You have, no doubt, noticed prices going up for all sorts of things. Last week James and I went grocery shopping and because we buy only organic and fair trade we are used to paying a little more for certain things. But inflation is biting into the organic market too these days.

Generally we buy our produce in season from mainly Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa growers. But there isn’t much fresh produce to be had in winter in the upper midwest, so we extend our concept of local out to the United States, excepting bananas and an an occasional avocado.

It was a cold, wet spring here and farmers got a late start on the growing season. Even our CSA farmer just emailed us to say our first box won’t happen until June 21st at the earliest. The lettuce in my garden is still too small to start picking, so what’s a girl to do when she wants a spring salad? The answer has generally been thanks California!

In the past, kale and lettuce cost around $1.50 – $1.99 for a big full bunch. But this last week a very sad bunch of kale and terrible looking lettuce were both priced at $2.99!

You have probably heard about fertilizer shortages caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But in the case of certified organic, farmers are not allowed to use synthetic fertilizers. However, they still use tractors and the produce needs fuel for shipping to Minnesota, and fuel prices keep climbing. Oh, and there is that drought thing happening in California and the southwest too.

James and I looked at the sad kale and lettuce, looked at each other, and decided we didn’t need salad greens that badly. But we’re still eating greens and plenty of them. Because while the garden lettuce is not ready for picking yet, the garden is still full of edible greens. So we have been enjoying baby arugula (so gourmet!), garden sorrel, wood sorrel, curly dock, and nettles. The prickly lettuce, has also asserted itself in a few places and we can eat that too if we sauté it. Purslane is starting to sprout and I noticed some tiny sprouts of lamb’s quarters today as well. And of course there are dandelion greens and violet greens still in abundance. Who needs kale and lettuce?

When we were at the grocery store deciding to eat our garden greens we were both a little nervous about it since up until now it’s always been in addition to the cultivated greens, not the main event. To be clear, we aren’t eating these greens as fresh salad, they are being added to other things because a salad of fresh stinging nettles would be very painful. But this week has gone really well. We remind ourselves that we have spent years learning and growing a garden precisely for times like this. We are hoping to experiment with fermenting greens and also lightly boiling (I guess you call that blanching says this non-cook) and then freezing them ala Carol Deppe’s mess o’ greens. This way we will have greens to put in soups and casseroles come winter without having to give in to what might be $3.99 lettuce and kale by then.

I am feeling blessed and lucky that I have a garden to eat from, especially when I look down my street at all the houses with nothing but lawn front and back. My neighbors can probably afford lettuce, even if it hurts a bit. There are plenty of people for whom $2.99 for a head of lettuce is completely out of the question, and this breaks my heart. The way we grow and distribute food in this country is shameful. The manner in which food has become industrialized making it is cheaper to buy an artery-clogging Big Mac than it is to buy a head of organic lettuce is despicable.

And it is only going to get worse.

More and more I see articles popping up about a looming global food crisis. You can get up to speed with articles from Post Carbon Institute, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Bill McKibben.

The mainstream media babbles on about wheat and fertilizer and makes a food crisis sound inevitable and also thrilling. The industrial west, particularly the United States, assures us that it is happening to people “over there,” all those poor people in India and Africa, and has nothing to do with us. Which, of course, is a lie, because everything is interconnected. There are hungry people in the United States, just ask the food shelves how many more people need help to feed themselves these days.

The causes are many, one of the biggest is how and where we grow our food to begin with. Agriculture as currently practiced is an industry, big business, an extractivist one at that. Agribusiness is not in it to feed the world, they are in it to make money, though they will tell you otherwise. And so we keep plowing our way through fossil fueled fields of corn and soy without a care in the world. But when the tractor gets to the end of the row and can’t turn around because it is out of gas with no more to be had, then what? 

