Irrigating with Ollas

My husband Daniel is addicted to Craigslist. This isn't always a bad thing. We've gotten some pretty nice pieces of furniture from there, including the entertainment center that's in our living room right now. I wouldn't advise getting mattresses or couches from there (ew, bed bugs!), but you really can get some good deals on things like entertainment centers, cabinets, bookshelves, tables, desks, etc. They might be free, or they might be a fraction of the price you would pay to get one new. The only problem is you usually need to haul them away yourself, so you need a pickup truck and people who are strong enough to load and unload the thing.

He also gets rocks off of Craigslist. Lots and lots of rocks. Also sometimes cut stone blocks and bricks. He's been using them for hardscaping in the yard and garden. The rocks are often free. In the Hill Country there's so much limestone that people will post things to Craigslist like, "Big rocks free to anyone who wants to haul them away. Otherwise I'm crushing them into gravel and using them as fill." The cut stone blocks and bricks are usually leftovers from people's building projects. Sometimes people give them away for free, and sometimes they charge a small amount of money for them, but again it's still usually a fraction of the price you'd pay buying them retail.

Daniel built us a nice new raised flower bed in the front yard using cut stone blocks entirely off of Craigslist, and almost all of them were free. I think he paid $50 for one load of them. It replaced a dinky flower bed lined with very rotten landscape timbers that was there when we moved in. This stone one he built will probably still be there after we're both dead.

The downside of his Craigslist addiction is that sometimes he'll get things that he's not even sure what we can use them for, but he had to get them because they were such a good deal. The back yard is becoming full of rocks and a big stack of bricks that we're going to use for something someday, and he just got this nice wooden cabinet that's in our storage unit because we're going to put it somewhere someday but we're just not sure where yet. But it was free, so he had to get it!

I try to stay away from Craigslist because I don't want to get addicted too, but a couple of years ago I lucked out and got a really great deal on something that's made a big difference in how I garden.

Daniel found a post where people were giving away cut limestone edging stones that would be nice to line garden beds with. It turns out they were dismantling a community garden at a trailer park, and I noticed that in the picture of the stones they posted, there were also ollas laying around, even though the post itself didn't mention the ollas. I had heard of ollas before and even seen them for sale in a few garden centers, but the two gallon ones cost something like $35 - $40 each. They didn't seem economical for a garden as big as mine. We emailed the guy asking if he was getting rid of the ollas too, and he agreed to throw in the ollas for an additional $200. When we got there to pick them up, a lot of the ollas were broken, but we managed to get 40 ollas that were either completely in tact, or only slightly damaged and able to be repaired. So that was $5 per olla. What a good deal!

Ollas sitting against the side of my house.

What are Ollas?

Technically "olla" just means "pot" in Spanish. It can refer to pots used to cook beans in, for example. But the ollas I got off Craigslist are the kind used to water plants. They're made of porous terra cotta and are kind of gourd shaped with a lid on top. You bury them up to their necks and fill them with water, and the water slowly seeps out to water the plants around them.

Mine are the Dripping Springs Olla brand (which is why they say "DSO" on their lids), and hold about two gallons of water each. They're supposed to be big enough to water an area 4 feet in diameter. These ollas come from Dripping Springs, Texas, which is only about 30 miles from here, so that let me know that they can work in the clay and limestone soil of the Texas Hill Country.

Before I got the ollas I was using soaker hoses to water my vegetable garden. I had the hoses lying on the ground and covered with mulch, one winding around each bed, and would attach the garden hose to them, often leave them trickling overnight to water my plants. Forty ollas turned out to be enough to completely replace the soaker hoses in the vegetable garden, so now the soaker hoses have been relocated to the fruit trees.

Ollas installed in the garden.

Pros and Cons of Ollas

So far the pros have definitely outweighed the cons for me. They are much easier to use than soaker hoses. I just fill them up when they need it, and then I'm done. I don't have to worry about remembering to turn the hose on or off. It's also very easy to tell when I need to water the garden. It needs it when the water in the ollas dries up. When it's been raining, the ollas empty more slowly because the moist soil doesn't draw the water out as quickly, and when it's dry the ollas empty faster as the dry soil and thirsty plants wick out more water.

