But apparently there’s this thing called “Bermuda Grass” which is very heat and drought tolerant. It isn’t grown in the cool damp of the Northwest. (Hey, they don’t call us “Mossbacks” for nothing.) Consequently, I am not familiar with Bermuda grass, and based on reader comments, this is a very good thing. Apparently its roots run deep enough to connect directly to Hell, from whence it draws nourishment in the form of dissolved pure evil. Bermuda grass, I am led to understand, is a touch aggressive.

So, if you’ve got Bermuda grass, my “smother your sod” suggestion might not be the way to go. Instead, you might consider hiring a young priest and an old priest to perform a lawn exorcism. Or maybe rent a back hoe. In any event, you have my sympathy.

Which brings me to the main point of this post: the giving and taking of advice.

A guy on a Very Serious Soil Forum took Very Serious Issue with my post. He, you see, lives in Bermuda Grass country.  After suggesting that my blog, were it a book, should be thrown “against the wall, out the window, or into the burning fire in a fireplace,” he concluded:

I took out 1500 square feet of lawn by ripping out every fricking piece of it [Bermuda grass]. I now have a pretty nice garden. Yes it is tedious hard work, but worth it now! I just love it when someone says “easy”, as in “gardening made easy” or “gardening for dummies” or some such claim. Nonsense!

While the call to libricide was a bit over the top, I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. We’re all starting from, literally, different places. We garden in physically different locations with different soil, different weather, different rainfall. We come to our soil from experientially different places: some have a lot of experience, some have no experience. We have different goals, different successes, different failures, different skills, different interests, difference amounts of time to dedicate and divergent years of learning and training to pull from.

The experiences I’ve had guide the suggestions I make on this blog, but I know – and I hope you do too – that those suggestions won’t be right for everybody, in every region. I’m reminded of my friend in Los Angeles who wanted suggestions for shielding her tomatoes from too much sun. Wow. Just wow. Too much sun? I didn’t know what to do with that. The idea that you would ever need to block sun to a fruiting plant – ever – is so far outside my experience zone that I just staggered around for a few days, imagining a world where tomatoes didn’t require cloching for all but six weeks out of the year to ripen.

But I take serious umbrage at the implication that you have to be somehow special to grow a garden. The gardener who took Very Serious Issue with my post implies in his response that is is nonsense to suggest that anyone can garden – that easy gardening, gardening “for dummies” (i.e, non-experts) isn’t possible. There is a strong implication that one must have some sort of super strength or wisdom or dedication or experiential skill to get a zucchini to grow.

Now that’s the real nonsense. You don’t have to be amazingly gifted, or spectacularly bright, or an expert in horticulture. You simply have to be willing to pay attention to your plants, think about garden timing from the perspective of a seed that wants to grow, and try different things. Sometimes, you have to try a few times and not give up when things go awry, as they will. But people all over the world – most of whom do not enjoy anywhere near your access to gardening gear, professional advice, or conveniences such as pressurized water – they successfully grow their own food. And you can too.

Gardening, my Very Serious Critic seems to say, is only for those willing to put in the “tedious hard work” that success requires. And perhaps he’s right, in his garden and by his standards. But there is no great magic to growing a garden, and there is no Secret Club just waiting to deny you admission (or if there is, they haven’t asked me to become a member).

So if you ever have someone tell you that something you’re doing in the garden is wrong or stupid or nonsense, remember that if you pay attention to your plants, you will become the best expert your garden can have. If the nonsense you are engaged in works great for you and gives the results you want for the effort you are willing to expend – keep doing it! If something isn’t working, by all means be open to suggestions and try something else. But don’t toss out your own knowledge because someone – even me! - tells you they know better. ‘Cause for your garden, and your life, and your time-management, they probably don’t.

The only prescription I will offer that I am confident will benefit every single one of my readers, now and ever onward, anywhere in the world, is to pay attention to what your garden is telling you. On the day you became a gardener – on the day you planted your very first vegetable – you automatically earned the right to try things your own way. If you keep trying, and listen carefully to the feedback from your garden, the right methods for your land and your life will become clear.

So go forth and learn, and pay attention to your plants, and have fun in your garden, and never stop finding the best ways to do things for you.

That’s no nonsense.

