Over The Fence

I’ve never gone much for pumpkins solely for decoration—no surprise to those who know I haven’t much patience for flowers. But I do appreciate FOOD that is pretty, and the ‘Kumi Kumi’ squash we trialed this year (below) fits my criteria. It’s a beautiful ribbed flattish pumpkin. I suppose I’ll eventually eat it, but for now it’s lovely to look at. I do like to use seasonal produce as table or outdoor decorations. I just like to make sure I eat them before they go bad.

Our average first frost date is nominally November 4. We were about two weeks later than that this year. Still haven’t made it below 30F as far as I know, although the east side of the valley probably has. We had a series of storms right about the time we hit freezing that brought 1″ of rain, depending on exact location. Then some beautiful end-of-November days that had me out in the garden in a T-shirt. About 1/2″ of rain last week kept me from having to water anything and the winter veggies are all happy as can be.

My season for lettuce is just ramping up right now. I’ve been harvesting one bed of cutting lettuce for a few weeks. There are tried-and-true varieties ‘Red Salad Bowl’ and ‘Tango’. Plus ‘Kweik’, which I haven’t decided if I will harvest for a salad mix or allow to grow for heads (or both). The bed of Organic Gardening test varieties is a bit behind, and I’ve just started cutting them this week.

The harvest from my garden continues. This month I’m harvesting the orange saffron threads from the Crocus sativus blossoms (above).

Only 20 more pomegranates to juice—our muscles are very sore!

Some of the juice is going into these little Starbucks bottles I saved over the years (finally found a use for them). I need another freezer. Some of the pomegranate harvest is now jelly.

I am finished harvesting the pistachios. We got a huge amount this year. I dried them and froze them. Have you ever tasted a fresh-dried and frozen—not roasted—pistachio? Not many have. They are really good; different. If you like pistachios, you would like these better than the roasted.

I did a scary thing today – I looked at the ingredients in my lip balm. I say scary because I’m not sure it’s something I ever truly wanted to know. I’ve been using Carmex® for years, especially in the winter when my lips get extremely dry (it’s also great as a cuticle moisturizer). But I’m also loyal to Burt’s Bees®, because it’s all-natural. So how unnatural is Carmex®?

First things first – the ingredients:

Carmex® vs.                       Burt’s Bees®

Menthol                                            Beeswax

Camphor                                          Coconut oil

Phenol                                              Sunflower seed oil

Fragrance in Petrolatum                   Peppermint oil

Lanolin                                             Lanolin

Salicylic Acid                                    Tocopherol

Cocoa Butter                                     Rosemary leaf extract

Wax Base                                          Soybean oil

Canola oil

A few things bothered me when I read these two lists. First, is that Carmex® contains a drying agent – Salicylic Acid, the same active ingredient in zit medication. Why would a lip balm, which is supposed to moisturize, need a drying agent?   Second “fragrance in petrolatum,” which is their fancy way of saying Petroleum Jelly. Again, Petroleum Jelly initially holds moisture in for your lips, but it also doesn’t allow your lips to absorb any moisture, leaving them as dry as they began.

But the ingredient that really got to me was Phenol, which is not only an anesthetic (which I need on my lips to what? Why would I want to numb my lips?) but is also an alternative to formaldehyde for embalming, and in large injections can be used to kill a person! And while I suppose being able to embalm someone on the spot may come in handy some day, the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep cosmetic safety database rated it a 9/10 (High Hazard) on its ingredient safety scale. This rating applies to the ingredient itself, not the product containing it, but still. Phenol is one of Carmex’s® three active ingredients (at .4%) and it’s considered that dangerous? When I read that I threw out my Carmex® forever.

Ultimately, everyone makes the decision about what to put in and on their body. People having been using Carmex® for years and still live to tell the tale. But when I have the option of putting something on my lips, which is eventually digested through my body, why would I choose a product with such dangerous ingredients? Carmex® recently announced that they’re changing their packaging to eliminate 20% of the plastic from the traditional jar. That’s great. But changes to Carmex® really need to start with the ingredients.

Long live Burt’s Bees®!

I’m a little bit of a lazy gardener. Meaning I don’t fuss and if I can leave something, I do. For example, I plant enough carrots in the spring to last us through the growing season and well into winter. But I don’t dig them up. I don’t plant them in troughs filled with sand and covered with newspapers and set in the cool room in our basement. We just leave them in the ground and stack a couple bales of straw on top to keep them cozy. In the middle of February, you can catch me tramping through the snow, tipping a bale aside and digging delicious carrots for soups and stews. They do lose some of their sweetness over time, but there is something satisfyingly sweet about eating from your garden in the middle of a blizzard!

What does all this have to do with hairy carrots? Well, this year I happened to notice our Purple Dragon carrots getting hairier and hairier as the season drew on.

I know the longer a carrot sits in the soil, the more root hairs it develops, but since we have left ours every year for the last four, this didn’t seem to jive with our experience in years past. I dug a little deeper and found out too much nitrogen can cause excessively hairy carrots. (Okay, you can stop laughing at the string of “hair club for carrots” jokes and the like probably running through your head at the moment!) We’ll be skipping the deliveries of mushroom compost for a while to let the soil balance out again. And, in the meantime, we’ll be enjoying our hairy purple dragons well into the winter.

Last weekend I got two 4-month-old Australorp hens (photo below). They have very sweet dispositions—really. These are huggie chickens. I had to get more hens since I built a larger pen area around my coop. No square inch of my precious and little 1/2-acre city lot can go unused.

The second photo shows the new fence I put in to keep my chickens out of the garlic and veggie beds. This is a portable fence (my design) and it is held up by the planter boxes along the outside and a couple of 15-gallon nursery pots on the inside. The coop is on wheels, so the fence has to be movable too. The gate has those hinges that close it when I forget (often).

See the pole lamp? It’s to fool the chickens into thinking the days are longer, so they keep laying. I don’t know if it will work.