I do have to water newly planted seeds or transplants by hand or with a sprinkler because they need time to grow their roots deep enough to reach the olla water. But once the plants are established I switch to only watering them through the ollas.

I usually fill up my ollas with rainwater from the rain barrels, but if I run out (or just don't feel like lugging around heavy jugs of water from the rain barrel to the garden) I use tap water from the hose. The problem with using tap water is our water here is very hard, and I'm afraid the minerals will build up and clog the pores. That hasn't happened yet because I usually use rainwater, but if it ever does happen, I could probably unclog them with vinegar.


There are a few things I've discovered that you have to watch out for when using ollas. One is tree roots. You shouldn't use ollas to water fruit trees (which is why they are in the raised beds and not in the food forest) because tree roots can eventually wrap around them and break them. Every time I harvest a crop and am about to plant a new crop I dig up the ollas and pull mats of roots off of them before replacing them. Often they are vegetable roots, but sometimes a nearby tree will grow a root all the way over to the olla and encase the whole thing with branching roots. If given enough time they would break the olla (besides stealing water from the veggies), but ripping them off once or twice a year seems to be working so far.


I've also found out that despite the lids, there are critters that can get into the ollas. Sometimes one gets infested with mosquito larvae. I'm not sure how that happens. Is it because the rainwater I put in had eggs in it? Are the mosquitoes quick enough to lay eggs in them during the short time I have the lid off to fill them up? Are they somehow squeezing underneath the lid? I don't know, but sometiems they somehow manage to get in there. During mosquito season I also let the ollas completely dry out before refilling them with completely fresh and clean water in the hopes that any mosquito eggs or larvae in there will die before I fill them up again. Sometimes I might have to resort to using mosquito dunks.

Other critters can get in there as well. Apparently slugs can easily squeeze under the lids. I guess that's what you can do when you have no skeleton. Sometimes I open one up and there must be at least half a dozen big slugs in there.

And you also have to watch out for beneficial creatures getting in there and drowning, because they're basically pitfall traps if the lid isn't on. Sadly, I once found a dead frog in one. I'm not sure how it got in there. Did it jump in when I left the lid off? Another time I found a frog that was still alive and swimming around in a half-filled olla, and I had a heck of a time trying to fish it out. It kept swimming away from me while I was trying to grab it, so I finally stuck the hose in there and let the water run over until the frog got washed out over the edge of the pot. And then there was the time I took the lid off one that had dried out, and I guess got distracted and forgot to fill it up and close the lid again. A day or two later I noticed it there with its lid off, and a toad was trapped in there. Luckily the toad was still alive and I was able to rescue it.


And finally there's the con that I was able to avoid, but most people probably won't. They are expensive if you have to buy them at retail and have a large garden. Like I said, the big two gallon ones I got retail at around $40 a piece, and each one covers an area 4 feet in diameter. I lucked out because I was able to get them used, and got enough used ones for my entire vegetable garden. It would have been very expensive to buy so many at retail prices. You can try making your own out of terra cotta flower pots, which may be somewhat cheaper, but those pots aren't as porous as real ollas and I'm not sure if they work as well. I had considered making some of them myself until I found the amazing Craigslist deal.


Overall I'm very happy with my ollas and feel very lucky that I was able to find such a good deal on them. They work well even in my clay soil. They seem to work with all different kinds of plants, especially larger ones like tomatoes and squash (sometimes small plants have trouble reaching the ollas if they are too far away). And I haven't actually done the math, but I would be really surprised if I wasn't saving water using this method.


If you can afford to get ollas for your garden, then I definitely recommend them.

My Attempt at a Permaculture Food Forest

Remember those fruit trees I planted in my front yard? In the last couple of years I've been trying to turn them into a "food forest." At the very least, I don't want them to continue to be fruit trees sticking out of a lawn of Bermuda and St. Augustine grass, and instead be a garden with fruit trees in it. The "food forest" method seemed like a good way to chip away at the lawn and replace it with a different understory for the fruit trees that doesn't have to be mowed, and might be useful in itself.

