WEGO Health: Best Conversation This Week

It is day #8 of the HAWMC (Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge) for WEGO Health and today’s topic is best conversation I had this week.

Uh…. ?????

Things I don’t really remember. However, conversations with a two+ year old are really fun! I did have an interesting conversation earlier this week with Sam, my lovely gardening husband. That’s gotta count. I just don’t really remember how it went, but this post shares what I learned from that conversation so you'll get the gist of it.

We He has been working hard at getting our garden plots at the community garden ready by planting seeds at home and babying them to get to the point they’re at now of transplanting them to bigger pots, except, he wanted to do it in a more eco-friendly way.

pepper seedlings

Sure, it’s easy to plant them in those little plastic pots that you can find everywhere (or picnic drinking cups) but then we began to wonder what kind of plastic are those. Most don’t really say so we’re left to assume they aren’t good.  It would seem to defeat the purpose of an organic garden. We had a few pots marked #5 but to streamline this whole process, the intent was to find something we could plant directly in the ground when the time was right.

Sam found cowpots but then wondered if the cows could’ve been eating GMO corn chaff or who knows what. Some other eco-friendly options are hard to justify the cost and we (he) had a lot of tomatoes to transplant and soon bell peppers so there had to be another way...

Newspaper! Of course! How awesome. So Sam got to work making little newspaper pots and then, transplanted some tomatoes.

Great, right?

Well, turns out that the ink used for newspapers is highly toxic (heavy metals) and having it leach into the soil and getting absorbed by the roots didn’t seem like a good idea.

So the next plan was to use those recycled paper grocery bags. Phew! These are safe so he made a bunch of those and transplanted tomatoes…again. Material is thicker and it took him a lot of time to make those but the hope is they’ll be worth it.

tomatoes

Gardening and being eco-friendly at the same time is challenging sometimes!

Here’s a list of things we’re growing this year:

☼ Tomatoes (striped roma, San Marzano, and egg yolk to name a few)
☼ Peppers, hot and sweet
☼ Corn
☼ Kale
☼ Strawberries
☼ Blueberries
☼ Lettuce
☼ Carrots
☼ Beans
☼ Flowers
☼ Beets
☼ Flax (maybe, Sam did last year)
☼ Amaranth
☼ Raspberries

I’m sure I’m missing something from this list but that’s a lot of it. Oh yeah, Sam won a $100 bucket of heirloom seeds from Baker Creek that he’s donating to the food bank garden at our community garden. Cool, huh?

You’re probably wondering what did I do in all of this; did I help Sam any? Well, not much, sadly. I wrote on the paper pots the tomato names. I do hope to have an afternoon to focus on weeding and doing some prep work so Sam isn't having to do it all.

Don't forget my giveaway for cute little magnets made by me. Anyway, hope you all have a good day!