Of course, it was caught on tape 20 years ago or more as well. But hey, whatever gets the information out there is fine with me.

It’s really quite amazing that this made national headlines. Usually to get an animal issue even in the local paper, you have to take your clothes off, or set something on fire. What does it say for the animals and for our society that a common practice of factory farming has now made national headlines simply because a concerned person went inside with a camera?

Our land in Panama

Several years ago, in response to insane real estate prices and ever-decreasing civil liberties, my partner and I decided to do something drastic: leave the United States. I found an online resource called Escape from America magazine, which offered information on other countries across the globe to which Americans were relocating. We chose Boquete, a beautiful town in the mountains of Panama. Perhaps a bit impulsively, we bought some land there. 4 years later, we’re still here in the U.S., albeit in the mountain city of Asheville which suits us much better than Seattle.

I often hear friends talk about leaving the country “if the shit hits the fan”. And I admit, it is nice to know that I could escape to Panama and pitch a tent on my land if I really needed to. But when I really think it through, I have to conclude that if things did go crazy (and maybe they already have?) that the U.S. is exactly where I want to be.

If you read survivalist or self-sufficiency books and websites, most of them will tell you that the most important thing to get you through a long-term crisis is a community of trusted neighbors and friends. Who is the first to be targeted when times get tough? Foreigners, outsiders. That is not a unique feature of Americans. That is a common human trait throughout the world. Move to another country and when the chaos spreads there, you will then be the outsider.

And you can’t just show up in a new country, bags in hand, and expect to be allowed to stay. Panama, for instance, only allows you to stay for 90 days at a time. Most expats get around this by taking their passport to Costa Rica every 90 days, getting it stamped, and coming back into Panama. But unless you have a job skill that is rare, you had better have an income stream. Panama will not allow you to work without a work visa, in order to protect jobs for their own citizens.

There are plenty of great reasons to move abroad and plenty of places that welcome Americans, including Panama. It would be a wonderful place to live and we may still end up there one day. And I am sure that at this point, there are other countries which have far better economic opportunities than we now have here in the U.S. I am only suggesting that moving abroad because it is safer from an unknown future difficulty is not necessarily the smart move.

Instead, we changed our focus to where/how could we best enjoy a good quality of life here in the United States. Asheville has a mild climate in summer and winter, which means you can grow food just about all year long. It is protected by the mountains from most natural disasters. And the people here are absolutely wonderful. In 4 years of living in Seattle (13 years for John), we were not able to build the strong community of friends that we gained here in just our first year.

We’re building our little homestead in Asheville and building up an invaluable community of people. We have no intention of going anywhere any time soon.

In May 2006, I chose Invisalign for my orthodontic work because I thought it would be easier to clean my teeth and gums if I could remove my braces to brush and floss. You can read my earlier post on Inivisalign for some of the drawbacks.

I’ve been wearing my Invisalign tray, which serves as an ongoing retainer, every night since I ended my treatment in April 2007. I had planned on replacing it with a traditional retainer because I felt like I was putting a disgusting petri dish in my mouth every night, destroying my teeth and gums over time. Of course I clean it thoroughly before using it each time, but still.

Turns out, my concerns were probably unfounded. I’ve finally had enough money coming in to both afford a dentist visit and also new retainer. So I went to my (completely awesome) dentist for a checkup for the first time in 3 years, expecting to need a few fillings and a root canal or two. Seriously. I also brought my Invisilign tray along to ask him about alternative retainers.

First of all, I did not have a single cavity. And keep in mind, I have had terrible problems with cavities my whole life. My mouth is a mosaic of fillings. And my gums had all 1 and 2 measurements with that little pokey thing they use to check gum health. 1 is best, and 5 is the worst.

And secondly, Dr. Young, who is an outstanding wholistic, natural hippie type of dentist, believes that Invisalign trays are fine for healthy teeth and gums. And actually said that having multiple types of metal in your mouth can cause health issues. I already have a metal retainer wire from when I had braces as a kid. A traditional retainer also has a lot of metal. So he recommended against it.

So, in the end, I’m keeping my Invisalign retainer. At least until some other better option is invented. My mind is at ease now.

Just over a year ago, I wrote about using a cat food moat to foil an ant invasion. That worked well for a short while, but it got old real quick. For one thing, my cats and dog were always pushing the bowl close enough to the edge of the tupperware that the ants could still get in. For another, the cats are such messy eaters that the cat food was always getting into the water, creating the most disgusting slimey mess. Very gross.

One year later and my ants are gone for good. It was a 2-part solution, one part of which was pretty obvious. Plug the holes into the house.

I caulked the path into the house that ants were using. They almost immediately found another one. I caulked that too. And repeat. Many many times, repeat. It helps to let the little ants stay alive and well in the house because they will help you find more holes as they try to find their way back out of the house.