Permaculture seems to be a kind of trendy thing right now, so I thought I'd give it a go. What is permaculture? It's hard for me to explain, actually. The definition seems to be fuzzy. To simplify it as much as I can, it seems to be an attempt to make agriculture mimic natural ecosystems more closely. For example, using polycultures instead of monocultures, using organic methods of fertilization and pest control, and so on. However, when you start reading about permaculture, it can start getting very philosophical and Utopian. Its most enthusiastic supporters seem to think we can Save the World with this technique. It actually reminds me of the Grow Biointensive method in that way, even though they're kind of opposites. Grow Biointensive is actually very unnatural, with all the double-digging and intensive planting to maximize yields. Permaculture seems to be less concerned with maximizing yields on limited space, and more concerned with minimizing inputs of labor, water, fertilizer, etc. The similarity is in their promises to Save the World by growing food for humanity in a more environmentally sustainable way.

Obviously I'm going into this skeptical that it will be quite as awesome as people say it will be, but I have this area in my front yard with fruit trees, so I thought I might give it a shot. Gardening is my hobby. I'm not trying to completely feed my family with this, so if it doesn't work out, it's not a big deal.

OK, so what I started out with was a suburban front yard in Central Texas in a neighborhood that thankfully doesn't have an HOA, so I can plant whatever I want in the front yard. The fruit trees went in the front yard because the back yard is too shady. In the front yard we have a cluster of live oak trees that shades the house nicely, with non-native St. Augustine grass underneath them, and then a sunny strip between the oak trees and the street with non-native Bermuda grass. The fruit trees were planted in this sunny area.

My house is in the Texas Hill Country (also known as the Edwards Plateau), which means we have a thin layer of black clay soil on top of limestone bedrock. It's Texas, so the summers are scorching hot, the winters are mild (we get freezes, but it seldom stays below freezing for more than one night at a time), and spring and fall are our rainy seasons. The natural ecosystem here would be a Plateau Live Oak and Ashe Juniper woodland. Permaculture enthusiasts claim that you can make a food forest anywhere, in any type of climate, on any type of soil. OK then.


The Fruit Trees

The first fruit trees we planted, soon after we moved into this house in 2012, were a Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and an unknown fig variety I got as a cutting from my in-laws.

Pretty soon we found out that Key Limes cannot survive in the ground in our area, at least not until global warming takes away what little winter we have. Apparently Key Limes cannot deal with freezes at all. The first freeze we had killed the entire top of the little tree. I was afraid it was dead, but in spring shoots grew back up from the roots, so we dug it up and put it in a large pot, and that's where it's lived ever since. When it freezes, we take it inside, which be dangerous because it has some nasty thorns. I get a nice crop of golfball-sized limes from it every year.

The Meyer Lemon is only slightly hardier. It might be better off in a pot as well, but it's still in the ground at this point. I try covering it with frost blanket when we have a hard freeze, but it still gets damaged often. Last winter despite getting covered, all of its leaves were killed again. It hasn't yielded fruit in a long time because it has to keep recovering from freeze damage again and again. The main reason why I'm reluctant to put it in another big pot is because we have limited space in this house, and already have a key lime, rubber tree plant, and Norfolk Island pine in big pots that we have to find room in the house for each winter. One of these days I guess I'll have to get a greenhouse, but we have so many other household projects going on, I'm not sure when that will happen.

When we removed the Key Lime, I planted a Kumquat in its place. Now that's a good fruit tree to have in the ground in Texas! Even though the tree is still only about 3-4 feet tall, I get a nice crop of fruit off of it every year, and freezes hardly bother it. We do cover it if it gets into the 20's, but I'm not sure if it even needs that.

The Satsuma is also doing fine in the ground. We covered it with frost blanket while it was little, but eventually it got too tall for that. Every now and then it freezes enough to kill a few leaves, but it grows news ones back in the spring. A couple of  years ago we got a bumper crop of about 40 fruits. The fruits are like a large tangerine or navel orange, with thick skin that's very easy to peel. I've heard that in Britain, Satsumas are known as "Christmas oranges," and that is around the time when they ripen. I've also been told that a light frost actually makes them sweeter. While the kumquat consistently bears fruit every year, it seems like the Satsuma is doing that thing some fruit trees do where it has a heavy crop one year that wears out the tree, and then doesn't do much the next year. The year after we had the 40 fruits, it only made two fruits, and then this last year we had a weird late freeze in March that killed a lot of its blossoms, but even after that I harvested 11 fruits in early December.