The keystone - just a little thing that holds the whole arch up. (Image: Wikipedia / Creative Commons)

With apologies to any structural engineers who might be reading, this Anti-Inflammatory Challenge has proven to me that people have a keystone, too, of sorts – a way of transferring and appropriately distributing the stress in our lives to something solid that can absorb and diffuse that stress.

For me, that keystone is sleep. Without enough sleep, nothing stays stable and the stress doesn’t melt down into the good earth. When, in the course of this Challenge, I have made my own sleep the biggest priority in my life (as much as possible, with two kids) everything else – the diet, the exercise, the various anti-inflammatory supplements, my mood and my relationships with the most special people in my life – all those things have fallen into place. When I have not aggressively prioritized my own sleep, it has been a struggle to maintain a bare minimum on everything else I’m trying to do, including tend to my own health.

I know people for whom physical activity is their keystone – as long as they get their workout or walk or bike-ride in, everything else is do-able. I’ve known others who needed intense daily social connection and still others who depend on daily social alone time. Some people can keep everything else in their life together as long as they just stay off the booze. Whatever our personal keystone is, it’s holding everything else up, and when it starts to slip or crumble, the remaining archway of relationships and commitments and activities that go into our life becomes far less steady.

I’d like to say this week was smooth sailing and dedicated to tending to my personal health keystone, but frankly, it wasn’t. This past week, sequentially, my son broke a 103-degree fever which progressed into a rather extensive bout of Hand, Foot and Mouth disease, my daughter hit 102 and slept for a day, and Homebrew Husband came down with “I feel like hammered crap” and stayed home a day from work. The only member of the immediate family not to fall ill was me.

Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease...with a supporting role played by the knees, legs, arms, elbows and diaper-zone.

Nick did as much as he could, but for several days I was on more-or-less 24/7 mama-mattress duty to soothe the little guy, give him the best possible chance for sleep and save the rest of us from the cranky wails that ensued when he wasn’t sleeping.  My sleep was most certainly not a priority or even a possibility through much of the week.

During this time, I sat on my ass a lot, baby on shoulder, and drank as much coffee as I could procure with a minimum of movement and tried to write some blog posts. This kind of down time sounds fantastic if you spend most of your day choosing your own motions and physical positioning. When you are denied the ability to get up, walk around, pee when you need to, adjust how you are sitting or standing for hours on end, or accomplish anything at all on your timeline, it gets old pretty fast.

Without my keystone in place, there were a few more chocolate chip stumbles, face-plants into pots of coffee, and I think I may have tripped over a small glass of homebrew as well. Honestly, when you are so sleep deprived you literally cannot get your eyes to focus, avoiding that one bite of granola just seems to lose its criticality.

The biggest thing I’ve learned from this Challenge is the importance of maintaining my sleep keystone. I see how without sleep, I am not able to transfer stresses in my life effectively and I lose my ability to function at my best. I’m an 8 or 9 hour a night girl, not a “perky and rested on 4 hours” type, and this Keystone of Sleep realization worries me, because I am not confident I can arrange my life in such a way as to get those hours of sleep on a semi-consistent basis.

If it’s going to happen, it’ll take some pondering to figure out how. I think I’ll have to sleep on it.

We’re in the final stretch of our Challenge, and I’ll be back for one last Anti-Inflammation wrap-up post at the end of the month, but this is the last post to comment on if you want to be entered to win a copy of The Primal Blueprint, Nourishing Traditions or The Paleo Solution. As a reminder,  the winner will be selected at random from all participants who commented on each of the four anti-inflammation posts in this series: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and this post, Week 4. We’re a tight-knit little group by now, and it will be a pleasure to send one of you the book of your choice just as it’s been a pleasure to have some company through this learning experience.

Now it’s your turn: what is your keystone? What’s the one thing you need to do consistently to perform your best and model the best self-care in your own life, and how will you prioritize your keystone after our Challenge ends?

No, something is happening to the way I think about garden inputs and outputs, and it all hinges on chicken shit.

Before we got our hens I bought a lot of compost. I had resigned myself to the fact – never questioned the fact, actually – that to grow a garden of the size and quality I desired I would need to buy a couple hundred dollars of compost or other bulk organic inputs annually.

Perhaps that seems an unfathomable garden expense, but I have 17 4′x8′ raised beds. Top-dressing each bed once a year with two inches of finished compost requires 6 cubic feet per bed, or 102 cubic feet of compost. At $3 per cubic-foot bag we’re looking at $306 in annual compost costs. Delivered in bulk the stuff is less expensive, but not by that much when you only buy 3 or 4 cubic yards – those delivery fees’ll kill you.

