Shopping in the Backyard

Summer is one of my favorite seasons, because it's that time of year when you can simply walk outside and stroll through the garden with a produce bag and pick your groceries for the evening meal. Row markers become menu entries as I go shopping in the garden for the family dinner.

Most of the time, I pick only what I need for the day, washing and cooking it immediately after picking it. Sometimes, however, a particular plant or group of plants comes due for picking in larger quantities. With the herbs, for example, we'll pick them in large quantity when the plants get big and when they get ready to bolt. Then we'll dry them and crush them to fill our spice jars in the kitchen.

Other types of produce may be frozen, dried, canned, pickled or otherwise prepared and preserved for use during the winter.

It's still early in the season so many of the crops haven't ripened yet. Nevertheless, we have harvested more than 4.5 lbs of miscellaneous produce from our small garden. In a few more weeks, blueberries and blackberries will be ripening on the mountain on which we live and we'll pick pounds of them for both immediate use and freezing.

          Food Preservation Tip: When freezing blueberries, spread them out on flat baking sheets with space between each berry. Place the baking sheets into the freezer until the berries are frozen solid. Then remove them from the freezer, bag them up and put them back in the freezer. When you thaw them for use, they'll retain their shape and firmness much better than if they were initially frozen in a big lump.

Garden Produce Quality Guarantee

When we shop for produce in our backyard, we know that it has not been sprayed with whatever pesticides are legal in its country of origin, we are confident that it has not been exposed to a processing plant contaminated with salmonella or E. coli. With the prevalence of reports of widespread food-borne contagion these days, that's no small benefit.

The other thing we can be sure of when we pick produce from our garden is that it's fresh and packed full of nutrition, without the incredible amounts of sodium added to canned vegetables. With family members in the home on medically necessary low-sodium diets, that's no small benefit either.

Putting up Green Beans by Blanching and Freezing Them

"Green beans are one of most prolific vegetable plants in my garden, year after year. Once the plants start producing, they'll keep producing green beans all season long. The pole bean varieties will continue growing and actually increase their production over time as the plant continues to get bigger and bigger. With just six pole bean plants in my garden, I am picking them at least two days out of three and getting more than my wife and I can eat each time we pick." So what do we do? We blanch and freeze the excess and enjoy green beans all year round.

Read more about how to optimize production of green beans and blanch and freeze them here.

Food Supply Safety: Exploding Melons

This article about exploding melons in China points out another reason to try to grow as much of your own food as possible and to buy the rest from trusted, preferably local sources. In many countries laws governing which chemicals can be used on food crops or even livestock intended for human consumption are very lax. Even if such rules are in place, enforcement is often spotty at best.

In the case of this specific example, farmers in China were adding excessive amounts of forchlorfenuron on their watermelon crops. This chemical is designed to make the fruit grow faster, rapidly expanding its size and weight. For crops sold by the pound, this can mean additional profit for the farmer.

While forchlorfenuron is used in the United Stated for certain fruits such as kiwi and grapes, amounts are regulated. In China, it seems, at least some farmers got the idea that if a little is good, more is better. While much of the fruit so treated has burst and become worthless, thanks in part to the heavy rains that magnified the effect of the chemical causing the melons to grow so quickly that the rinds split open and ruined the crops in the field, different weather conditions could have resulted in a different outcome.

Here are the USDA safety findings for forchlorfenuron.  Studies on animals show that it can result in low body weight, low birth weight, and some significant kidney problems in animals. No comprehensive human tests have been conducted. It's not clear how much of the chemical was being used in China or what concentrations were found int he flesh of the fruit. So there is no way of knowing how the dosage compares to that used in the animal tests.

This, unfortunately, is not the only case of tainted food supplies from China and other sources. Melamine has been found in milk, eggs, baby formula and other food products in China. In one famous case, a supplier was even marketing the toxic by-product of plastic manufacture as a protein content enhancement to food processors. Because a chemical in it mimics one tested for in protein tests, it essentially caused a false positive result in protein testing for foods.

Only a very small percentage of food entering the United States (or even food produced within the United States) is ever tested for these kinds of contaminants. As a consumer, you simply can't know what's in most of the food you eat if you buy food produced in large commercial operations, especially those from regions where the existence or effectiveness regulations and oversight is dubious, at best. If, however, you grow your own food, you are in control of what goes in it. If you buy from local farms, you can often actually visit them as see their operations or at least talk to someone from that farm and ask questions abotu their practices.

Eating local foods, gardening and raisng your own food are not just good for the environment, they can protect you, individually, from the risk of dangerous chemical contaminants that may be added to the food supply without your knowledge or consent.