There is a lot about agriculture that has to change, but one good place to start might be to stop growing corn for ethanol, corn syrup, and all the other processed things corn gets turned into. Also, soybeans. And we need to stop growing so much corn and soybeans to feed livestock. The cow, pig, and chicken populations need to be cut back dramatically. More acres are dedicated to growing food for animals than food for people. All those acres and acres of corn and soybeans need to diversify and start growing food people can eat fresh, food we can recognize as food and not something that has been processed into the semblance of food.

We also have to stop using fertilizers made from fossil oil, regenerate degraded soils and re-localize food production. We should have started doing this a decade or more ago. Starting now is going to hurt. A lot. The people it will hurt the most are those who have the least to begin with.

None of this is a surprise. There have been farmers all around the world who saw the writing on the wall a long time ago and have worked to transform not just their farms, but to teach, support, and inspire others as well. I’m almost finished reading a book by two of those farmers, Miraculous Abundance by Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer, successful mircofarmers in France (a mircofarm is essentially a really big garden). I learned about the book from Eliza at My Solitary Hearth. These farmers grow an astonishing amount of food in a small area without using synthetic fertilizers, tractors, or other fossil fuel driven machinery. They have proven it can be done.

And if all that is not enough to worry about, the nutritional value of our food has been declining for decades. The decline is not just due to over-breeding crops and selecting for things like higher yields, longer shelf life, and qualities for better shipping. The biggest factor in nutritional quality decline is climate change. Higher carbon in the air makes plants grow faster, which increases their carbohydrate content while reducing their protein and mineral content. This is not an issue that has gotten much attention, but when it does, you can bet Monsanto will suggest GMO seeds will solve the problem. You can also bet that the unregulated vitamin and supplement industry will be pushing their products even more than they already do.

If you never thought growing your own food was necessary, it might be time to rethink that. Also might be time to learn how to forage and become accustomed to eating “weeds” (weeds that probably have more nutritional value than cultivated foods anyway).

It’s not too late to start a small garden this year in a little corner of your yard or in a few pots on your deck or balcony, or even a sunny windowsill. All of us will very likely need to grow some of our own food one day anyway, so best start now while there is still time to get the hang of it, before it becomes a necessity.

In addition to the leafy greens in the garden, I’ve been picking rhubarb about once a week, harvesting green onions and chives on the regular, and a couple weeks ago we even got to have asparagus with dinner. The garlic is looking amazing this year and should be sending up scapes in the next week or two. We have given the potatoes their first hilling, which means filling in the trenches we dug for them. If they keep growing as fast as they are, in a couple weeks we will be hilling them up again with compost. 

And the beans we planted a week ago are beginning to sprout. Actually, the black-eyed peas started sprouting within days of being planted, everyone else has been taking their time. I spied a zucchini sprout but haven’t seen any other squash sprouts yet. And no carrots either, they take so long to emerge I sometimes wonder if they ever will. I have seeded a long row of radish twice, about two weeks apart, and while both rows have sprouted, neither of them are growing much. I love radishes so their reluctance is a bit disappointing.

The chickens are doing great, though I think there must have been a recent shake up in the pecking order. Ethel is on the bottom and is always missing feathers on her head, but she is balder than usual. And poor Lucy, who seemed to always get along with everyone, is missing feathers across her back and has a naked patch on her chest. It’s Elinor and/or Mrs. Dashwood doing the plucking. Lucy is getting food and water though and still seems in good health, so we’ll leave them to work things out and keep an eye on them. Chicken drama!

Reading

• The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin. The third of the Earthsea books. I have read this one before but strangely have no memory of it, at least the early part. Maybe something will be knocked loose later.
• Unraveling by Terry Tempest Williams, a beautiful essay

Listening

• Crafting with Ursula: adrienne maree brown on Social Justice and Science Fiction. This was a long podcast and I listened in chunks, but it was soooo good!

Watching

• Lucy Worsley Investigates: The Witch Hunts. The focus is on Scotland and the first woman condemned as a witch at the beginning of the whole witch craze. It gets a bit over dramatic at times, but the information is correct and Worsley does a good job at making sure we see the “witches” as human beings.