For the non-citrus trees, the best one is probably the fig. Nobody knows what variety it is, but it gives us a good crop of small figs each year. The figs are light purple and only about 1-2 inches long, so they are smaller than figs from the grocery store, but they are very sweet and tasty. The tree sheds its leaves in the fall and grows them back in the spring, and our freezes don't seem to bother it at all. It's been growing very fast, and it's amazing that it started out as just a little cutting.

The Gold Nugget Loquat has also been growing fast, and has become the largest fruit tree in the food forest. However last spring was the first year we actually got a good crop of fruit off of it. Loquats are a little weird because the tree is cold-hardy, but the flowers are not. They flower in November, grow fruit through the winter, and then the fruit ripens in spring. Every single year we've had freezes that killed the flowers before they could make fruit until last year.

Perhaps the most disappointing tree so far is the Wonderful Pomegranate. The tree itself is beautiful. It's grown really big. It gets large orange flowers on it that the hummingbirds love, and then they fall off and that's it. Last year 3 or 4 of them tried to make fruits, but then when they were about tennis ball sized they split open and rotted. I could tell that happened before they were ripe because the insides were still white. I don't know what it's problem is.

A couple of years ago I added three more fruit trees in a second row behind the first row. They are a Houston peach, an Anna apple, and an Ein Shemer apple. This might be pushing things a bit because they are getting pretty close to the oak trees, and might be in too much shade. We did trim some of the limbs off the oak trees, but I've still noticed that they are starting to lean away from the oak trees to get more sun. But maybe a little shade will help them survive the Texas heat? We'll see I guess.

None of them have produced fruit so far, but last year the peach had some blossoms, got 2 or 3 small green fruits on it, and then they fell off. The Ein Shemer apple has gotten a few blossoms each year that just end up falling off, and the Anna apple hasn't even blossomed. Maybe they just need more time. Apple trees aren't self-fertile, which is why I planted two, so Ein Shemer won't make fruit until Anna blossoms anyway.


The Hügelkultur Beds

A food forest is supposed to have an understory of other plants below the fruit trees. My fruit trees started out stuck in lawn grass. I needed to figure out a way to remove the lawn grass and replace it with something else without disturbing the roots of the established fruit trees. That's when I stumbled upon something called Hügelkultur. This is another thing where I'm not sure if it will work as well as they say it will work, but might as well give it a shot. I decided to start by making a bed between each of my fruit trees and then eventually I'll expand out from there. If nothing else, this will mean I won't have to mow between the fruit trees, which has always been a pain.

Melons in a hugelkultur bed last year.

I modified the technique somewhat from what I read about it. I didn't dig a trench or even removed the grass because that seemed like too much work and also might damage the fruit trees' roots. Instead, I covered the grass with a couple of layers of flattened cardboard boxes. We always have plenty of boxes from Amazon or Costco, so this was a way to recycle them.

On top of that is where I put the wood, which is the main distinguishing feature of this kind of raised bed. In our wooded back yard, we have two big brush piles and some logs. I didn't want to use our oak, mesquite, or juniper logs because I prefer those for firewood, but we did have logs from a big Chinaberry tree that fell down. Chinaberry is such a lightweight wood that it doesn't make very good firewood (it burns up too quickly), so I used those logs to line the outsides of the bed, and then in the middle I put all kinds of stuff from the brush piles that I chopped up with loppers or just broke up by hand if they were really rotten.

Then on top of that you need something nitrogen-rich to balance all the carbon in the wood. I used grass clippings from mowing the lawn.

Then on top of that goes some kind of soil-like substance that you can plant things in. I ended up using store-bought topsoil and cow manure. That is probably not ideal because I had to spend money on that part and buy a bunch of individual 40 pound plastic bags of the stuff and spread them on top. But at the time I didn't have a lot of homemade compost ready for something like that, and since I didn't dig a trench, I didn't have soil that I removed from the trench to put on top.

Then I immediately plant them with vegetables. I've found that I should plant them immediately because the roots of the vegetables are needed to hold everything together. So far the best thing to plant in them seems to be winter squash or melons with long vines. The vines also help hold everything together.

