Comments sculpin has made

  • I'm a lazy locavore?

    I outsourced my vegetable garden last year to the Seattle Urban Farm Company. Lazy? Maybe, but not so much lazy as gimpy: injuring a hip put a crimp in my gardening plans for most of a year. There are a lot of us out there who are in no shape to remove a lawn, and you wouldn't necessarily know it to look at us. As Tauger put it, that's the reality of people's lives.

    I don't think I'm particularly interested in rarefied consumption. (If I were, I'd probably have a better haircut.) I just wanted some vegetables from my front yard, and I wanted them relatively painlessly.

    I have no complaints, by the way. SUFCo built two extraordinarily good-looking raised beds, installed some drip lines, and planted fall crops, including some that I'd never thought of growing but which worked out beautifully. They did a little bit of maintenance before I took that on entirely. They also built a chicken coop with my husband and me, which now houses three charming pullets.

    The SUFCo folks were almost as much gardening tutors/consultants for us as they were gardeners; they were generous with their knowledge, and we took as much advantage of that as we could. Several months later, when my hip had mostly healed, I was able to take a lot of what I'd learned and put in five more raised beds along the same lines. Now some of our neighbors are copying that bed design, too.

    Colin of SUFCo once mentioned to me a dream of having maintenance gardeners on bicycles with trailers full of tools, pedaling from garden to garden. Sounds pretty neat to me.

    From what I heard, I was a pretty normal customer of those guys. It would be interesting to see how many customers of such gardeners are full-blown yuppies who aren't at all "rethinking their place in the production/consumption divide", and how many just needed some help getting off the ground. I could rethink things just fine, thanks. It was the actual shovelwork that was giving me a hard time.On The paper of record identifies -- sort of -- a new trend posted 1 year, 4 months ago 12 Responses

  • UW Forestry Club trees

    In the Seattle area, there's a great, little-known source for Christmas trees. (So great and so little-known that I hesitated to publicize it.) Every year, the UW Forestry Club sells noble fir Christmas trees as a club fundraiser. The trees are locally and organically grown in power-line right-of-ways. The one I bought last year was  lovely; I'd never seen such a fresh Christmas tree, and it hung onto its needles better than any other Christmas tree I've ever had.

    To order one, you have to get your check in by next Thursday the 30th, then pick it up the Sunday after that. There's something of a carnival atmosphere as people line up for their trees, clutching thermoses of hot coffee. It's a bit of a production, but it's fun. On On organic Christmas trees posted 2 years ago 20 Responses

  • Thanks!

    I've been making peanut and sesame noodles for years and never knew why my sauce tended to break. I tried it again a couple of times last week, letting the noodles cool down a bit, and it was perfect. Hooray!

    ObFavoriteFlavoring: in place of curry powder, a handful of cilantro tossed into the blender with the rest of the sauce. On On summer memories and politically correct peanut butter posted 2 years, 5 months ago 6 Responses