Super Bowl Gardening!

 

It's a quiet week for gardening  here.  Cold and dark, and I'm at work during the daylight hours.  Then it started to rain.  Normal January weather for Seattle, but I'm not making any progress in the garden!

It is a fun time to be in Seattle, though, with the Seahawks playing in the Super Bowl on Sunday.  12th man flags are everywhere, and people wearing their Seahawks gear all week.  When we were out at Grazies last weekend a young couple changed the words to a song we were all dancing to to "Seahawks!"  I have completely forgotten what song it was, but we all cheered wildly and took up the mod.  And everyone is talking about the team, the game, analyzing players and strengths, talking more about the weather for game day in New Jersey than here.  Our office, and I think every workplace in the city, is having a Super Bowl party on Friday afternoon, so I went out and got a Seahawks jersey to wear. Shirts and hats were flying off the shelves, probably the best thing to happen to Macy's in the last week of January for years. It's all great fun, and it seems to me that that is the spirit of the whole city this week.  Best place to be a football fan in the country!

It's hard for me to settle down and be serious about growing food and being more self-sufficient, but we're still planning a few things.  I'm hoping to get some indoor space set up for starting some seeds sometime in this festive weekend.  On Saturday I'm going to pick up our order of 40 pounds of chicken from Zaycon Foods https://www.zayconfoods.com/  We'll have to package it all in small packages and get it in the freezer Saturday afternoon.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to do some digging or clearing done Saturday or Sunday morning.  I'll let you know!

Tonight I made broiled chicken and a vegetable stir fry with onions, celery, garlic, zucchini, tomato and parsley.  I didn't enjoy it quite as much as usual, though, because I could not help but be aware that all those vegetables must have come from somewhere a very long ways to the south of us.  If I had a truly fantastic garden I could expect to have some onions and parsley this time of year, but none of the rest of it.  If I had to depend on what I grew, I'd have to can or freeze the tomatoes and zucchini, not sure how celery would fare. Or eat carrots, potatoes, parsnips, squash, and greens all winter long.  I'm thinking about that for a goal another year, using this year as a base line and to just start thinking about it.

We buy local produce from farmer's markets a good portion of the year, but it is still so tempting to drop into one of our huge shiny supermarkets and pick up any vegetable or fruit imaginable in the dead of winter.  We've all read about vegetables and fruits being bred to stand up to travel, while sacrificing taste, or about the high use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers in the big agri-business farms.  I care about those things, but I am more motivated now by just wanting to grow my own food, or buy it from someone within a few miles of me.  Just to see if we can do it, if we can survive on our own.  That's my food for thought this week.

Have fun, and GO SEAHAWKS!!