How have they done so far? I started them last summer, so they're over a year old now. For one thing, they DO need to be watered. Some people claim that the rotting wood in the beds soaks up so much water like a sponge that you never have to water them. That is not true in Texas, at least not in the summer. The wood I used ranged from very rotten to very fresh, so the fresh wood may not soak up as much water as the rotten wood, but the important thing is I've still had to water them. So far I can't tell if they need to be watered more or less than a traditional raised bed.

I haven't noticed any problems with the plants having nutrient deficiencies. I've seen some people write online about how the wood draws up too much nitrogen as it decomposes. I do occasionally sprinkle fertilizer on mine, but they don't seem to require any more fertilizer than a traditional raised bed.

One thing that ends up happening is as things decompose, the mound starts to collapse and gets big holes in it. Part of that may be because I used a tangle of sticks in them middle instead of logs, and they were sticks of various species of wood at varying stages of decomposition, so they aren't decomposing evenly. When I plant a new crop of something, I stomp around on it a bit to break up the sticks further and compact it a bit, and sometimes fill in the holes with more compost. I figure they'll eventually settle down into something more solid.

At least some of the vegetable plants seem to enjoy the partial shade they get from the fruit trees during the hottest part of the summer, and the fruit trees have essentially gotten a thick mulch between them that probably helps them in the summer as well.


The Biggest Problem with my Food Forest

I'm trying to grow a fruit and vegetable garden in the front yard with no fence around it in the Texas Hill Country. Nobody else in my neighborhood are bothering to do that, and maybe I'm just in denial about how nuts this is, because maybe I'm just going to all this work to feed the local deer herd. Aaarrrgh! DEER! Yes, I know they are cute. I'm also having to constantly battle them to keep them from eating everything.

I use a combination of various techniques, so I haven't done any kind of controlled experiments to see which techniques are the most effective. I put wire cages around some things (which are ugly, I admit). I spray deer repellent that smells like rotten eggs (gross!). When my husband cuts his hair, I sprinkle that around. I have even hung up socks with Irish Spring soap in them from the fruit trees.

Still the deer sometimes munch my plants. I found out that their favorite fruit tree to browse is the peach tree, but the apple trees are also tasty. Any leaves that aren't protected by a wire cage or aren't too high up are eaten. They eat a few leaves off the pomegranate tree too, but don't like the citrus or the fig leaves. They will also rub their antlers on the trunks of young trees of any kind, so they have to be protected with wire cages.

As for the vegetables in the Hügelkultur beds, I pretty much gave up on legumes of any kind. Despite their value for nitrogen-fixing ability, they're also extremely tasty to deer. They also seem to really like cucumber leaves, but aren't as much into the squash leaves (I guess because they're spiny?). They will eat squash leaves, but it's not the first thing they eat. In the winter, greens like lettuce MUST be under wire cages or they all get eaten.

Maybe one day I'll have to give up on growing anything other than citrus trees, or build a fence around the whole thing, but for now I'm making do.


General Thoughts So Far

I'm not expecting my food forest to be like the Garden of Eden, where I can just pick abundant fruits and vegetables with no labor, no watering, no pests, and no need for added fertilizers. That doesn't sound realistic to me at all. I would think that shouldn't sound realistic to most other people either, but that's how some permaculture websites make it sound. The natural ecosystem in my area is an oak-juniper woodland, not an apple-peach woodland or even a citrus-fig woodland, and there are good reasons for that. You can't get something for nothing, and if you want sweet, juicy peaches here instead of acorns and juniper berries then you have to put work into it. Fruit trees are domesticated trees, so they need human help to grow. Just like I couldn't abandon my house cat in the wood and expect her to survive in the wild like a bobcat, you can't expect to be able to plant a peach tree and then let it fend for itself and expect it to survive like a juniper tree.

A fairer comparison would be between a food forest and other methods of fruit and vegetable gardening, such as my raised bed vegetable garden on the other side of the driveway, where I do more of a Square Foot/Biointensive technique. Is the food forest less work, about the same amount of work, or more work? If it's either of the first two, it might still be worth it.

I expect it might depend on the exact species of plants too. I've already gone over how some of my fruit trees are doing much better than others, the fig and kumquat being the best trees with the biggest yields with the least amount of help from me. For the annual vegetables, I prefer growing vining squash in the food forest because it has more room to roam and spread out. On the other hand, I do potatoes in the raised beds because of all the deep digging required to plant and harvest them. I really don't want to be trying to dig potatoes out of a hügelkultur beds with all the sticks in the way, and I don't want anything that requires digging too deeply because that might hurt the fruit tree roots.

