Eat Local Challenge

People all over the country are taking the Eat Local Challenge. It is not a contest with judges or rules, just a chance to challenge yourself to eat locally. You choose your own format, whether you'll eat locally grown food for a meal, a day, a week, or whatever. You can make exceptions to the local rule, like coffee or tea or condiments or staples if you want. Try it! You get some great food, you learn what is grown in and around your community; you save energy on shipping and processing your food; and you support local farmers. We can do this right here in Montgomery. Write and tell me what you bought, what you cooked, and how great it was! I'm also interested in what you learned.

There are many places to find the ingredients for your local meals. Some stores in town carry local products. Some farms have farm stands or signs offering eggs or other produce. There is the farmer's market, or CSA's, or you could grow your own.

Montgomery Friends of Open Space has a farmers' market that opened June 12th (see first photo). It will be open every Saturday until 1:00 pm until October in front of the Village Shopper, which is on Route 206, just north of 518. I was there the first week. There were several stands, offering produce, meat, baked goods, flowers, and plants. Some of the vendors are friends or neighbors of mine, and I always see friends among the shoppers. We stand around and talk and it's a lot of fun. I highly recommend it. I am somewhat restricted in what I can buy, because my husband has a vegetable garden and we already have a lot of what is offered. Last week I bought a yellow summer squash, cucumbers and rhubarb. The squash was sauteed tonight with chopped onions, the cucumbers were made into sandwiches, and the rhubarb was cut up and boiled and it's cooling right now. I'll add sugar and eat it by the bowlful.

Some people get their produce from a CSA. That stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and supporting local farmers is definitely sustainable. In a CSA, families buy shares (or half shares) of the farmer's crops for the year. Depending on the weather, there may be more or less of something than the previous year, but everyone gets a share. Members pick up their share at the farm one day of the week, or at a designated pick-up site. Sometimes there is an option to pick your own of some especially abundant crop if you want extra. This unusual system allows the farmer to concentrate on growing food, not marketing or selling it, and guarantees the income the farmer needs regardless of the weather. Usually a share is a lot of food, so you might want to start with half a share, or take a friend's share while he or she is away on vacation.

Some especially hard-working and enthusiastic people grow their own food. This is about as local as you can get. My husband has had a vegetable garden here since we moved to Montgomery in 1986, and I am always impressed with all the food he gets from it (see second photo). It is a little late to start your own garden this year, but not too early to start planning for next year. You can do research at the library, look for publications from the Rutgers Agricultural Extension, and ask other local gardeners what they recommend. Probably they will have lots of great advice. They will probably be willing to show you their gardens (and even let you help weed!). You may want to take a soil test so that you don't use any fertilizer that your soil doesn't need. I also recommend starting a compost pile right now so you will be able to improve your soil in a year or two.

So far my husband's garden has produced radishes (did you know you can eat radish greens? Just cook them like kale), bok choy, mizuna, collards, kale, chard, rhubarb, sugar snap peas, garlic scapes (see my last post), purslane (a delicious weed that grows in the garden), spinach and half a dozen kinds of lettuce (see third photo). We are also picking and eating several kinds of berries right now (see fourth photo), but I'll tell you about that another day.

Growing garlic

This is a story about my husband Larry's garden. Larry is an incredible gardener. He's been gardening since he was 5 years old, and he started a vegetable garden in our back yard as soon as we moved into our house in April, 1986. Eventually I asked him to please make the garden organic, and he did.

A number of years ago, a friend who also had a vegetable garden moved away, and before she left she dug up some of the garlic from her garden and gave a head to each of her friends. Some people ate theirs, but Larry planted his, and every year he harvested a few heads of garlic and used them in salad dressing, remembering to be grateful to the friend who moved away. He could have grown them outside the garden fence, because deer don't like garlic, but he kept them inside the fence with the other vegetables. They didn't need full sun, which was convenient.

