Good Bug, Bad Bug

My wife has an amazing ability to buy me great books.  I read a lot of different things and she’s found a way to match my bizarre interests in science and history to the perfect book choice.  Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries… she’s very thoughtful about it.

She usually includes a gardening book or two in the selections and for vacation she ordered Good Bug, Bad Bug by Jessica Walliser.  (Her blog is worth reading too.  She’s got a cool wire frame potato bin thing happening there that is likely to be the way I do potatoes next year.)

When I was a kid I had these cool animal cards.  The company sent out a set of 5 or so each month for a while and it came with a green, plastic container.  I loved organizing it, alphabetizing, and reviewing each animal.  I can still see the cool, freaky picture of the aye aye in my head!  And when I decided that the armadillo was my favorite animal in sixth grade, that card started me on the road to know-it-all armadilloness.

Good Bug, Bad Bug reminds me of those cards!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched for pictures of my garden pests.  And this book is simply set up with great pictures of all of them, descriptions, organic treatments (if they exist) and how to spot the damage.  She’s also got a section on beneficial bugs with the same info and she describes how to attract them.

The book is small and easy to flip through.  Check it out… no more searching online for me..

Filed under: pests, reviews , good bug bad bug, jessica walliser

Bittman Says: Save The World

Mark Bittman, NY Times food writer, is a reasonable man.  Much like Michael Pollan, he sees the problems with the earth and our diets as complex, but the solution as fairly simple.  Where Pollan boils his argument down to the pithy “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”, Bittman brings his down to the even pithier “eat good food”.

Good food, as it turns out, is mostly plants.  Plants, he says, and not the components of those plants.  The tomato, not the lycopene.  The carrot, not the beta carotene.  Lycopene, beta carotene.. those things are all good for you, but it is the tomato, the carrot that provides them.

The video here is from Ted Talks.  Ted, and I am hip enough to have heard about this long, long ago (two weeks… so sue me), is the intelligentsia’s way of creating a social site with just enough exclusivity to make it feel ivy league.  All longing for inclusion aside, it is actually full of good stuff from good thinkers.  Bittman was a surprise.  Not that he isn’t a good thinker.  He is.  It’s just that Pollan would have been a much more obvious choice. 

But Bittman more than  holds his own.  His talk is excellent and his points are well presented.  No real new ground is broken for those of us who read or watch this kind of stuff all the time.. except for this.

Locavores (people who seek local food), vegetarians, gourmets, we’re all essentially the same.  Opposition to industrial food is a common goal and it’s all about good food.

Fight the fight.  Grow a garden.  Eat your vegetables.

 

Filed under: reviews, vegetables , eat good food, mark bittman

$64 Tomato: Like You Need Another Gardening Book

We’ve all got tons of gardening books I’m sure… but it sure is fun to read about how other people struggle with growing stuff!

The $64 Tomato is really more a collection of sequential essays, but there is a story that is told.  William Alexander wrote this book – his first – to chronicle his years as a gardener in the yard of an old house in the Hudson River valley. 

The book is funny and fast.  All of us can appreciate his approach, his genuine desire to grow apples organically (ultimately winding up with a slow progression of natural pest control efforts that ends in shock and awe fashion with waves of WMDs), his love of a brandywine tomato (a love shared by a rascally groundhog), and his evolution into a nearly self-sustaining small-scale farmer.

The stories work as fantastic gardening anecdotes, but along the way there is plenty to learn about the author, his family, and their lives in an old house in a small town.

Well worth the read.  And do not follow his math on the $64 tomato.  It’s depressing.  But, we don’t REALLY get into gardening to save money right?

Filed under: reviews , $64 tomato, gardening book review, vegetable gardening

The Real Dirt On Farmer John: Weepy, Crying, Fantastic

If you have a chance, get yourself a DVD of The Real Dirt On Farmer John.  If you’ve never heard of him, check out angelicorganics.com.

The documentary captures more than 25 years of his personal history as a farmer -  a history that includes how his family farm of 100+ years went under during his watch.  It’s how he dug himself out of it and brought his friends and family along (and vice versa) that makes the movie so touching.

If you’ve ever wondered why you garden or why you support a CSA, this movie will remind you.

Now, I’m a softy.  A serious weeper.  A cryer of epic proportions.  So perhaps this warning is only for other sissies like me.  Good stuff happens in this movie, but it will make you cry anyway.

I watched it on my laptop on an airplane.  The stewardess, a woman clearly tougher than I am, brought me some kleenex.  And a glass of water when she really saw me trying to fight the blubbering.

 

Filed under: reviews, vegetable garden , farmer john