Of course gardens are always a work in progress. There are some plants like tomatoes that seem to do OK in both places, though to be fair I've only grown cherry tomatoes in the food forest so far, and cherry tomatoes are tougher than large-fruited tomatoes. I haven't tried peppers in the hügelkultur beds so far, but peppers are almost perennials in this climate (I've had some live for as long as three years before an especially hard frost killed them), so they might be a great candidate for the permaculture garden, which is supposed to be skewed more towards perennials. And I'm still not giving up on figuring out how to coax my pomegranate, peach, and apple trees to set fruit. I've also started planting I'itois onions, multiplier leeks, and ginger here and there in the hügelkultur beds. At least the deer don't like to eat those.

The important thing is it's been fun so far figuring some of this stuff out.

Bountiful Gardens is Going out of Business

Heads up everyone! One of my favorite seed companies, Bountiful Gardens, is going out of business. Everything is on clearance and selling out fast. Better go there are order all the varieties you want before they sell out. They are closing December 13.

My favorite thing about this seed company has always been their wide selection of greens, especially ones that tolerate hot weather. They have heat-tolerant lettuce varieties that I don't see in any other catalogs. I just ordered a packet each of all of them, plus a few other unusual species of greens that most other catalogs don't carry.

When I first got into seed-saving, I read a lot about the problem of seed companies going out of business when they're the only one that carries a particular variety of plant, and then the variety goes extinct if home seed savers don't maintain it. Honestly, I wasn't too worried about that. I thought it was an exaggeration. I mean, come on, how many times does that actually happen? And if only one catalog was carrying that variety anyway, was it even really that great of a variety to begin with?

I don't believe that anymore after finding some varieties that did really great in my garden that really are only carried in one seed catalog. I still think that it probably doesn't happen that often, but it does happen.

So go to www.bountifulgardens.org and if you see anything interesting or unusual, snatch it up now before it sells out! And then when you grow it, if it does well in your garden, save the seeds.

The Story of Food Waste

On Earth Day this past week, MSNBC aired Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story. I knew that a lot of food was wasted in our society, but I had no idea about the scope of the problem. According to this documentary, we waste 30%-40% of our food, and that means we also waste 30%-40% of our water, land, pesticides, fertilizers, and energy we use to grow it.

I think what most surprised me was how much fresh produce is wasted before it even gets to the grocery store. It never occurred to me to think of why exactly all those fruits and vegetables look so uniform and perfect at the grocery store, while the ones I grow are much more irregular in shape and size. I guess I assumed that the chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machines, and other industrial growing techniques had something to do with it.

I never realized it was because they just throw away all the fruits and vegetables that don't meet their beauty standards! A banana that doesn't curve just right, a carrot that's not perfectly straight, a peach with a cosmetic blemish, they all get rejected.

I knew there must be some rejects. Bruised fruit, broken vegetables, etc. I assumed they would get processed into things like jams or canned soups, but no. The peach grower said he offers his ugly peaches to jam companies, but he has so many they can only take a small fraction. Another segment had a celery farmer standing on piles of celery that was trimmed off to make the bunches of celery fit in the bags they're packaged in. He said it was perfectly good celery, but nobody wants it, so it gets plowed back under.

Speaking of fresh vegetables, they really gave me a lot of guilt over that moldy bell pepper I threw away last week! The most memorable part of the movie followed a bell pepper from a sprouting plant, to being picked over and getting past the culling stage, to being shipped in a truck cross-country, to being bought in a grocery store, to being put in the drawer of a refrigerator, and then... molding and rotting away.

All to the tune of "Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds.

"When you walk on by... will you call my name? Or will you walk away?"

Yes, little bell pepper, I FORGOT ABOUT YOU! I'm so sorry!


But actually, I think I'm pretty good for the most part. One thing I wondered about watching this documentary is, "Is eating leftovers a weird thing that most people don't do?" They talk about restaurant portions, they talk about catering events where you have food left over, they talk about serving too much food at dinner parties, and I kept wondering how that wastes food, unless nobody eats leftovers.