Meanwhile, I was washing and cooking the collards, kale and broccoli that he brought in from his vegetable garden on summer days (among many other vegetables), and I was getting frustrated with the aphids. Aphids are tiny soft-bodied insects that live in large colonies, and the ones I found on these veggies were gray. I could wipe them off of flat leaves, but it was harder to wipe them off the curly kale leaves and impossible to wipe them off the broccoli florets. I complained, but I didn't want pesticides sprayed on the vegetable garden, so for a while we were at a loss as to what to do.

Then one day Larry read that aphids don't like garlic. He divided up the small clump of garlic plants growing in his garden and put one on either side of every broccoli, collard and kale plant (see first photo). The garlic and the other vegetables happily grew together, and just as he had hoped, there were no more aphids on the vegetables. In the middle of the summer the garlic leaves die back (and the plants temporarily go dormant); that is the time to harvest the heads of garlic. Larry now harvests enough garlic to last us for a year--he keeps the heads on a tray in our basement, which is cool and dry and fairly dark for most of the year. We make it last by choosing any cloves that look like they are starting to sprout and using them first. He still has loads of garlic plants left in the ground to protect next year's vegetables from aphids, and the following spring he digs up buckets of garlic plants to give away to friends who might want to grow some. And armloads of garlic plants even end up in the compost pile (see second photo)!

A few years ago we heard about a vegetable called garlic scapes (see third photo). They are the stalk that the garlic plant sends up every year around Memorial Day, which produces miniature garlic bulblets that drop off into the soil. These are not flowers. They are another way for the plant to reproduce. As the stalks grow, they start to bend (see fourth photo). Some stalks bend into a loop and some just curve, but as soon as they start to bend they should be harvested and eaten. In fact, they should be cut off even if you don't want to eat them, since the plant will expend energy to grow and mature the bulblets, and the real, underground garlic cloves will therefore be smaller if you don't remove the scapes. We usually cut them into inch-long pieces (see fifth photo) and saute them in butter or olive oil and just eat them, but there are other recipes available. Harvest scapes as soon as they start to bend, because if they get too old they are very tough. We freeze whatever we can't eat and have them several more times during the year.

So, from a gift of one head of garlic and one simple organic pest control scheme, we now get enough heads of garlic to last for the year, several meals of garlic scapes, and aphid-free vegetables. How's that for a success story?

Replace your fallen trees

Montgomery has lost a lot of trees in the last couple of months, between the snow, wind, and rain (see first photo). Please don't be discouraged about planting replacement trees. If you choose the right tree for the place, or the right place for the tree, you have a much better chance of avoiding the kind of damage we are still cleaning up. I hope you will decide to replace any trees you lost, because Montgomery needs trees, and so does the earth.

The most important point I want you to know is this: don't plant a Bradford pear tree! This Frankentree is an environmental disaster. The Bradford pear tree is an example of a Callery pear tree, a type of pear tree that was hybridized to produce pea-sized fruit, so it could be used as a street tree. It has white flowers in spring (see second photo) and beautiful red fall color that recommend it to many people. Unfortunately, it has a weak branching structure, resulting in many fallen limbs (see third photo). Moreover, at the time of year when the fruits ripen, the birds are foraging for native berries, which are fatty, waxy berries, so they can store up energy to migrate, and the birds don't know that the Callery pear's berries don't have the nutrients they need. In fact, they barely have enough calories to repay the birds for the energy they expend in foraging. However, the birds eat the berries and spread the seeds in their droppings, and Callery pear trees are springing up in fields, hedgerows, and forests everywhere. Native butterflies' larva cannot eat the leaves of Callery pear trees, but they outgrow and displace native plants that do provide food for native birds and butterflies. Montgomery Township has banned the planting of these trees and other invasive exotic species on our Open Space and as part of any application for development, and the Shade Tree Committee holds volunteer events to remove them from our Arboretum.

