Category Archives: food

Getting Your Garden Ready For The Spring – One advantage of fall gardening

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Like it says at the end of the article, if you end your gardening in late fall then get it ready for early spring. Myself it is October and my Broccoli is just coming in now. YAHOO.

http://msucares.com/lawn/garden/vegetables/fall/index.html

Young Plants

The hot, dry weather in July, August, and September is hard on germinating seeds and young seedlings. Germination and seedling survival is improved if one of these methods is used:

• Water a day or two before planting so seeds are planted in moist soil. Watering after planting can cause the soil surface to pack and crust.

• Plant seeds in moist soil and cover with moistened, non-crusting materials: a mix of peat moss and vermiculite or composted sawdust and sand. Keep the surface moist during germination and seedling establishment.

Plant three to five seeds of the small-seeded vegetables like broccoli and cabbage at the recommended final plant spacing in the garden row. Once the seedlings are established, thin the seedlings to one plant at each location.

Transplants

Start vegetable transplants for the fall garden in individual containers, such as peat pots, small clay or plastic pots, or peat pellets. Setting out plants without disturbing the root systems reduces transplant shock.

Protect young plants from the sun for a few days. You can use bare-root transplants from thinning the seedling row, but be prepared to provide water and shade until they become established.

A fall garden is open to attack by insects and diseases just as the summer garden. In some cases, the insect problems are worse. Worms (cabbage loopers and imported cabbage moths) are serious problems on fall cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and collards. Control these leaf-eating worms with one of the biological sprays. Squash bugs are troublesome on fall squash and pumpkins.

Fall vegetables need fertilizer just as much as spring and summer vegetables. Don’t count on the fertilizer applied in spring to supply fertilizer needs of vegetables planted in late summer and fall. Fertilize before planting and side-dress as needed.

As the danger of frost approaches, pay close attention to weather predictions. Tender plants often can be protected from an early frost and continue to produce for several weeks. When a killing frost is inevitable, harvest tender vegetables.

Green tomatoes that are turning white just before turning pink will ripen if stored in a cool place. Pick these tomatoes, wrap them in paper, and use them as they ripen.

Don’t abandon the garden when freezing temperatures kill the plants. Clean up the debris, store stakes and poles, take a soil test, and row up part of the garden to be ready for planting early spring Irish potatoes and English peas.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Fall Gardening Saves So Much Energy – It is like any nontradtional gardening though

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First there are places in the US where you can garden year round. Most of the southeast falls into this category. Yes there are issues around water use because much of off season gardening requires watering. But when you look at the exercise and healthy food it can produce, plus the off setting of transportation costs, especially in gasoline costs overall the good out weighs the bad. I would contend with a solar space attached to a house or proper cold frames you can actually year round garden up to the Great Lakes latitudes. But this is not what traditionally has been considered fall gardening. I also might add something will take up later that winter crop covers can be considered both fall gardening but also composting. I also can hear a lot of you saying that you are sooooo glad when the gardening season is “over” that the thought of getting the rototiller out in August or September is too painful to consider. But we all over plant and also underestimate the amount of work and the amout of time involved. To which I say, “Stop it”.  Here is a good primer from East Texans – the home of Stevie Ray Vaughn.

http://easttexasgardening.tamu.edu/homegardens/fallveggarden.html

Prepare In July For Fall/Winter Vegetable Harvest

by Keith C. Hansen, Extension Horticulturist

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I skipped to the gardening part of this article.

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Every time you prepare the soil to plant a new crop, always mix in as much compost as you can get your hands on. Add well-decomposed animal manure, fertilizer and lime if soil tests indicate a low fertility or pH, and work all ingredients into the soil.

Southern peas such as blackeye, purplehull, cream and crowders make a great, edible summer cover crop for building the soil and providing food. The pea vines can be mowed and rototilled under while still green for extra soil building benefits or allowed to produce peas and then tilled under.

Tomatoes and peppers need to be planted soon – by the first of August – if they are going to make a good crop before first frost. What if your garden spot is not yet ready? Buy your transplants now and grow them in a larger container to plant in the garden later.

Get either 6-pack transplants or 4-inch transplants. Put them in a 1- or 3-gallon nursery container filled with potting soil. Do not use soil from your garden. Add slow release fertilizer (like Osmocote or other slow release formulation) to the soil mix. Set the pots in a sunny spot in the yard, not in the shade!