The two to three bins a year of cold-finished compost I can make on site could supply about 40% of my raised bed top-dressing needs if I got aggressive about sifting and fining-out the chunky stuff. But even if I put in that amount of work, I’ve still got the three-tier perennial bed, the fruit trees, the herb bed, the cane fruit area, the ornamental areas – and all those spaces would like to get in on the compost action, too, thank you very much.

And, to be perfectly frank about it, the compost I make just isn’t that great for top dressing. I’m just too haphazard about how I make it, so it’s all very un-uniform and tends towards too wet. I know I should be adding more browns – but I’m just not that into compost tinkering. “Let it rot” is pretty much good enough for me.

But those chickens – they are feather-covered compost-making machines.

I tapped into the bounty of the coop last weekend and am finally realizing the full value of the hens. The top of the coop litter is kinda straw-ey, but scrape down and the deeper layers look like the stuff I pay $3 a cubic foot for: rich, brown, fluffy and mostly uniform. The straw is chopped into itty bitty pieces, just right for shielding soil from Pacific Northwest rains and preventing the dreaded crusting-over problem. The bottom most layers crawl with red worms lucky enough to avoid the beak of death.

And the quantity – there is so much of it! I hauled out wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow and only after raising three sweeping new beds a foot off the ground did I make a substantial dent in the compost. I really have no idea how the coop holds that much. Actually, I do: a foot- deep layer of composted chicken litter in our 8×12 coop is 96 cubic feet, or 3.5 cubic yards, of compost.

Ninety-six cubic feet is within a hairs-breath of how much compost I’d like to have on hand annually for all my raised beds, and has an input equivalency value of $288. And the chickens, with their unending pooping and straw-scratching aeration, are churning more out all the time.

I don’t have a fully formed conclusion or philosophy on this yet, but as I continue my education in Livestock 101: The Chicken, it’s becoming apparent to me that lower-input, sustainable and time-efficient agriculture, at even the pico-level of the home garden, requires the contributions of animals.

I’m not saying you need chickens or other animals to grow a good garden – I’ve grown great gardens without chickens – but in order to have a more internally-sustaining system (in an urban area I do not believe a completely self-sustaining system is truly possible), I think you just might need livestock.

Here’s why.

Consider the math of the compost, which is a crude way to assign value, but it’s the best we have. We’ve spread three bales of straw into the chicken coop, with a total input cost of $30. Straw plus natural and free chicken (and worm, etc.) activity yields $288 worth of compost. Chickens earn us $258 in Negabucks.

Now consider the value of time. To take-home $258, the difference between the input cost and the output value from the coop litter, a person earning $20 an hour and paying an average tax rate of 10%,would have to work a little over 14 hours, or two days not counting Facebook time at the office.

Alternatively, that same person could pile up yard clippings, run all around their neighborhood looking for yard-waste containers to empty before the trash guy can, rake neighbor’s leaves and genrally abscond with any compostable possible in order to get enough bulk material to produce an equivalent quantity of compost on site without paying extra. I’m thinking that’s more than 14 hours worth of effort, and we haven’t even gotten to turning the compost or sifting it.

The chickens have nothing else to do but make eggs and compost. That’s literally what they live for. They scratch, they poop, they make little dust bath divots, they eat some worms. Result: eggs, poop, happy chickens. The gardener, however, has an unending list of things to do and squeezing 14 hours out of the year to generate compost inferior to that of a chicken just may not make sense.

I’m never breaking even on eggs, but I’m pretty sure these chickens are going to shit their way to garden profitability.

Stop doing that.

No, seriously, I would now like to explain why you should not actually rip up your lawn, and I’d like to start with a little soil science. Bear with me, this’ll be quick and you’ll thank me when you aren’t paying thousands of dollars in chiropractic bills later on.

There are different types of soils. One, called Mollisols is characterized by, “deep, high organic matter, nutrient-enriched surface soil between 60–80 cm [24 to 31 inches] in depth” and, “a soft, granular, soil structure.”

