Chives

This is not my first attempt at a vegetable garden. Last year I grew tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and a couple of herbs. I left the chives in a pot on the front porch and they have started to come up again. This year they are looking stronger and with more of a bite in them. I already cut some to finish off a soup.

As you can see the chives do have some friends. There are around a dozen small (.75 cm) black bugs crawling around and up the chives. They have a beige back with black stripes running down. It almost looks like they have wings, but they don't fly when I knock them off. I do know that some insects only are able to use their wings as the weather warms up, but I'm not really sure if they are wings to start off with. They have six legs and antennae. They don't appear to be doing any harm to the chives.

The onion/alium family, which chives are a part of, are not supposed to be prone to many pests. The only one that really bothers them are thrips. However the bugs on my chives look nothing like thrips, which are much smaller and have different colourings. 

A couple of other people (link 1, 2) seem to also have had small black bugs on their chives. They suggested they were aphids, but these bugs have longer more cylindrical bodies compared to aphids.

Some of the suggestions of dealing with them include clearing away dead material around the chives or spraying them with a garlic spray. I will try this to see if that gets rid of them, but as of now I'm not really concerned because they don't appear to be doing any damage. 

UPDATE: I cleared away all the dead material around the chives and have not seen any of the bugs for about a week. No garlic spray or anything else was necessary.

What is a garden?

Although this is going to be mainly a gardening blog I will comment on issues that I care about concerning food and gardening. Please feel free to discuss these issues even if you don't agree with them.

Drive through a typical North American suburb the defining feature of most yards will be the lawn. According to the Canadian Centre for Architecture, grass lawns are cultivated more than any other crop in North America. They also say that lawn care is a multi billion dollar industry each year. What is our obsession with manicured lawns that consist of only a few species of non-native grasses?
Well a quick google search for "history of lawn" yields many results. Basically lawns evolved from meadows that were maintained by grazing livestock in the middle of medieval towns and around castles. These meadows were kept clear for town gatherings and the areas around castles were kept clear to spot the enemy. From the 16th century onwards lawns became a status symbol for the rich in Britain and France, although they did not always consist of grasses but sometimes of ground covering herbs such as thyme. The concept of the lawn was brought over by colonial elites, even though the maintained lawn did not really work in the more varied North American climate.  The popularization of lawns was completed due to technological innovations (such as the mechanical lawn mower) from the Industrial Era onwards which made having a lawn accessible to most strata of society. They continue to be a status symbol and expansive lawns are also used for sports such as golf and soccer.
So why the history lesson? The origin of the word vegetation is vegetare from latin which means to enliven or invigorate. Does the typical grass lawn really enliven anything in any way? It probably harms it in many ways. Kentucky blue grass is considered unsustainstable in the prairie landscape. Here in Southwestern Ontario in the park behind my house they are pulling up and laying down new grass every year. They then fertilize it and several times I've been told not to walk my dog there because it might be poisonous. Is grass really aesthetically more appealing than other plants? Does grass really enliven your senses? Does grass enliven the environment? The grasses that were native to North America had much deeper roots to deal with the dry summers. Why does this matter? Because plants with deeper roots are better at sequestering carbon. Forget cloth shopping bags or turning off your lights. We have more acres invested in grass that really doesn't do all that much for the environment and even harms it in some cases. Imagine if everyone had a little patch of native grasses on their lawn or grew other vegetation that didn't require as much care, chemicals and money and sequestered more carbon, looked better and could even feed you.
People don't mind spending time or money on their lawns as evidenced by the figures from the CCA, more than $25 billion. Why not make that money and time more efficient, achieve more than just status and help enliven multiple facets of life. I'm not saying that we should all go ahead and start growing native grasses that grown up to 12 feet tall, but we can definitely make small changes. Plant some flowers. Not only do they look nice, but they also provide the habitat for bees and other pollinators to thrive in. Plant a vegetable garden. Different vegetables provide different nutrients to the soil and can help invigorate your family's meals. I challenge everyone to grow something this summer even if it just throwing a couple of herb seeds in the ground. What have you got to lose?

Inspiration

What is food? Food is weird. Most of us eat it at least three times a day. Some of us cook it, some of us pick it up, some of us grow it at home, others grow it for pay. We like some types of food but not others. We eat it or throw it at our sisters and brothers. Food can make you feel good, food can make you feel bad. It can heal you, it can destroy you. Sometimes weird foods become a fad. It grows from little seeds into plants that are tall, green and grand. But most of these plants get shipped off, or frozen, or packaged with plastic, or processed, or thrown out, or shipped off again. I seem to remember a dream, a boy picking a tomato, now it is in his hand. Garden to table, I hope I will be able.

This summer I hope to grow a small vegetable garden and put some of that food from the garden onto the table. I like the idea of being able to produce your own food and then cook it or enjoy it properly to send it off with a final and fitting hurrah. Often what is simple is good, but the way our food is produced has become increasingly more complicated and entangles politics, human rights, animal rights, environmental issues, livelihoods, cultures and markets into one web. I will not get into any of those individual issues (although i might in later posts), but learning about those issues is what inspired me to both grown and cook my own food.

I will leave you today with a question that you can comment on and debate. Should kids learn how to grow foods in school, much like the school system teaches other skills in formal classes (gym, home economics, shop class etc.) ?