More pictures from the garden

A good month between updates so I had better update with some lovely pictures from the garden. The Thai basil is loving the wet weather, seemingly more so than most of the seedlings.

First seeds sown

A slack blogger, though I may be, theres been a bit of activity in the garden since I last posted on my progress so heres the lasted update.

Dirt is finally in the planters! After renting a van and driving down to BC Sands for one tonne of delicious organic soil, and shoveling it all twice, its all ready to go. I thought I had better get a few seeds started too, seeing as its getting close to winter and it would be a shame to have any little seedlings freeze to death. So I've started a little seed tray

Still taking advice on what to plant as theres a fair bit of room left, but Ill be sure to upload some pictures once these guys start sprouting.

Liquid Water Flavour enhancer, mhhmmmm

Michael Pollan has a great link today to a press release out of Kraft Foods about an exciting new product:

    MiO, which means “mine” in Italian, complements the desires of its
    18-to-39 “Generation Next” target group, allowing them to customise their
    everyday experiences, claims the company.
    Liza Laibe, MiO senior brand manager, told BeverageDaily.com:
    “MiO answers this wish to personalize life’s experiences in a way no
      other beverage can”.

MiO is essentially sugar free cordial, and not, as you may have assumed from the above quotes, the answer to all lifes questions and liquid ecstacy. The reason I am writing this up in 3Votes is really to highlight the insane language that has taken a hold of the companies that once simply produced our food. I dont want my beverages to personalise my life experience, I want them to quench my thirst. I dont need my everyday experiences customised, I just want my food to come from the ground and taste delicious. This is a rather new phenomenon in the food industry that used to rely massively on classical food descriptors to sell us frozen reconfigured mush, as "Fresh, golden, brown and delicious."  They seemed to have moved into their own world, no longer is Kraft trying to convince us MiO is a natural experience, now its a super natural experience. Lookout water, it look's like youre about to get done in, by a fat toothpaste tube!

And then there were three

Finally finished my 3rd planter, which for the time being is all I'm going to build. So lets hope PLANTERTRON 3000, PLANTMAX 6000 and DAVID all get on well. Next step is to track down someone who wants to give me a tonne and a half of dirt for free, preferably delivered.

This week in food

This week I managed to catch an awesome program out of Channel 4 in the UK called "Eataholics" The premise of the program is to take someone with massive food phobias or a hugely selective diet and engage them with a nutritionist and a psychologist to find the root cause of their problem and help them work towards a healthier diet. I am not usually a fan of the voyeuristic but this program gives a really fascinating insight into one of the major concerns with a modern western diet, and that's the decreasing diversity in our diet. Even as the number of items in our supermarkets increase, more and more of these are simply reconfigurations of the same basic staples, paired with fat, sugar and salt. It also highlights the advanced psychological role food plays in our wellbeing, from creating a sense of community, to the role of comfort foods and our childhood diet. Well worth a watch.

Another Day, Another Planter

Planter number 1 off the assembly line, PLANTERTRON 3000, being the beast that it is, took Greg and I probably about 8 hours to put together. As with all things in life, its successor, PLANTMAX 6000 was much quicker to build. Nows its just a matter of nicking a couple more pallets and getting a hold of a ton or so of soil, piece of cake!

My First Planter

After reading various stories on the web about using discarded pallets as planter boxes, I set to work borrowing some pallets from a nearby construction site and enlisting the expertise of my friend and confectioner, Greg. Veraciously tearing the pallets to pieces,after day one our progress was a little slower than expected.

But after reconvening on day two with more serious weaponry the end result was exactly what I wanted. Now we just need to replicate it a couple of times over and I will have the perfect platform to start growing.

  

                                                   

Welcome to Three Votes!

As this is my first post, I feel I should lay out my motivations in establishing this space. Having been mildly obsessed with food and its production for the past year, I felt the only responsible thing to do was try my hand at making my own food, and shortening my food chain as much as possible. So after stealing ... erm, "borrowing," a patch of council land I attempted to grow my own vegies in Balmain. I loved the process, I loved the learning, and most of all, I loved my food. But come winter I had to move out of my cozy Balmain den in the hippie exile of Erskineville. Over the coming weeks I'll be documenting my progress building a new garden at our terrace in Erskineville as well as hopefully exploring South Sydney to find more people producing foods in their own homes. And as always please feel free to jump in on this discussion as I am a pretty green green-thumb having only done this once before and am always looking for help!