I’ve been staring at seed catalogs over the past week trying to decide what kind of produce we should grow this year.  We haven’t been able to grow any food for the past two years due to selling our old house and purchasing a new one.  At our previous house we had built four 4′ x 4′ raised beds and one 4′ x 8′ raised bed.  We mostly dabbled in trying to grow a number of different veggies and we found a lot of success with cherry tomatoes, beans, and garlic.

Now that we’ve moved, we have more room to garden due to the configuration of the yard and a second story porch on which we can container garden.  We built eight 4′ x 4′ raised beds.  We have room for a whole lot of five gallon containers on the porch.  This gives us a fairly large amount of room to grow a lot of different vegetables.  The Square Foot Gardening book recommends eight 4′ x 4′ blocks as a maximum for a family of four.  We’ll shortly be a family of five and we want not only fresh vegetables, but vegetables for preserving as well.  I’d say that the amount of space we have will work quite well.

I’ve come up with quite a large list of different vegetables to grow.  Looking at the list, it seems that the only way we’ll be able to keep on top of planting and harvesting so we can get the maximum benefit out of our garden is to pre-plan everything.  Plan out what seeds will go where and at what times during the season.  This will hopefully get us fresh veggies all season long and still allow us to preserve a bunch.  I’m quite certain, though, that we’ll still need to purchase extra vegetables.  Some veggies I’m not going to bother growing because it’s either not worth it to try to grow them, or we don’t have the room to grow enough.

Hopefully I figure all this out soon.  We’re going to have to start some seeds around the end of March.

Mmmmm.  I can already taste delicous, fresh veggies!

With the advent of REST, I really thought we were getting close to that.  I can write all the business logic of an application in whatever language I choose and expose everything as a bunch of linked REST URLs.  A UI designer can create that UI in HTML/Javascript, Objective-C, Java, C++, Ruby, whatever.  By divorcing all the business from the UI we can be much more flexible.

But in steps the aforementioned tweet talking about Chrome supporting IndexedDB.  I was curious, so I started poking around on the W3C website.  I found the Web Storage document, the Indexed Database API document, and the Web Sockets API document.  Interesting.  Web Storage and Indexed Database are both for storing data locally so that an application can work when not connected to a network.  Web Sockets allows two-way communication between browser and server.

This is strange and interesting to me.  What was once supposed to be a simple and standards-based way to display content across different operating systems has morphed into a new way of writing applications.  It all keeps getting more and more complex.  It’s getting to the point that you _have_ to be a programmer just to build a UI these days.  HTML + Javascript is the new QT, GTK, or Swing.  It’s just another way of building a rich UI.  Any of the standard native UI toolkits could ask a REST-based service for data just the same as the browser version.

I have to wonder, though, if there is a limited lifetime for local storage in the browser.  The day can’t be too far off when there won’t be the concept of being “disconnected” from the web.  Coverage will be such that we’ll be able to be connected to the internet all the time, no matter where we are.  Web Sockets is even more interesting to me.  The browser concept was never supposed to allow two-way persistent communication.  You make a request and receive a response, then you close the connection.  We’ve devised all kinds of workarounds using server-side sessions, so I suppose this is the next logical step.

I guess the end result is that we’ll never really see the ideal of separation of concerns with application development.  More and more APIs are being added to HTML and Javascript that are blurring the lines between presentation and business.  The frameworks to make the browser UI do cool things are complex enough that you have to understand programming to a certain degree to manipulate the DOM.

Sigh.  I’d better start learning the finer points of UI design now.

There are a number of different ways to store root veggies all winter.  A root cellar would be nice, but that would require a lot of digging.  We thought about the possibility of just burying some garbage cans; but again, too much digging.  Another possibility would be to build out and insulate a small room by one of the basement windows and rig up a system of circulating and letting in cold air to regulate the temperature.  That would take a lot of work and use up too much basement space.

What we ended up doing is taking a freezer that has a slow refrigerant leak and converting it into a refrigerator through the use of an external thermostat.  This works quite well.  The downside is that the thermostat we picked up isn’t as accurate as we’d like.  It was expensive enough and buying a better one would mean shelling out 100 dollars or so.  We may end up doing that for next year.  But, all in all it isn’t too shabby of a setup.

We experimented with putting carrots into small, trash bag lined boxes and burying the carrots in damp sand.  This works fantastic.  I’ve only found a single rotten carrot in the lot.  The rest have held up great.  We threw a bunch of cabbage heads in there.  The outer leaves look awful, as one would expect.  I’ll be interested to see if the rest of the cabbage has held up.  Then we put in about 150 pounds of potatoes.  That was the cause of much sadness.

My wife noticed that some of the potatoes were moldy when she went to pull some out of storage.  I checked them all out today.  All the potatoes were a loss.

I’m trying to figure out what went wrong.  We stored the potatoes in a mixture of sand and peat.  It seems like that was a big mistake.  One of the boxes had more sand than the others and the potatoes looked much better, but still moldy.  I think next year we’ll try all sand and slightly less moisture in the sand.

We also have some pie pumpkins and butternut squash.  Those we just left in a box out in the basement.  Our basement is well under 60 degrees, so the squash is quite happy.  We packed sweet potatoes into small, trash bag lined boxes, buried them in a sand/peat mix, and left them out in the basement.  So far, so good with them.

I think next fall I’d like to get a lot more carrots, some turnips, and rutabaga.  Those should all hold up in the fridge-freezer.

There are certainly other ways to preserve root veggies, but they’re a lot more labor intensive and would require shelf space for canned items or freezer space.  We wanted to go the low labor route since we have many other things to cook and preserve at that time of the year.

I want to share our experiences with food in the hopes that it helps other families in similar situations.

We have one son who has anaphylactic (the kind that could kill you) allergies to peanuts, tree nuts, coconut, sunflower seeds, and corn.  Yes.  Corn.  Our other son is on the autism spectrum and tends to have issues with different foods.  Different tastes and textures can either make him really like the food item or turn his nose up.  It’s a strange guessing game trying to figure out what he’ll eat and not eat, especially with various proteins.

Throughout navigating what each of our children will eat and not eat, we have solidified some goals about our food habits:

• Everything is made from scratch
• We must avoid the allergens
• We want to eat as local as possible and as organic as possible
• We want to get the best price we can for our food
• We want to buy in bulk to save money
• We want to preserve the harvest to lower our food costs
• We want to eat healthy, delicious meals

All of this combined is kind of a tall order.  What I’ve found out is that it really comes down to what your priorities are in life.  We are determined to make this work.  It has been a gradual lifestyle change on our part, but a good one.

These are the topics I’ll write about much of the time since it’s near and dear to my heart.  It’s something I believe in.

All food postings will be cross-posted to my Tumblr blog at http://eatinglikethe1800s.tumblr.com/