the Waste-Not Blog

Oh, my goodness, can it be that time of year again? I'm afraid so, everybody! I've got almost a dozen flats of planted seeds, the very first pepper plants are poking up their shy cotyledons, and pretty soon I'll be planting my flat on onion seeds as well! (I usually end up planting some sets but my goal is to be able to rely on seeds entirely one of these years... given that it's March, this won't be the year either, but a girl can dream!) Seed shopping might be the most fun part of gardening. I know very few people who would put up a determined resistance to that assertion. I mean, sure, eating what you planted is fun too, but that fun is spread across the growing season and interspersed with a ton of hard work; but seed shopping? looking at dozens of pretty pictures, reading dozens of cute and interesting descriptions, drawing garden layout sheets with your favorite pens on your favorite graph paper? That wins. Hands down. Now if you've been blessed with ...

A lot of parents treat picky eaters like a given. Memes about kids who eat nothing but cheerios and chicken nuggets abound, as do memes about animal crackers all over the house and kids who aren't hungry at dinner but want a gogurt twenty minutes later. "Oh, yeah, mine do that too." "Have you tried letting him put ketchup on it?" "Wow, your kid eats raisins? You're lucky, the only fruit my kid eats is Welch's Fruit Snacks." So when people meet my kids and see their eating habits, they are... incredulous. Because my kids eat literally everything. I've had to stop them from picking up the baby's... used... animal crackers off the floor ("But we like baby slime!"). So how did this happen? Did I starve them for weeks so even the most repulsive foods became desirable? Do I put ketchup on everything? Did I hire a voodoo practitioner to pull the stuffing out of a voodoo doll with my kid's name on it, to make their stomachs fee...

What a summer we've had. Because the last dairy farm in the town of Manlius finally succumbed to low milk prices and high land taxes we had to move into our Fixer-Upper investment house before it was done being properly renovated. All the main living areas had electricity before we moved in or immediately thereafter (I put a light fixture in the kitchen ceiling and hooked up a couple of wall outlets within the first week or so), but we've spent the summer with no water save that provided by the garden hose--which is often suspiciously black , unfortunately. So potable water is obtained from WalMart's kiosk at a rate of $.35/gallon or sometimes from the church's taps if our supply happens to be low on Sunday. For most of the summer the hose produced water when the well's breaker was switched to "on," since the system hadn't been tested under pressure yet, so we tried to fill as many buckets as we could at a given time--which translated to being as spar...

It's an age old question among home gardeners: how many tomato plants does an individual or family need? Clearly there are multiple factors at work in the search for an answer, including the number of people said tomatoes are intended to feed, chosen preservation and usage methods, and available space. Still, one family of four who intends to can tomatoes might plant eighteen plants, and another family of the same size with similar goals might plant sixty or more. Why the broad range of answers to a seemingly simple question? The Combatants On one side of the debate stand the restrained growers, with plants often numbering in multiples of six because that's how stores sell tomato plants. The vines are carefully spaced in their gardens, almost always caged if not staked. Virtually no tomatoes touch the ground, barring some awful accident like a freak windstorm or the neighbor's blundering dog; as a result their rodent problems and unnoticed rot problems are practically...

15 grams of protein. 6-12 grams of insoluble fiber. 4-5 g of soluble fiber. Plus vitamins and minerals, particularly potassium. These all come from a one cup serving of cooked dry beans. The amounts of different nutrients vary based on the type of beans under discussion: black beans and kidney beans are very rich in iron, while lentils are a very good source of molybdenum and folate. But we all knew this, right? Beans are healthy, beans are cheap, we should all eat more beans. Clearly nobody needs to hear any of this information again. Remind me why I thought this post was a good idea? Oh. This is why. On average, a given American eats less than six pounds of beans in a year . That's about forty cups of beans annually, significantly less than a cup per week. We're all concerned about the burgeoning problems with cardiovascular disease, obesity, living wage, you name it--and we eat maybe a cup of beans in a week? Nonsense, I say! Balderdash, I proclaim! We can all do bet...

Why do you eat vegetables? A few of us will say it's because we like them, love them, can't get enough of them. And there are days when we even mean it! But what about the rest of the time, the rest of us? When there are so many delicious, easy foods to be had in the world, what gives vegetables the pride of place as the food everyone feels they ought to eat more of? Of course it's because they're healthy, right? Because they have fiber to help us digest. Because they have vitamins and minerals to supply our bodies' daily needs. Because for many of us, a meal of straight protein, fat and starch doesn't feel right--we instinctively know that while all those things are great and delicious, they need a little help along the way--an oar, as it were, to help them row their boat to Valhalla. A Charon to steer their ferry across the river Styx. I could go on. I won't. Instead, I'm here to tell you that while these vegetables you're eating do perform...