If you are considering planting a Bradford pear tree, please don't. If you have one that has been damaged, why not cut your losses and replace it with a native tree? Callery pear trees don't live long, they are easily damaged in storms, and they are bad for the environment. If you want a flowering tree, you could plant a beautiful ornamental native tree, or if you like the look of a fruit tree, why not plant a flowering crabapple tree? These are not native trees, but the entomologist Douglas Tallamy (see my post titled "Why Native Plants?" from March 28) states that crabapple trees are the only non-native tree that native insects can use just as well as native trees. They have beautiful spring flowers (see fourth photo) and they are drought-resistant and very tough. Do check for a disease-resistant variety; Donald Wyman is a reliable favorite with white blossoms (see fifth Photo). In a future post I will recommend native ornamental trees.

Most people have noticed that the majority of the trees damaged by the storm were evergreens, because they presented much more surface area for the wind to work on. Evergreens also suffer disproportionately from heavy snow. It would not be a bad idea to plant evergreen trees farther away from your house and garage to prevent damage during winter storms. White pine trees all over town lost branches, but an informal windshield survey suggests that Norway and blue spruce trees were the most likely to be uprooted. Apparently they have shorter roots than most other trees. Since they can grow to be very tall, they can do a lot of damage to whatever they fall on. I would recommend that spruce trees, especially, be planted away from your home, or used only for places where evergreen screening is needed. The native Eastern red cedar grows well here in Montgomery in well-drained, sunny spots, with lovely blue berries that birds love to eat (see sixth photo). However, when it grows in shade it gets tall and spindly, which makes it prone to bending over (permanently) or breaking (see seventh photo) when weighted down by snow.

You can prevent some damage to your trees by keeping vines from growing on them, especially English ivy, which is famous for damaging even brick and stone buildings.

Remember to protect any tree that you plant from deer with a fence four or five feet tall. When the tree is little, a flag to alert lawnmowers is a good idea. If the tree is large enough that the deer can't reach its leaves or twigs, don't forget to protect the trunk from scraping by bucks' antlers in the fall, starting September first. Remember to mulch in a doughnut, not a volcano, and no more than 4 inches deep. Mulch should not actually touch the bark of the tree. Also, don't forget to water (equaling 10 gallons for a balled-and-burlapped tree) once a week for the first summer, when there hasn't been a soaking rain.

Soon I'll post some suggestions for native shade trees.

Earth Day Fair--a great success!

Montgomery Township's Earth Day Fair was a lot of fun, thanks to a lot of work from the Environmental Commission, the Sustainable Montgomery Committee, some dedicated Township employees, our sponsors, and a wide variety of volunteers. Thank you! Estimates are that around a thousand people attended.

I had a table for the Native Plant Society of New Jersey (see photo) and enjoyed hearing and (usually) answering a lot of questions about native plants. I also spoke briefly about my experience with a home energy audit under New Jersey's Home Performance with Energy Star program (see my post of Thursday, January 14, 2010), and otherwise never even got a chance to leave my table. But I heard the live music and the children and saw the crowds across the room. I hope everyone who attended learned something about the environment and about Montgomery.

I also got rid of the items I brought to Freecycle, which is incredibly good news for my attic! The Boys and Girls Club of Trenton collected about 100 bicycles, and they were very pleased.

If you missed the Earth Day Fair, or loved it so much that you wish there was another one, there is a Sustainable Hillsborough Family Fair on Saturday, May 1st from 1:00 to 5:00 at their Municipal Complex. I will be there for the Native Plant Society of NJ with Dr. Hubert Ling, the naturalist from NPSNJ, who has great recommendations for urban trees. Montgomery and Hillsborough may be rivals in football, but we are partners in sustainability!

Earth Day Fair

The Environmental Commission and Sustainable Montgomery Committee are pleased to announce the fifth annual Earth Day Fair on Sunday, April 25th from 12 to 4 pm at Montgomery High School on Route 601. This year's theme is Earth Day, Every Day: how we can incorporate green practices into our everyday lives.