When I take a doggy bag home from a restaurant, that's lunch for the next day. When I throw a party or host a holiday dinner, my husband and I spend the next week eating the leftovers, but they don't get wasted. I sometimes plan for leftovers on purpose by choosing foods I know reheat well or are good to incorporate into new dishes.

Maybe it's just how I was raised, but I was raised to not waste food. My mom might have gone too far with the penny-pinching so that at times it seemed the stress she went through worrying about every little cent wasn't worth the money she saved, but at least she taught me that throwing food away is the same as throwing dollar bills straight in the trash, and that isn't something anyone would do.

I also knew that the dates on containers are "sell by" or "best by" dates, and not "eat this by this date or else it will kill you" dates. I only throw away food that is noticeably spoiled. If it's moldy or has obviously rotten spots, or has a bad smell, then it goes in the compost. Otherwise, I eat it, and I have never gotten sick from eating food from home.

I'm also a compost heretic. Lots of garden books will give you these rules on what you can and can't put in compost. I don't listen to any of them, and put anything organic in the compost. Yes, including cooked foods, dairy products, meats, and moldy bread. ALL food waste goes in the compost. If it's something that smells bad, I bury it in leaves or grass clippings.

So even when I do waste food, like that poor bell pepper, it goes into my garden as compost, not into a landfill.


Speaking of landfills, one thing they didn't mention is when all those containers of food are thrown away, not only are you wasting the food, but you're wasting the containers the food is in. When that guy found that dumpster full of sealed plastic packages of hummus, I was more concerned about all that plastic going into the landfill than the hummus. All that plastic to package the hummus was wasted as well, and plastic doesn't decompose.

Another thing I wish they had covered is food waste by restaurants. When I was a student I had a part time job at Barnes and Noble, and our store had a coffee shop in it. I helped out at the coffee shop sometimes, and got to see how much food they wasted there. They had a big glass case full of all our baked goods: cookies, muffins, scones, etc. They also had panini sandwiches and had a gelato bar.

Nothing was made from scratch, of course. The baked goods came as frozen hockey pucks of dough that you just took out of the box and put in the oven. The sandwiches were pre-assembled as well and just had to be grilled, and the gelato was a liquid that was poured into the machine to churn and freeze.

Since a case brimming with baked goods looks better than having only a few of everything, they kept that case full all the way up until closing time. And then at the end of the day everything was thrown away. I remember looking at that big wheeled restaurant trash can completely full of food, mostly cookies and muffins and scones baked that day, and thought of what a waste it was. I asked if I could have a few, and I was told absolutely not! That would be considered theft, just like if I shoplifted a book off the shelf.

So then I asked if we could donate the food instead, and the manager said we'd get sued.

So it all went into the dumpster. A locking dumpster to make sure no one gets it out later.

I understand why we wouldn't want to sell day-old cookies or muffins, because they really aren't as good the next day. If you're going to spend the crazy prices we were charging for each muffin, you want one that's freshly baked. But the day-old ones weren't bad. Someone would have loved to have them.

I'm glad the documentary mentioned that you actually can't get sued for donating food. There is an actual law that says you can't, in order to encourage people to donate food without having to worry about things like that. They were talking about it in the context of grocery stores donating extra food, but it would apply to the Barnes and Noble coffee shop too.

But most people either don't know about that, or managers may even lie to their employees and say they could get sued, because they just don't want to go to the trouble of taking the muffins to a charity instead of throwing them in the dumpster.


One last thing I think would help is if people has more ideas about how to handle leftovers. Maybe the Food Network should have a show about that. It would certainly be better than most of the shows they have now. Since Good Eats ended, the only show I like on that channel anymore is Chopped, because it actually gives me ideas on how to cook with what I have on hand that needs to get used up. They sometimes have a theme show where all the mystery ingredients are leftovers.

Maybe they could have a show just about using leftovers creatively, and they could throw in information about freezing food and other ways to store it better, meal planning, shopping smart, and so on. I would totally watch that, but I guess all those food competition shows like Guy's Grocery Games and Cutthroat Kitchen are more exciting.


Well, I would say this documentary was worth watching. We're even more spoiled when it comes to food than I thought. It inspired me to clean out the fridge today and make sure I didn't have any more sad vegetables at the bottom of the crisper drawer singing, "Don't you forget about me..."