The happiest day of my life? Well, I can’t quite say that reading a book falls under that category, but I do remember picking up this book over the summer of 2017 and waiting until winter to read it. And let me tell you, it was especially good over the winter months – which can be quite bleak around where I live. You see, reading about food and gardening gets the mind thinking forward to spring and looking forward to experimenting with new recipes and gardening techniques.

Buying Local

Barbara Kingsolver writes quite a bit about buying local and the costs of shipping exotic food from faraway places. And let’s be honest, the fuel involved in the growing and shipping of food from thousands of miles away doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But, it seems like the trend has only increased over the past years. However, there’s also been an offsetting trend of local food and farmers’ markets, which have grown a lot in the past 10 years.

Hubs

One fuel wasteful trend, but one that seems to be popular in terms of shippers’ efficiencies, is the hub. In other words, shipping things to a central hub from which they have to fan out. This helps the shippers move things more efficiently and organized, at the expense of more fuel as products sometimes have to double back along their path. An extreme example of this is the US Postal Service. Nowadays, the little slot for in-town delivery has been taped over. So, a letter that would have been hand-carried by me to the PO and then hand-carried to the local address by the postal worker, now does a 300-mile round trip in a truck to get delivered, in the same town. This example exists over and over as delivery has moved to the hub style of distribution.

Overpackaging

The other trend I have noticed is over packaging. This is probably due to product loss. One product gets broken at one point and company policy is to double-box it from that point on. For instance, I ordered a wrench, solid steel, and it arrived in a large box that could have held 8-10 of the type of box that was in it, actually holding the wrench. Obviously, a lot of air, plastic and cardboard is getting shipped around the world daily.

Trifoliate Orange

But enough about all that, let’s talk about something a little more interesting – plants. Her book mentions the Trifoliate Orange, which grows in Southern Appalachia and tolerates temperatures down to -20C/-4F. I read about this plant in another book of Kingsolver’s called Prodigal Summer. In that book, it is not mentioned by name, but a little research led me to the conclusion that it has to be the Trifoliate Orange. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle confirmed it for me. I got one as a Christmas gift, good timing as I was far enough into the book by the Christmas season to know I wanted one!

I have been raising citrus plants since I was quite young. I would collect the seeds and see what comes up, and citrus seemed pretty easy to manage as a houseplant. So, when a unique citrus plant came to my attention that just might be able to winter over outside in my Northern Appalachian climate, I jumped on it.