There will be many exhibitors representing a variety of environmental organizations and non-profit and commercial enterprises with goods, services and information that address our environment and quality of life (I will have a table for the Native Plant Society of NJ). There will also be several expert speakers offering information on a range of topics such as the NJ Clean Energy program including rebate and home audit information (I'll tell the experience of a homeowner who has gone through the process), simple things you can do to keep the air in your house clean, organic lawns and gardens, and how to pick the right plant for the right spot by Toni Cox.

There will also be several recycling opportunities not usually available. Johnson and Johnson Consumer Companies will be sponsoring free computer recycling (for Montgomery residents only). The Boys and Girls Club of Trenton will be collecting used bicycles of all sizes to support the Boys and Girls Club Bike Exchange Program. Nassau Racquet and Tennis Club will be collecting used tennis racquets for the Montgomery Special Olympics program. Used printer cartridges, cell phones, eyeglasses and batteries will also be collected.

New this year will be a "FREECYCLE" event, where you can drop off items you no longer need and go home with "new" items--all for FREE! This is a great way to recycle and to reuse. Please do not bring items that are larger or heavier than one person can comfortably carry. You may bring photos of such items and include contact info to make arrangements for pick-up by interested persons.

There's even more! Three bands will be playing over the course of the afternoon: Jersey Junket Cajun Band, Mountain View Jam, and Acoustic Road. For the kids, Garbanzo the Clown will perform, a professional story teller will tell exciting stories for all ages, and creative crafts can be made from recycled items. Finally, there will be giveaways and plenty of food for all.

"The Earth Day Fair in Montgomery has become an increasingly important event for environmental education, so much so, that it was one of the reasons that Montgomery received certification in 2009 from the statewide Sustainable Jersey initiative," said Montgomery Township Committeeman Brad Fay, who is the liaison to the Environmental Commission. "I encourage everyone to come spend time learning about the local environment while also enjoying good food, good music, and good friends."

In addition to the Montgomery Township Environmental Commission and Sustainable Montgomery, this year's Earth Day Fair is sponsored by ConvaTec, Green with Envy Home Store, Environmental Liability Corporation, Hilton Realty Company, Robinson's Candies and Rocky Hill Cleaners.

The fair will be held indoors and outdoors, rain or shine. For more info, contact Lauren Wasilsuski, EC Secretary, at lwasilauski@twp. montgomery.nj.us or 908-359-8211 or email the Earth Day Fair Planning Committee at earthdayfair@gmail.com.

Speaker Schedule:
12:15 - 12:45 pm Organic Lawns by Verdant Lawn Care
1:00 -1:45 pm NJ Clean Energy --Home Audit and Rebate Information
2:00 - 2:30 pm Organic Vegetable Gardening by Truly Home Grown
2:30 - 3:00 pm Hunger and Home Gardens by AmpleHarvest
3:00 - 3:30 pm Pick the Right Plant by Toni Cox
3:30 - 4:00 pm Clean your Indoor Air! by Green with Envy

Kids Entertainment Schedule:
12:30 - 12:45 pm Storyteller
1:00 - 1:15 pm Storyteller
1:15 - 2:15 pm Clown
2:15 - 2:30 pm Storyteller

Live Music Schedule:
12:15 - 1:15 pm Jersey Junket Cajun Band
1:30 - 2:30 pm Acoustic Road
2:45 - 3:45 pm Mountain View Jam

Why Native Plants?

Last fall I attended a lecture at the Delaware and Raritan Greenway by Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware. He wrote a book called Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens, which I read, and which gave me many more reasons to plant native plants. His lecture was inspiring and added even more information from his latest research. Dr. Tallamy autographed my book and was gracious enough to pose for a photo with me. He has a website (see below) which you should visit to learn why it is important for us all to plant native plants.