It looks like chocolate cake:

Mollisols: the soil of your dreams. (Image: Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

Any gardener will tell you that two feet or more of soft, super-rich, high-organic matter soil sounds like a growers heaven. As you would expect, Mollisols are, “the world’s most agriculturally productive soil order [and] represent one of the more economically important soil orders.” (Wikipedia)

What does any of this have to do with your lawn?

Well, Mollisols weren’t born super-soils, they became super-soils. Mollisols typically occur under grasslands, such as the Great Plains of the United States. The most fertile kinds of Mollisols build up over eons from layer upon layer of decomposed grasses. Basically, the diverse grassland prairie grasses die back, thatch down, occasionally burn, and the masses of dead grass and dead grass roots decompose into the best soil in the world.

This is why Great Plains agricultural areas – before large-scale destruction of top-soil anchoring prairies through deep ploughing and hedgerow-to-hedgerow mono-cropping – were some of the most fertile growing spots in the world. The soil is Mollisols, a just-add-water dream to grow in.

Decades of unsustainable farming practices on this prairie land combined with a long, hard drought led to the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s. In some places over 75% of the deep topsoil simply blew away. (Yes, the best soil in the world, and it literally turned to dust before our eyes.) Today, of course, massive amounts of supplemental fertilization keeps these soy, wheat and corn growing areas commercially viable. Ponder too long on this and you might start crying, so let’s get back to your lawn.

So the best soil in the world is created when grasses and grassroots are smothered in place by more grasses and grass roots. The best soil in the world is the result of gradual accumulation of lots of organic matter on top of grass.

I think you know where I’m going with this, right? Lots of organic matter on top of grass… And you were thinking you’d have to rip up the grass before you put in a garden?

Go ahead and put in a garden, but don’t rip up the lawn. No, instead, smother it. In doing so, you’ll be mimicking the best soil-building actions of nature and starting to turn your own little urban grassland into a teeny Mollisols which you can build on year after year, just as native prairies build their soil up year after year.

You’ve probably heard of sheet composting, lasagna gardening, grow heaps or hugelkultur. These are all slightly different variations on building a raised growing space from layers of organic matter that rots down right where it is, getting better and better as it composts in place. All these techniques can be implemented right on top of an existing lawn, to the betterment of the soil and the growing space.

I’ve never had lawn survive and grow through 10 to 12 inches of piled on compost, mixed mulch or other organic matter, but if you want to be extra sure your grass is well and truly smothered so it can begin to decompose into wonderful rich topsoil, lay down some plain cardboard over the grass before piling on your organic matter.

The best time to build up new beds (with rigid sides or without, as you prefer) is in the fall for planting next year, but a spring build can be done too. I’m currently building up three half-ass hugelkultur / lasagna gardening beds and will be posting soon about the process of creating them right over my lawn. I intend to have them planted this summer.

So save yourself some work and save your back from needless spasms – stop ripping up your lawn and start smothering it. It’s the natural, faster, easier way to make a garden, and it gives a better result. Don’t you love a win-win?

You frequent a horse stable even though you have no interest in riding horses.

You have a ridiculous multi-component compost hierarchy to handle kitchen scraps and you assume this is normal:

“The old oatmeal can go to the chickens, but not the orange rinds; they go to the worms, and the cabbage core goes to the worms too, and so does this pizza box I brought home from the work party, but it goes on top of the worm bedding to keep fruit flies down, not buried down in the bedding. The fish bones and the young coconut husk we can put in the pit compost trench I just dug, and the drier lint and old rags can go to the outside compost bin. Oh, but make sure to separate the coffee grounds, I need them for the blueberries. And the egg shells – those I keep under the sink until I bake them to feed back to the chickens. What do you mean you put the egg shells and the coffee grounds in yard waste already? What the hell? Why is this so hard to understand!?“

You’ve gardened with a head-lamp.

You’ve thought massive jet-lag that leaves you wide awake at 3 am gives you a nice opportunity to be out in the garden before anyone can bug you.

You stop into the the local bakery and teriyaki place weekly just to see if they have any old 5 gallon buckets they might give you.

Is this heaven, or the Territorial Seed Company store?

You’ve ever taken a vacation to a garden or farm.

You “rescue” compostables (coffee grounds, paper plates from picnics, leftovers from a friend’s kid’s birthday party) with mildly inappropriate frequency and a complete lack of discretion. But hey, it’s not like you dumpster dive…yet.

When you see free scrap wood by the side of the road, you actually stop and pick it up. It’s a potato tower in the making!

