Addenda to Eight Random Facts meme

The first tomato is turning ripe! It's the size of my fist, and it's a Chianti rose, a cross between a heritage Italian tomato and a Brandywine that ripens pink and sweet and low-acid. (Seeds from Rene's Garden - thank you, Rene Shepherd.) My tomato vines are loaded with fruit and I can hardly wait to pick that first sun-warmed fruit and bite in - oh, yes.

The hot weather has finally come to south-central Colorado, and my garden is taking off. Now if we would just get some rain. . . .

And I'm finally tagging my eighth blogger: Velda Brotherton, you're it!

Spring in the Rockies

This morning dawned with rain shushing softly on the metal roof of our house; now the showers have turned to snow: big clumpy flakes falling straight down like a steady rain of wet, pure-white feathers. The snow is melting, not accumulating, which is a mixed blessing here in March. Snow lasts longer than liquid water, seeping into the soil instead of running off the surface. But any moisture is welcome after four weeks of hot, dry winds that have dried the soil surface to dust and evaporated the snowpack on the peaks - our summer water - like a blow torch.


The green and crinkly leaves of spinach in my kitchen garden are now dotted with white clumps of snow. The new leaves on the golden currant shrubs along Ditch Creek just below our yard, the first trace of spring green in the wild except for big sagebrush, which keeps its gray-green and pungent leaves all winter long, stand out brilliantly against the rain-darkened stems. I haven't been outside to look, but I bet that the mosses and lichens that dot the surface of the soil in our restored bunchgrass and wildflower grassland are plumping up and turning green. They respond within minutes to even the smallest amounts of water, "waking up" from dormancy to make food and go about their lives in the brief periods of moisture that infrequently grace this arid environment.

It's spring in the house too. The seed trays that I planted last weekend with six kinds of tomatoes, four kinds of basil, oriental eggplants, and baby butterhead lettuces (thank you Rene Shepherd of Rene's Garden Seeds!) are dotted with tiny green sprouts. The flat with the tomato and eggplant seeds sits on a heat mat, and that extra bit of gentle warmth 24/7 means that the seeds began sprouting just four days after I planted them, and will grow larger, sturdier root systems, a distinct advantage when I put them out in the garden and they have to deal with spring weather here at 7,000 feet elevation in the south-central Rockies: hot days, nights below freezing until at least mid-May, and those blow-torch-like chinook winds. Spring here is not the least-lamb-like, but it's always interesting!

We really are what we eat - and that's often not pretty

Maybe you've never thought where your food comes from, or it doesn't matter to you. Turns out it's worth paying attention to, because the health of our food not only impacts our health, it also has a huge impact on the health of the planet we depend on. I had just started reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, when Denver's 5280 Magazine asked me to research the environmental cost of a typical fast-food burger and fries meal for their March "Green Guide" issue. Pollan's book turned out to be not only witty and voluminously-researched, but a real eye-opener on the impact of industrial agriculture and the prodigious amount of oil and other fossil fuel energy that goes into producing our food, especially processed food, much of which is made from commodity or industrial corn.

When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it - or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food. . . .

Pollan calculates that growing and processing the McDonald's meal he and his wife and son ate one day for lunch (one burger and fries, two large sodas, one salad, one order of chicken McNuggets, and a large shake) consumed the equivalent of 1.3 gallons of oil.

It's not easy to calculate the energy cost of a burger and fries meal because the food-growing and processing system that brings it to your plate (or your car) is complicated. Futurist Jamais Cascio has made a reasonable attempt at figuring the carbon footprint of that meal, that is, its contribution to the rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Producing a typical cheeseburger, he figures, adds ten pounds of carbon dioxide or its equivalent to the atmosphere. That doesn't sound like much, until you figure that Americans have a serious fast-food habit, averaging one to three burgers per week. For 300,000,000 of us, he says, even if you take the lower end of the range, our burger consumption makes the same contribution to global warming as 6.5 million Hummer H3 SUVs driven for a year!

My husband, Richard, and I like to cook, so we don't eat fast food. But after reading Pollan and Cascio, we're working on reducing the environmental cost of our meals by eating organic food, and eating as locally as possible. For dinner tonight, we had baked Yukon Gold potatoes straight from the farm in the San Luis Valley sixty miles away topped with basil pesto from our last summer's garden, a salad of mixed greens grown in geothermally-heated greenhouses just up the valley from us, and - okay, I admit it - Alaskan wild salmon. Not exactly local, but it was a special occasion. I have to admit though, the potatoes tasted at least as good as the salmon, perhaps because we bought them at the farm, and we know the soil and sunlight they grow from.

Community of the Land

Conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity that belongs to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." I've struggled for years with how to describe the kinship I feel with other species, not so much as individuals, but as a community -- the totality of relationships and interrelationships, the bonds of who eats whom, who chases whom, who cooperates and who competes and who cannot survive without whom -- that make nature what it is, and make Earth habitable for humans. Leopold's phrase captures why it's important to me to know and respect nature and the more-than-human communities that animate the landscape. Land is the community to which we belong, not a commodity that belongs to us.


Salida Almanac: Here in the Upper Arkansas Valley, we are waiting for snow. The sun set into a cloud bank that muffled the high peaks to the west, and Venus shone clear about two fists above the western horizon as Sirius, the dog star in Canis Major, sparkled into view over the hills to the east. Today was another in a week of spring-like days that have the juncos trilling and the dippers on the river warbling courting songs, and the spinach I planted last fall in raised beds poking tiny leaves up from the rosettes that have survived the frigid weeks of winter by hugging the sun-warmed soil surface. But the Weather Service says we're due for a return of winter tomorrow. It's been a long one already, but I wouldn't mind more snow. In arid country like this, we're always poised on the edge of another drought and greedy for precipitation, just in case. So I'll keep hoping for snow!