Every time you water, use a water-soluble fertilizer solution instead of just plain water. Your transplants will continue to grow and be healthy, just as if you have transplanted them directly into the ground. Once your garden site is ready, you will have large, healthy tomato and pepper plants to set out. They will be easier to take care of and you will be assured of a bountiful harvest before the first freeze of winter.

Grow fast maturing tomato varieties for the fall harvest. Look for varieties with less than 75 days to maturity, such as ‘Merced’, ‘Bingo’, ‘Celebrity’, ‘Whirlaway’, and ‘Carnival’. ‘Surefire’ is a smaller, processing tomato variety (with thicker skin) which sets and matures all of its tomatoes very quickly, giving you a “surefire” harvest that beats the first freeze. Most cherry tomatoes will bear within 65 days of transplanting.

Timing is very important for a successful fall garden. Heat tolerant/cold sensitive crops need to be planted in time to mature before cold weather slows and stops growth, while cool season/heat sensitive crops are planted late enough to avoid the heat, but early enough to take the first frosts of winter.

The following are optimal “windows of time” for planting fall vegetables:

Beans – 8/1 – 9/1 (lima beans 7/15 – 8/15) Muskmelon (Cantaloupe) – 7/15 – 8/1
Beets – 9/1 – 10/15 Mustard – 9/15 – 10/15
Broccoli plants – 8/1 – 9/15 Parsley – 8/15 – 10/1
Brussels sprouts – 8/1 – 10/1 Peas, English – 8/15 – 9/15
Cabbage plants – 8/15 – 9/15 Peas, Southern – 7/1 – 8/1
Carrots – 8/15 – 10/15 Pepper plants – 7/1 – 8/1
Cauliflower plants – 8/15 – 9/15 Potatoes, Irish – 8/15 – 9/15
Chard, Swiss – 8/1 – 10/15 Pumpkin – 7/1 – 8/1
Collard/Kale – 8/15 – 10/1 Radish – 9/15 – 10/15
Corn, Sweet – 8/1 – 8/15 Spinach – 9/1 – 10/15
Cucumber – 8/1 – 9/1 Squash, Summer – 7/15 – 8/15
Eggplant plants – 7/15 – 8/1 Squash, Winter – 7/1 – 7/15
Garlic – 9/1 – 10/15 Tomato plants – 7/15 – 8/1
Kohlrabi – 8/15 – 9/15 Turnips – 10/1 – 11/1
Lettuce (leaf) – 9/15 – 10/15 Watermelon – 7/1 – 8/1

Seeded vegetables can be tricky to get up in the heat of summer. Soil often forms a crust on the surface after tillage and watering. This “crust” can hinder tender seedlings from breaking through. Here are a couple of tips to help get seedlings up in the summer.

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Please read the rest. It is good stuff. More tomorrow.

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The Ultimate Frontier – Composting at work

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Yesterday I posted about corporate recycling and how they have to have plastic containers with labels on them to actually do it. Well here is a thought. Take a felt tipped marker and cross out paper and write organics. That way you are composting at work. If you have no organics other than food scraps you may have to mix in some shredded paper or go out side and collect some leaves. You will need a a tight lid and you may need to store it outside, but everything is possible.

http://bubbler.wordpress.com/2007/08/20/composting-at-work/

 

 

Composting at Work

I’ve started a composting process of the food waste at my workplace using a bin that is passively aerated. It’s kind of a prototype, as I am figuring out what kind of mix of inputs will work, how much moisture it needs, etc. During the summer, our kitchen produces a huge amount of food scraps which gets bagged up, thrown into a room, then later heaved up by staff onto our dump truck, driven into town, dumped at the refuse center, where it is then sorted and transported out of the county to a landfill 70 miles away. It’s a ridiculously inefficient process of dealing with waste that generates yet more waste.

The small bin I have currently set up will fill up within a week, so obviously it isn’t anywhere near cutting much waste out. However, once I’ve demonstrated that it works and have figured out the proper mix and all that, I’m hoping that we can expand the operation to cut out a more significant chunk of waste.