You know exactly how many bales of hay the trunk of a Honda Accord can hold (one).

You are on first name basis with the guy who runs the tree removal and stump grinding service even though you’ve never had a tree removed because he drops 10 cubic yards of wood chips in your driveway twice a year.

You have passionate conversations about the relative merits of different overwintering cauliflowers.

You will freely and generously give plant divisions, starts, transplants and seeds to other gardeners, but you are shockingly miserly about your soil, shaking off any excess from plant roots and recapturing any dirt you rinse off in the garden in a five-gallon bucket. Hey, you’ve put years into that soil.

You have more fruit trees in your postage stamp yard than the rest of your neighborhood combined.

You regularly spend more on seeds in a given month than you do on produce.

Your idea of a very romantic anniversary present is a drip irrigation system for the raised beds.

You have empty canning jars under your bed to put by the bounty. And in the laundry room, and tucked behind the tv, and above the washing machine…

You lust over exotic edibles you know you simply must grow – like goji berry and and medlars and paw paws – even though you’ve never purchased, used, or eaten any of these edibles and you have no idea if you’d even like them.

You frequently wonder if you could guerrilla garden the park where no kids ever seem to play and turn it into the neighborhood giant pumpkin patch.

You are incapable of committing to anything in August because your garden will need you.

You have “good” garden shoes and “working” garden shoes. And both are covered in shit.

You’ve subjected guests to photo tours of germinating seeds.

You use terms like umbelliferous and cruciferous to describe things that aren’t vegetables. As in:

“Oh, in Seattle everyone has Gore-Tex, so nobody really uses that umbelliferous rain shieldy thing.”
“Um, you mean like an umbrella?”
“Yeah, right…isn’t that what I said?” 

You pee in your garden (for the nitrogen, of course!).

You cook meals and describe every course as follows: “This is ______. I grew it!”

Weekends are your time to “go to work” in the garden.

You frequently resent the non-edible plants in your garden and think things like, “A hedgerow of blueberries would work better in that space than those dwarf rhododendrons, anyway!”

The phrase “shade tolerant edible” makes you gasp in delight.

When friends ask you to go get a manicure with them, you just laugh and laugh and laugh.

As a matter of professionalism, I do have to taste the really good food to ensure it really is really good. (Aside: I have a colleague who is an amazing chef and cookbook author and is allergic to garlic. I have no idea how she manages.) My tasting portions in preparation for and at this event were actual tastings – not big huge bowlfuls – but little bites add up.

And then came the final push to put the finishing touches to the Garden Journal I’ve been working on for weeks and weeks. I absolutely, positively wanted to get it print-ready and up on the site by Thursday so gardeners could have access to it by mid-Ferbruary, latest, before too much gets going in the garden. Well, mission accomplished (yeah!), but not without throwing my commitment to more sleep and less caffeine under the inflammation bus.

Yesterday, the adrenaline rush of wrapping up a project behind me, I became a human mattress for my sick and feverish little boy. Which would have been great if I hadn’t stayed up half the previous night, high on Garden Planner completion and reading about fingerling potatoes. My poor sleep behavior was compounded by Homebrew Husband switched my coffee to decaf (“Let see if she notices…”) yesterday morning.

Still, I maintain that everything – sick baby, no sleep, no coffee – all of it would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the giant bag of organic chocolate chips in the cupboard.

"Pssst....you. Hey, you? You know you want some chocolate. First one's free." Image credit - Wikipedia / Creative Commons

Now, I don’t want it to seem like I have no will power. On the contrary, I have tons of willpower. Just not for giant bags of organic chocolate chips.

So, in the delirium of little sleep, less coffee and feverish baby tending (which was mostly just: Never set him down. Ever.) I had one little chocolate chip. And then another. And then another.

I may have had a few giant handfuls more after that. It was a bit of an anti-inflammation stumble.

On a positive note, not a drop of alcohol has passed my lips, and (with the exception of the pork bun I ate without realizing it last Friday ) if crumbs of gluten or grain have snuck in, they really have been crumbs.

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the gym, but mostly so I can check my kid into the attached childcare center (which sounds terrible, but I work there part time and it’s a good spot, staffed with good moms), hook up to lobby wi-fi and get some work done (it turns out becoming a very small internet retailer is harder and more time consuming than you might expect). Still, I’ve gotten a few good workouts in and I’ve done a fair bit of walking too.