Here is a summary of his arguments. We have developed the USA so much that only 3 to 5 percent of the land remains undisturbed as habitat for native plants and animals. Where land is in isolated patches the biodiversity decreases, so we need to provide food and other habitat for native plants and animals around and between nature preserves. Some native animals, such as deer, can eat a wide variety of plants, and some, such as raccoons, eat our garbage. However, most of the food chain comprises animals that only eat native plants, and the animals that eat them and the animals that eat them, and so on. Insects do the most consuming of plants, and are in turn eaten by other insects, birds and other animals, so we need to provide the plants that insects need to eat. For example, each type of caterpillar has to eat a certain native plant or family of plants, or maybe a few families, in order for it to survive (think of monarch butterfly caterpillars which can only survive on milkweed leaves). Each native plant supports its own ecosystem of insects and sometimes other animals that rely on it for food, and cannot eat anything else. These insects are in turn eaten by birds or turtles or frogs. Butterflies, which most people love, cannot exist without first being caterpillars, so if you want butterflies, song birds, turtles, etc. you should plant native plants. And the birds that are attracted by your butterflies will keep the caterpillars under control, just like a balanced ecosystem.

If my summary doesn't make sense or isn't persuasive, please visit the website or read the book. On the website you will also find lists of the native plants that support the greatest number of native insects, and please note that the top 21 woody plants (trees, shrubs and woody vines) each support more insects than the highest herbaceous plant (which happens to be goldenrod).

As you plan your garden this spring, or choose trees to replace the trees that fell over in the windstorm or snow storm, please select plants that are native to the place you live, because there they will be found by the native insects, birds and other animals that need them. For information on plants native to your area, you can visit the website
http://plants.usda.gov/checklist.html, or look at the Native Plant Society of New Jersey website http://www.npsnj.org/ In future posts, I will be showing you photos of some of the plants I am planting, as well as some I've planted previously or found in the wild as they come back to life this spring. I will also be showing some native plants at the Native Plant Society of NJ table at Montgomery Township's Earth Day Fair on Sunday, April 25 from 12:00 to 4:00 at Montgomery High School on Route 601.

I think spring may be here

Montgomery was bloodied but unbowed--we survived the winter with its snowstorms (first photo), and we survived the rain and wind storm (second photo). Suddenly the weather is beautiful, and flowers are now blooming that came out in January or February last year (snowdrops, third photo). Buds are starting to open and frogs are calling from vernal pools.

My husband ordered seeds for his vegetable garden in January with a friend who gardens. Now there are trays of seeds germinating on the coffee table and other trays growing in the basement under a fluorescent light. He has been poring over gardening catalogs for months and calling local nurseries, searching out the best flowers, shrubs and trees and the best sizes and prices for his garden and for community planting projects. I have been researching native plants.

But it's still not too late for you to plan your garden! When you do, please consider native plants. They benefit the ecosystem and are well-suited to the local soil and climate.

If you lost some trees, think about replacing them this spring. Be sure and ask advice about the right type of tree for the spot you have in mind. There is no point fighting Mother Nature by planting a wetland tree in a dry place, or a sun-loving one in a shady area.

Whatever you do, please DO NOT plant any invasive exotic species. These are non-native plants that spread from cultivation and grow in the wild, taking habitat away from native plants and the wide variety of native animals that depend on them. Common examples are Bradford pear, Norway maple, burning bush, barberry and English ivy. Bradford pear trees have weak branching structure and they sustained a lot of damage in the recent windstorm (fourth photo), so you will be doing yourself a favor if you don't plant them.

Montgomery Township is picking up branches curbside on Monday, March 22, and they will chip them up and add them to their wood chip pile. It would be even more sustainable for residents to compost as much as they can, or use it as firewood (fifth photo). I have seen shrink-wrapped firewood for sale that has been shipped over from Europe, and if you use firewood you would do best to buy local. We found a friend who heats with wood and is happy to have pieces of our fallen sugar maple branches.