The second part of the solution is cinnamon. Ants will absolutely not cross it. If you have an area that you cannot seal, such as a doorway, create a thin but continuous barracade of cinnamon. Seal it if you can though, because too much cinnamon everywhere just ends up being a big mess as well.

Totally non-toxic, safe for pets, natural.

When I started my garden (much too) late last year and then again this spring, I said I’d leave updates on how things were going.

Long story short, they went not very well. I only managed to scratch out a few young chard leaves and gave up on the rest. But luckily, I also came into a job around the same time as my garden was dying and so was able to get some professional help.

I’ve got some beautiful raised beds now growing greens, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and okra. And much more on the way.

However, I’m posting all my gardening updates at foodscout.org rather than here on vegangirl, so if you’re interested, you can check it out. I’ll be posting again pretty soon since my squash is starting to come in. I’m also going to be adding another raised bed and some rain barrels for watering in the next few weeks.

Greenlife Grocery, more so than other large stores in the Asheville area, seems to be on the cutting edge of food options. While EarthFare only carries a few over-sweetened raw energy bars, raw crackers, and a couple of live food lunch-on-the-go type of items, Greenlife has an ever-expanding collection of raw food meals, snacks, desserts, fresh deli items, and ingredients.

For a long time, Greenlife has offered a full section of snacks about 7 shelves high. And they have featured some live food deli items for quite some time. In recent visits, I have discovered a new line of raw ice cream and a whole line of raw pies by Earth Cafe Living Foods in the freezer section. Both are out of this world delicious.

They have also expanded their selection of deli items and added a regular selection of to-go meals in the refrigerator. And they continue to add new snacks to their raw snack shelves all the time.

All the raw food isn’t in one place, so you have to become familiar with where everything is. Check the far left end of the deli case and the refrigerated area near the sushi. The refrigerated section in the produce area has some raw kimchee and sauerkraut and there is a mini fridge around the corner with some random items as well. The raw snacks are at the end of the pasta aisle facing the meat counter. And the frozen treats are a few feet away at the end of the freezer section.

Just like most people in Asheville, the employees at Greenlife are very friendly and helpful, so ask them to show you where all the raw food is and they’ll probably give you the full tour.

Greenlife is located at 70 Merrimon Ave.

Plum Tree

When I moved into my house 2 years ago, I was told that the pretty little tree in the front yard was a “decorative cherry tree”. What a waste to grow inedible fruit, I thought to myself.

I never noticed any fruit at all on it last year. But this year, sure enough, little hard “cherries” started appearing. But then they kept on growing, and getting lighter in color. And then the squirrels started eating them.

Well if the squirrels are eating them, what are the chances that I can’t also eat them?

Plum

By coincidence, I had to have a tree guy come by due to some other overgrown trees in the yard. And he said “oh cool, a plum tree!”

Wow. I have an actual fruit tree in my yard! And the few plums I was able to eat before the squirrels stole every last one of them, were absolutely delicious.

Bowl of Plums

Frog in my front yard

From about the age of 8 or so until I was probably around 12, I spent 2 weeks every summer in a place called Camp Segowea. I think it was in Massachusetts, somewhere in the mountains in or near the Appalachian Trail. It was very green and misty and rustic and full of bugs and little critters everywhere.

Since moving to Asheville, which is way further south but still in the Appalachian Mountains, I frequently feel as though I’m at summer camp. Whether it’s the morning drizzle that quickly dries up and turns to sunshine or a small road that is full of trees, flowers, and ferns, I can’t help but be reminded of Camp Segowea. I know “you can’t go home again”, but there’s something very comforting about that feeling.

It’s pouring rain right now, which also reminds me of summer camp, and my cat spotted a little visitor from his perch in the window. This is the first frog I think I’ve seen in the wild, probably since summer camp. It’s been a long time anyway.

I went outside to take a photo and he didn’t seem bothered by me at all. He’s still there, enjoying a big puddle on my walkway. That’s about how I remember frogs to be. The boys at camp used to catch frogs and have frog races. All they had to do was walk up to a frog and grab it – they never tried too hard to run away.

I went out onto my back porch today to take in a little vitamin D, and happened to notice that my blueberry bush – the one that I had written off for dead not a few weeks before – blossoming with new leaves. It reminded me of the ill-fated “winter greens” that I planted in October around the same time.

Spring is here. Time for new beginnings. I figure this time, my leafy greens have a couple of things going for them that they didn’t have last time around:

1. No more sub-freezing temperatures
2. No more cats using the garden as a litterbox

I used a metal rake to break the dirt up a bit and smooth things over, then sprinkled some all-purpose organic fertilizer, that I had bought for some good reason I’m sure, around the planting area. Then I buried little rows of left-over seeds from last fall.

If this goes well, maybe I’ll venture into planting some root vegetables or vine plants.