I’ve been ok but not great about the omega 3 and vitamin D and turmeric supplements too. It’s really like my own health needs and goals just slipped to the back burner with the added activity this week of catering a major event, finalizing a big product and building store functionality into the site on top of all the normal stuff.

All told, I give myself a C for the week. Maybe C-.

The long weekend is coming up, and I’m going to use that as an excuse to re-start and re-boot. When you stumble over chocolate chips, it’s very tempting to just wallow around in a big Willy Wonka-style lake of chocolate Failure and celebrate Not Being Perfect by taking yourself out for a big bowl of ice cream and toasting your martyrdom with a half bottle of wine.

But we’re not going to do that. 

Nope, it’s all about progress in the Anti-Inflammation Challenge, and the reality is it’s hard to incorporate new habits and take on new restrictions when a lot of other things are vying for your attention. It’s not exactly anti-inflammatory behavior to beat myself up and take on more stress ’cause I had a few damn chocolate chips – organic, dark chocolate chips, at that.

So, for me, it’s: stand up, brush yourself off, get some good sleep and get back on track.

How are you doing? Have you stumbled over anything, and if so, how are you getting back on track while staying kind to yourself?

It’s like that in the garden. I’d prefer to just go out when the mood strikes and toss some seed in the ground and a few weeks later (because that’s how I want the garden to work) harvest buttery heads of lettuce, perfect shatteringly crisp carrots and juicy dark-red tomatoes. And I’d prefer to not worry about irrigation or compost.

But that’s not reality. The reality is, if you want a vine-ripe tomato in August, you have to be thinking about it in February or March. If you want April cauliflower you commit to an overwintering plant the previous June. Winging it just doesn’t work when you garden like you mean it. You need to think about how and why and when you fertilize and prune and plant to get good, consistent results.

So instead of going with the flow and going without cauliflower, I plan. I write out lists, take notes, research, draw sketches, look back at two year old seed catalogs and record what’s going on in the garden. Somewhere along the line all this planning took on a life of its own and I realized I needed to organize my organizing. I needed an easy, flexible, scalable way to record and plan my garden and keep all that planning and recording in one place.

So I designed this Garden Journal. It is designed specifically for vegetable gardeners, because it was designed by a vegetable gardener.

Everything you need to plan and organize your best garden is in here.

I’m pretty freaking proud of it, actually. It is, in my opinion, the best, most complete and most flexible garden planner on the market. It looks good and it performs better. I know, because it’s the Garden Journal I use. I believe it has everything you need to plan and grow a great edible garden without a bunch of fluff you don’t. And I’ll stand behind that: if I forgot something, or left a critical record-keeping sheet out of this Journal, email me and I’ll work to include it in future releases.

I’ve never sold anything on Northwest Edible Life before, but I’m offering this Garden Journal as a 91 page PDF download for $16. I believe this is a very fair price for a tool that will help you grow the best garden you can, and I hope you agree. But, because I’m eager to get this organizer in the hands of as many gardeners as possible before the real push of spring planting is upon us, I’m offering a 20% discount on all downloads made through President’s Day Weekend. At checkout, just use the Discount Code “LongWeekend” to have your discount applied. This discount will expire on Monday, 2/20.

For more information, including contents and page previews, or to purchase and download your own Garden Journal, click here.

Your feedback, is – as always – welcome and greatly appreciated. I hope you’ll love this complete planning, journaling and recording tool as much as I do. Thanks for your support and happy gardening.

-Erica

And now you have to kill it – on purpose.

You have to murder your seedling so that other, slightly better or slightly luckier seedlings can grow big and strong without competition.

It’s tragic, like Shakespeare.

Oh cruel, cruel fate that hath put these secateurs in my hand! Why hath thou made me both judge and executioner among young kinfolk, when I cry only for life, dear life of blossoming verdurousness!

But look, it has be done or none of your seedlings will have room to grow properly and they’ll all suffer (as will your harvest yields). So get over the sentimentality and know that when you thin your seedlings – which you must – you are doing one of the many essential tasks which you committed to when you decided to become a veggie gardener.

Let’s look at this tomato seedling I started in late January. This “seedling” is really four tomato plants, all looking to fill this 4″ pot with a heathy root system.

Unless there is obvious leaf loss or disease, you can pretty much ignore the leaves at this point. When you evaluate seedlings to thin, look at the stem first.

