http://radishmagazine.com/stories/display.cgi?prcss=display&id=347681

with many more pictures than the printed version.

We are now ready to sign up new members for the 2007 season.  Please click on membership and read the membership information.  If you are interested, please fill out a printed copy of the membership agreement form, and send it to us with your deposit. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at barefootgardens2003@yahoo.com or 254-3254.

Chicago Tribune: Appetite mounts for local produce
January 29, 2007

Article Link

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0701290118jan29,1,248302,print.story?coll=chi-bizfront-hed

Happy New Year! We’ve finally started to catch up on some of the projects that we put off during the last gardening season and can start to look forward to the season this coming year. Once again, we will be offering 2006 CSA members the first opportunity to sign up for the 2007 season. On February first, we plan to open it up to newcomers. If you know that you are interested in signing up this season, please don’t delay! We filled up quickly last year and we expect that to be the case again in the year to come. In any case, we will be updating the membership information soon and will be contacting you when we have that put together.

A few weeks after Christmas this past winter, I began to crave a fresh tomato.  I was happy enough with the paste tomatoes that I had frozen the previous summer.  They were great for the soups and red sauces that we eat a lot of in the winter, but they didn’t quite satisfy my craving for a fresh tomato that could be chopped or sliced.

As the weeks passed, I began to look more carefully and seriously at the conventionally grown tomatoes at my local supermarket.  I knew better than to be fooled by the appearance of the Romas and the big round beefsteak-type tomatoes on the shelves.  Although they were red, they would never actually ripen.  No, they would remain tough and flavorless even if I gave them the opportunity to ripen on the counter.  However, there were some “vine-ripened” tomatoes that intrigued me.  They were a deep ripe red, they were soft and they even carried a faint scent that hinted of tomatoes.

Eventually I bought a bunch of these (I say a bunch because they were still connected by the remnants of a vine) and brought them into our home and our kitchen.  That evening I cut a couple of them up and served them with some rice and guacamole.  They weren’t too bad.  They weren’t anywhere near as good as a tomato out of our own garden (especially a perfectly ripe Nyagous Brown or Black From Tula), but I had to admit that they were an improvement on what the local grocery chain had been able to offer that time of year in the past.

Once I had satisfied my initial craving, I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish the last two, however. I have to admit that I had a nagging distrust of these tomatoes and I never did cut into those that remained.  So, they sat on the counter.  And sat.  And sat.

I can’t say for sure how long those tomatoes remained on the counter, but I’m sure that it was well over a month (let me interject here that if you were to try this experiment with a “real” ripe tomato, you would end up with an empty skin and a blackened stinking pool of rotten tomato flesh in just a couple of weeks).   In any case, during that time that those “tomatoes” sat on the counter, they got slightly more wrinkly, but never did break down as we would expect most vegetables to do.  I was somewhat unsettled by this but equally fascinated.  Had these things been irradiated?  Were they grown in some kind of formaldahyde solution?  Were they the result of a genetic engineered cross between a tomato and some other life form that doesn’t follow the natural laws of rot and decay?

After several weeks, I  finally decided to compost these tomato-like things but first I dissected them.  The insides looked as you would expect a tomato to look except for one thing, when I looked at the pulp I noticed that all of the seeds were germinating!Each seed had become an inch long baby plant trying to escape the confines of the fruit they were imprisoned in.  Yikes!!!!  I was horrified at this frankenfood that I had eaten and fed to my own children.

It’s a brave new world out there folks!  And nowhere is this truer than in our supermarkets.  Our family plan now is to fatten ourselves up on real, fresh tomatoes while we can.  That way, perhaps we can resist the temptations of such faux foods in the supermarket aisles come winter.

This is a shot of a few hundred heads of Silver Rose Garlic curing in the Barefoot Gardens “lawn”. Each share will receive a braid in their basket toward the end of the season. Individual heads of other garlic varieties will also be given out regularly through the season.See more garlic photos on the Barefoot Gardens group site at Flickr

Read the online version of the Macomb Eagle article on Barefoot Gardens from 6/30/06

When I started to garden years ago, flowers were very low on my list of priorities.  I was interested in growing “important” crops like food rather than secondary crops such as flowers.  Over time, however, I find that an increasing amount of my garden space and gardening time is devoted to flowers. 

