Potato Salad with Tartar Sauce

Snapdragons in my garden

Smoky skies have been the US East Coast's depressing reality this week, thanks to Canadian wildfires that are emblematic of increasingly hot, dry North American weather caused by climate change. Long before my corner of the world turned temporarily sepia yesterday, local gardeners (including me) have been agonizing about the lack of rain.

Dry, dry, dry, dry, dry, dry...

In my online gardening group, we crack jokes along these lines: "I just spent two hours drenching my plants, so it's definitely going to rain now", or "I'm leaving my patio cushions out tonight so that it will pour!" 

For the most part, we gardeners are people who are atuned to nature, and fully aware of the role of climate change in our gardening woes. A lot of the members of the online group both practice and preach eco-friendly landscaping with rain barrels, native plants, natural pest control methods, drip lines, composting, etc. But I wonder how many of them still eat a lot of meat, which is contributing on a large scale to the greenhouse gases that are heating our planet and driving extreme weather patterns--and making it a challenge to keep our gardens thriving.

Can't keep my garden magical without water

Changing habits isn't easy. Some entries in this blog document how much I still enjoy meat, even after four years of being mostly vegetarian, and I have chronicled how annoyingly difficult it can be to find good vegetarian options in restaurants, or to reconcile vegetarian or vegan aspirations with other dietary restrictions. 

But guess what? Even if you don't do it daily, you're still having a positive impact EVERY TIME you choose a plant-based food over an animal-based food, because you're reducing the market demand for animal-based foods. The more often you make that choice, the more you're contributing to a hopeful environmental future. 

A potato salad is an appetizing vegetarian menu item for summer. "Potato Salad With Tartar Sauce and Fresh Herbs" (NYT Cooking; the link should allow you to access the recipe without a subscription) is delicious. 

If you're lazy like me, just hack up the taters rather than slicing them neatly. You get bonus environmental points if you make the salad vegan by using plant-based mayonnaise, because unlike leaving your umbrella at home to increase the likelihood of rain, minimizing your meat and dairy consumption is a science-backed way to fight climate change.

Camouflaged frog in my garden pond