You are currently browsing the daily archive for March 19, 2010.
March 18, ready for planting!
It’s been a long, cool winter. And I’ve been very patient. There were a few warm days earlier that tempted me to get out and garden, but I knew better. Sure enough, a good, hard frost hit days later. Ah, but it’s warming up quickly now. Tomorrow we expect sunny skies and 70 degrees, and the future reports are trending upward. In the next two weeks there isn’t a nighttime low of less than 39 expected! I know there will be one more cold night, probably right around Easter. There always is.
I was late ordering my seeds again. Our finances run very, very tight at the first of the year with various taxes due. But, I’ve been socking away a dollar here and there from our food budget and have purchased most of the seeds I’ll need. I’ve also purchased the ingredients for my homemade custom potting mix.
Today the kids and I poured the ingredients of the custom potting mix onto the ground and mixed it up. We cleaned out and filled all our containers, first with an inch of pea gravel, then with our mix. It will compact down a little as the season goes on, so we made some extra for supplementing. My strong teens carried the containers up the stairs to the second-floor balcony where the plants will live just outside my kitchen window.
Last week I started Johnny Jump Ups, Dianthus, Greek oregano and Mountain mint indoors in little recycled paper cups. I’ve been squirting them with water every day, keeping the soil just moist. Tomorrow I’ll start the calendula, bergamot, two types of tomatoes and two types of bell peppers indoors.
My patio looks barren but hopeful and more than a bit eclectic with all the recycled containers and pots. But it smells of composted manure and peat moss, the stuff of spring.
Watch this spot for more as my garden and my zero-mile foodshed grows.
- The ONLY good use for Diet Pepsi in school. rocket science (mentos eruption) by woodleywonderworks, on Flickr
You gotta admire the tenacity of soda companies. I mean, they’re in there swinging every chance they get to bat. They’re on the cutting edge (albeit possibly the wrong end) of advertising, food science, and especially PR. When High Fructose Corn Syrup gets a bad name, they come out with “throwback” formulas: Made with REAL (genetically modified) sugar! When concerns of overconsumption hit the press, they respond with cute little “mini” cans. When the outcry against sugary soda at school gets too loud, they magnanimously retreat and brag about how they care for our children.
Big news in the world of soda was announced in the Wall Street Journal this week:
PepsiCo Inc. said Tuesday it will remove full-calorie sweetened drinks from schools in more than 200 countries by 2012, marking the first such move by a major soft-drink producer.
Well, Pepsi has beat Coke in this skirmish of the “Less-Cola War.” But before you prepare the laurel wreath to hang on their shoulders, let’s let the other shoe drop. From the same article:
In primary schools, PepsiCo will sell only water, fat-free or low-fat milk and juice with no added sugar. In secondary schools, it will also sell low-calorie drinks like Diet Pepsi.
Bottled waters, some not even different in composition than tap, served in a nice BPA-laden plastic bottle. Yum! Fat-free and low-fat milk, the drink of overweight, lactose intolerant children everywhere. Fruit juice with no added sugar, as if fruit juice needs more sugar. Feeling better about PepsiCo yet? So far I’m not seeing a great improvement in the choices. Then there’s low-calorie drinks like Diet Pepsi, full of aspartame. Here’s where PepsiCo and I enter the ring as grudge match opponents.
You can sort of justify water, juice and milk. Kind of. But PepsiCo has shifted the attack from HFCS soda’s assault on young bodies to aspartame’s devastation of growing brains.
PepsiCo, you get no gold star for this assignment.
Further reading:
Stop Childhood Obesity: Serve Whole Milk!
BPA hazardous to developing brain tissue
Environmental Working Group’s assessment of bottled water, including Pepsi’s Aquafina
The Use and Misuse of Fruit Juices, an AAP study
View the sugar contained in fruit juices as sugar cubes
Aspartame: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Aspartame Toxicity Info
Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade and Prevention Not Prescriptions by The Kathleen Show.
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