The whole science and art of composting consists of a proper ratio of carbon to nitrogen, which ideally should be around 30:1. We have a vast amount of cardboard and newspaper on-hand which I will shred to serve as bulk carbon (further reducing the transport of those materials into the recycling center in town), as well as sawdust and, every now and then, pine needles. The food waste supplies the nitrogen, as well as moisture. I will also pick up horse manure from stables down the road and mix that in there as well to provide essential microbes. It remains to be seen what kind of compost such a mixture will produce—it may be somewhat deficient on nutrients as my main sources of carbon are bland.

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More tomorrow.

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Permaculture And Transitional Communities – What Wiki says

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Those fleeing a hydrocarbon existence use many different rationales. Like Thoreau, they want to lead a simpler life, while resisting the constant wars the US seems to be in. Like Schumacher they want to celebrate appropriate technology. Like the Amish they want to support earth conscious sustainable food production methods. What ever the reason, this is what WIKI says about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns

Transition Towns

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

Totnes, Devon: a Transition Town

Transition Towns (also known as Transition network or Transition Movement) is a brand for environmental and social movements “founded (in part) upon the principles of permaculture” [1], based originally on Bill Mollison’s seminal Permaculture, a Designers Manual published in 1988. The Transition Towns brand of permaculture uses David Holmgren’s 2003 book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. [2] These techniques were included in a student project overseen by permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins at the Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland. The term transition town was coined by Louise Rooney[3] and Catherine Dunne. Following its start in Kinsale, Ireland it then spread to Totnes, England where Rob Hopkins and Naresh Giangrande developed the concept during 2005 and 2006.[4] The aim of this community project is to equip communities for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil. The Transition Towns movement is an example of socioeconomic localisation.

Contents

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Out to weed the strawberry patch. More tomorrow.

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Animals And Other Forms Of Related Transportation

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This post was really difficult for me. Riding animals has been a human practice for thousands of years and still is in use in many parts of the world. From dog sleds in the north to camels in the south and horses all inbetween many hundreds of animals have been used to haul humans and freight. In some places humans even haul people in what Americans usually refer to as rickshaws. I contemplated making this a multiple post but the biggest question for me is how this move back to animals as a major form of transportation would restructure our world. How would we feed them all? How quickly would it happen? How many people would have to give way for all of the offset food? Anyway there are so many ways I could have diced this pie that a simple post will have to do. Please try not to think about how much manure this would generate.

 

Some animals are used due to sheer physical strength in tasks such as ploughing or logging. Such animals are grouped as a draught or draft animal. Others may be used as pack animals, for animal-powered transport, the movement of people and goods. People ride some animals directly as mounts, use them as harness one or a team to pull vehicles.

Riding animals or mounts

They include equines such as horses, ponies, donkeys, and mules; elephants; yaks; and camels. Dromedary camels in arid areas of Australia, North Africa and the Middle East; the less common Bactrian camel inhabits central and East Asia; both are used as working animals. On occasion, reindeer, though usually driven, may be ridden.

Certain wild animals have been tamed and used for riding, usually for novelty purposes, including the zebra and the ostrich. Some mythical creatures are believed to act as divine mounts, such as garuda in Hinduism and the winged horse Pegasus in Greek mythology.

Pack animals

 

A pack llama

Main article: Pack animal

Pack animals may be of the same species as mounts or harness animals, though animals such as horses, mules, donkeys, reindeer and both types or camel may have individual bloodlines or breeds that have been selectively bred for packing. Additional species are only used to carry loads, including llamas in the Andes.

Domesticated oxen, bullocks, and yaks are also used as pack animals. Other species used to carry cargo include dogs and pack goats.

Homing pigeons transport material, usually messages on small pieces of paper, by air.

Harness animals

 

Mule used to pull a wheeled vehicle in Morocco

An intermediate use is to harness animals, singly or in teams, to pull (or haul) sleds, wheeled vehicles or plough.