We want the thickest, stockiest stem we can find. That rules out seedling #3. We also want a more or less vertical stem. That rules out seedling #1 which is growing at a weird angle as it tries to get at more light.

Sorry guys, you gotta go. A pair of kitchen shears or small scissors is the right tool here. Just snip the seedling off at more-or-less soil level. Don’t try to pull the seedling out or you’ll probably mess up the roots of all the seedlings, including your keeper.

Okay, now we’re down to two seedlings with equally qualified stems. We need a tie-breaker at this point, so look to the leaf mass of the finalists. The seedling on the bottom in this photo has more leaves, and they are more well developed. You can see she’s working on her third set of true leaves at the center growing point, while her sister in the top of the photo is still growing out the second set. We have a winner, and the top seedling is snipped out.

The result of the seedling carnage: a plant with room to grow and develop properly. With a little time, continued space to grow and – cross your fingers – heat, this plant will grow into a mature, ripe-tomato-laden beauty. (Since this is Seattle, in reality she’ll probably peak as a green tomato goddess, but that’s not really her fault.)

A few notes about culling the weak. Sometimes you’ll see something like this:

And say to yourself, “Woo-hoo – look at that tomato in the back go! That’s the super tomato…that’s…hey, those leaves look kinda funny. Damn it, that’s not a tomato, that’s a weed!”

Yup, if you see something that looks too good to be true, it is. Get rid of it. This tall thing – whatever it is – came from some seed that hitched a ride in the vermicompost I used to start some of these tomatoes.

You won’t run into this much if you use sterile commercial potting mix, but occasionally a batch of good seeds will have a seed that develops into some very different seedling – much taller, or very different leaf shape or something. Get rid of that one. If it’s that far off from everyone else at the seedling stage, it’s probably not going to mature into what you think you planted. Genetics are funny. That’s why professional seed folks rogue out anything that looks too different in a batch of seed-crop.

Another reason to cull is poor seedling location within a pot. My daughter helped me plant these tomatoes, and the seeding density and location was a bit variable. Here you can see a pair of seedlings growing right at the edge of the pot. They look good, but that location isn’t ideal because all the roots will be off to one side when the seedling is transplanted. Since I had viable seedlings growing in the center of this pot, I cut off both of the side seedlings first thing.

So go forth, guilt free, and know that thinning your seedlings – in a pot or in the garden bed – is the right thing to do.

Besides, it hurts you more than it hurts them.

The immune system is a powerful thing and has a lot of weapons in its arsenal to attack and destroy any invading germs and rebuild the homeland when things go temporarily awry. All is fine and good until immune system friendly fire starts taking out your healthy tissue. When the friendly fire is extensive, that’s when you’ve got an auto-immune disease of some kind, like lupus, celiac’s, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and many, many more.

Anti-Inflammation Eating: Roasted Beets with Lemon-Walnut Pesto

But even without an official auto-immune disorder, a lot of people have levels of ongoing, chronic inflammation that is damaging to the body. How can you tell if you’re one of them?

Well, I’ll make this easy. Do you:

• Eat a typical American diet – lots of low quality meats and dairy, packaged foods, refined carbs and food products that include corn, soy and wheat ubiquitously?
• Work a job or jobs with long-hours and little emphasis on “work-life balance?” (This can include stay-at-home-momming, moms)?
• Feel stressed? Not occasionally because you’re hitting a deadline on something important or you’ve got pre-race jitters, but a lot – about money, jobs, kids, spouses, the environment, politics, the neighborhood, the move, the illness, or whatever is keeping you up at night?
• Rarely spend time outside or engage in moderate activity (gardening, walking, skiing – whatever floats your boat)?
• Drink too much, smoke too much, do anything else naughty (well, except that) too much?
• Take a lot of medications for things that should be normal body processes, like digestion (heartburn, constipation, diarrea, acid reflux meds and more – Aisle 5!)?
• Feel tired all the time?
• Wake up feeling bloated or puffy?

If a few of these sound a little too familiar, that’s a sign you’re probably suffering from chronic inflammation. The more I read about this inflammation stuff, the more I think our entire “modern American lifestyle” seems pretty much designed to make us sick.