What’s changed?  Well, I have I guess.  The more that I grow, harvest and handle flowers the more I appreciate them.  Flowers are beautiful of course, and they come in a spectacular array of colors, sizes and shapes.  Most of the flowers I grow are extremely generous as well.  A beautiful zinnia that I cut down to a nub so that I can get a long stem will grow back to produce many more.  Flowers seem to attract the most beautiful and elusive summer creatures such as hummingbirds and butterflies.  They are a beautiful addition to the landscape that we surround ourselves with in the summer and seem to transform the rooms of our home when we take the time to harvest and arrange them.

Like with everything else that we consume, there are political, economic and ecological consequences with how we “consume” flowers.  I don’t have the time to go into it in detail here, but suffice it to say that all of the negative consequences associated with how food is raised, sold, transported etc. are even more true of the flower industry.  When you buy flowers from a florist in Macomb, you are getting a flower that has been chemically treated to a degree that might make even a conventional grower of California strawberries gasp.  Consider too, that a large proportion of those flowers are raised in developing countries where a significant percentage of the population is underfed and there are often no enforced environmental regulations whatsoever to protect land and water. 

Personally, I look forward to the day when we can choose organically raised or free trade certified flowers as we can our apples and coffee.  Even better in my mind would be enough local demand for organic, local flowers to support a couple of small, family market garden or farm operations, right here in McDonough County. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 6:02 am and is filed under

July is the time that I start hunting for ripe tomatoes.  Everything seems to be ready!  The vines are large and vigorous  and there are full sized green tomatoes everwhere you look.  The weather is surely warm enough and there is plenty of sun.  However, tomatoes have their own timetables and once the cage is up and the mulch is down, my role as a gardener at this point in the process is to watch and wait.

Some of the early tomatoes have begun to change in color from apple green to a pale green that, in some varieties, is almost yellow.  This is a sign that they may begin to ripen soon, but tomatoes ripen on their own schedule.  If I had to guess, I would expect to be able to put tomatoes into baskets within the next couple of weeks, but I can never be sure until I start to see them red on the vines.

For the time being, we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with walks between the tomato cages, and the rich aroma of the plants themselves.  We’ll have ripe tomatoes soon, and then the feasting can begin.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 6:02 am and is filed under

One of my favorite things to do during June evenings is to stroll through the gardens looking at the crops. These walks are especially magical this time of year because of the late evening light and the dancing of the fireflies. Of course, I also like to check on the way things are (or are not) growing.

For the most part, I’ve been pleased with our spring crops this year. The spinach and lettuce crops, in particular, have been large, vigorous and abundant. However, I am even more excited about the potential for the crops coming up. Our onion crop looks like it will be large and diverse. The cantaloupe vines (muskmelons actually) are healthy and loaded with fruits. The sweet peppers look very good and I’m very excited about the 30 plus varieties of tomatoes we’re going to have this year. I’ve made an effort to grow a larger number of people’s favorites from years past (e.g. Speckled Roman, Wapsinicon Peach, Green Zebra). They are really taking off now and I’m trying to get them all “caged” quickly before they get too large. Most of the tomatoes look extremely vigorous.

Not all is roses (or tomatoes) of course. I’ve talked to few of you about my trials with sweet corn this year. I prepared some of the richest, most friable ground that I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with this spring (just east of the potato patches where I have no irrigation) with visions of a beautiful and abundant sweet corn crop. The only glitch that I could foresee was if we didn’t get the regular rains that we are accustomed to this time of year. Well, that fear proved justified. My planting was followed by 5 weeks without rain and I was forced to till that planting in and start over.

Subsequent plantings have been a little more successful but for a number of reasons I haven’t been able to get a solid and regular stand of plants. The result, I fear is that we are likely to have very small and sporadic harvests of sweet corn. There is plenty of time for new crops, but the later the crop, the more prevalent that corn earworm and other similar caterpillar pests become. In the end, if we don’t get several inches of rain during June or early July we just won’t have much sweet corn this year.

I encourage you to walk the gardens yourselves and see all of the changes that are taking place. It’s a dynamic landscape this time of year as the beds of spring greens give way to the heat loving crops (and vines especially) of the hot summer months.