Anti-Inflammation Eating: Pork, Mushroom and Greens Soup with Ginger

If you want more than “how do I feel” observational stuff, there are a lot of blood tests you can have done to measure various markers for inflammation. Mark Sisson, the author of The Primal Blueprint, goes over these tests in good detail here if you are interested.

So, uh, great – we’re all suffering from chronic inflammation. But what do we do about it?

Well, I went right to the source and asked Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution, what he’d distill as the three key things to avoiding inflammation.

His response:

1. Paleo diet
2. Ancestral sleeping patterns
3. Ancestral activity patterns

In other words, we do just what we committed to this month: eat lots of veggies, lots of wild fatty fish, wild or pastured meats, little or no sugar, alcohol or packaged and refined carb products. Sleep enough and move enough (in both cases, probably more than we are now.)

Many of you brave readers made the commitment to do this thing with me and put your anti-inflammatory stake in the ground too.

So how are you doing a week into the challenge?

Anti-Inflammation Eating: Roasted Coconut Chicken with Squash and Chard

Me, I’ve pretty much stuck to the plan this past week. Last night (Thursday) was the hardest because I have a catering event on Saturday and I began early prep work, including making ginger-dark chocolate ganache tarts (with Theo chocolate, no less…my favorite), dark caramel sauce and dill and feta flatbreads. There was a substantial amount of inflammatory temptation in those foods, I can assure you.

I did “cheat” insomuch as I took tiny tastes of the ganache and the caramel to confirm the flavor, but we’re talking seriously minuscule portions. Otherwise I’ve been strict: I managed to celebrate my daughter and her great report card at the neighborhood ice cream shop without partaking, and I’m doing shockingly well at ignoring the half-bar of premium dark chocolate with coconut that’s kicking around my purse somewhere.

Exercise has been good: lots of walking with the kiddo in the stroller and one session at the gym this week. Not quite what I was striving for but more activity, more time in the sun and fresh air, more stretching of the legs.

I also saw a naturopath and have a few leads on new good traditional doctors. The naturopath said take more fish oil and add turmeric to my supplement regimen.

Anti-Inflammation Eating: Venison Patty and Kale-Fig Salad

And for all this, I’m feeling much better, honestly. I can’t say what in the combination of cutting out alcohol and carby food, getting more sleep or being more pro-active about my health should get the lions share of the credit. I suspect it’s the combination of all these things, but I really do feel like my old self: more energy, more focus, more stable moods, less zombie-like, less resentful of reasonable demands on my time and energy.

So for now, although my over-riding health concerns remain unchanged, at least I feel pretty good.

What about you? Have you stuck to your Anti-Inflammation Challenge goals? Has it been harder or easier than you expected so far? If the challenge has been a real challenge, what’s been the most difficult aspect? Do you think this kind of diet and lifestyle is something you could stick to? Most important – how are you feeling? Better, worse, or about the same?

But my mother (ah, my mother, a Domestic Goddess of the highest order, I tell you) did let me in on a teeny time and mess saving trick. It’s not a miracle or anything – I don’t want to get your hopes up – but it does shave a second or two off each load. If I’m doing the math right on the number of loads of laundry I do, a few seconds per load adds up to something like 12 weeks per year in saved time. You know, roughly.

Here’s the trick. Get your enormous tub of bulk enviro-friendly laundry detergent (because if you do few enough loads to not buy your laundry soap in bulk than this post probably isn’t for you anyway).

Now get a squeeze bottle. Like those plastic ketchup and mustard bottles from diners, but not red and yellow. You can find them at any restaurant supply store, or here. Fill the squeeze bottle with the bulk soap, as so:

Recap and voilà! Easy to use, fast, dripless way to get your laundry soap in your machine.

Perhaps you are thinking: but those giant bulk laundry containers come with a convenient measuring cup, why would I need this?

Well, in my experience, those cups are evil. They get tremendously coated with slowly dehydrating soap. They do not “conveniently store over the dispenser” as promised – instead they fall off, usually bouncing their sticky soap residue all over a pile of clean clothes you haven’t quite gotten around to putting away. Finally, every time you fill one a little extra soap from the container’s dispenser drips on your counter. Leave that soap drip on your counter long enough it’ll take the color right out of Formica. And that, friends, is why my counter has that custom Jackson Pollock look to it.

No, trust me, the squeeze bottle is far better.

It’s not a solution, but it’s a start.

Anyone have any other good laundry simplification tips? I’ll take any help I can get.