  • Oxen are slow but strong, and have been used in a yoke since ancient times: the earliest surviving vehicle, Puabi’s Sumerian sledge, was ox-drawn; an acre was originally defined as the area a span of oxen could plow in a day. The Water buffalo and Carabao, domesticated water buffalo, pull wagons and ploughs in Southeast Asia and the Philippines.
  • Draught or Draft horses are commonly used in harness for heavy work. Several breeds of medium-weight horses are used to pull lighter wheeled carts, carriages and buggies when a certain amount of speed or style is desirable.
  • Mules are considered to be very tough and strong, with harness capacity dependent on the type of horse mare used to produce the mule foal. Because they are a hybrid animal and usually are infertile, separate breeding programs must also be maintained.
  • Ponies and donkeys are often used to pull carts and small wagons, historically, ponies were commonly used in mining to pull ore carts.
  • Dogs are used for pulling light carts or, particularly, sleds. (e.g. sled dogs such as Huskies) for both recreation and working purposes.
  • Goats also can perform light harness work in front of carts
  • Reindeer are used in the Arctic and sub-Arctic Nordic countries and Siberia.
  • Elephants are still used for logging in South-east Asia.
  • Less often, camels and llamas have been trained to harness. According to Juan Ignacio Molina the Dutch captain Joris van Spilbergen observed the use of chiliquenes (a llama type) by native Mapuches of Mocha Island as plough animals in 1614.[1]

Assorted wild animals have, on occasion, been tamed and trained to harness, including zebras and even moose.

See also: Driving (horse)

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More tomorrow.

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Shout Out For Starhill Forest Arboretum – May 7th is their playday

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This is shaping up to be a very local week of posting. This is kind of unusual but fun. Please join Eddie and Guy at Starhill Arboretum to enjoy the spring growth and what your support has brought to fruition.

http://www.starhillforest.com/

Starhillforest@aol.com” <Starhillforest@aol.com> Add sender to Contacts

To:
dougnic55@yahoo.com
Greetings
Things are green and blooming….and still moist….at the Arboretum. And the bluebirds have babies! Let’s hope for a beautiful afternoon on Saturday, May 7. Stop by and spend time relaxing at Starhill Forest Arboretum between 1 to 4 PM. You’ll have an opportunity to stroll, hike or just sit and enjoy the beautiful surroundings.
There will be tree give-aways for members of the Friends of Starhill Forest organization, a raffle at 3:30 PM for all participants to win rare or unusual trees, and an opportunity to learn more about the plant collections and upcoming activities at the Arboretum. Spring 2011 work day volunteers will also receive bonus raffle tickets.
A special highlight will be tours of the newly constructed field lab. This year’s Illinois College interns, who arrive later this month, are excited about having a “headquarters”…but not as excited as Alana McKean, Arboretum manager.
Check out the online photo albums of spring at Starhill Forest by going to www.StarhillForest.com.
For more information about May 7, contact Alana@StarhillForest.com
Hope to see you on May 7th.

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Anyone Who Does Not Compost Is Part Of The Problem

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No one and I repeat NO ONE should be throwing out food. Everyone can compost. If you can’t use the resulting dirt (everyone should have house plants if they value their health) then you can just throw it outside. It doesn’t matter if you live in an apartment in a urban center or a house in the country, the message is stop throwing food in the garbage. The problem starts at the store though. Please stop overbuying food…especially meat.

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http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/07/opinion/la-oe-bloom-food-waste-20101107

Help the planet: Stop wasting food

Producing it and then getting rid of leftovers require a lot of fossil fuel. Just taking a few simple steps can ease the problem.

Op-Ed

November 07, 2010|By Jonathan Bloom

Let me guess: You’re concerned about the environment. You recycle, buy the right light bulbs, drink from a reusable water bottle (preferably one made of metal) and wish you could afford a hybrid. You try to remember your reusable shopping bags when you go to the market and feel guilty when you don’t.

But there’s something you could be doing that would make a much bigger difference, and it’s not one of those really hard things like carpooling to work or installing solar panels on your roof.

All you need to do is minimize your food waste. If you buy it and bring it home, eat it. That alone is one of the easiest ways to aid the environment.

About 40% of the food produced in the United States isn’t consumed. Every day Americans waste enough food to fill the Rose Bowl. And our national food waste habit is on the upswing: We waste 50% more food today than we did in 1974.

Squandering so much of what we grow doesn’t just waste food; it also wastes the fossil fuel that went into growing, processing, transporting and refrigerating it. A recent study estimated conservatively that 2% of all U.S. energy consumption went to producing food that was never eaten. To give you a sense of perspective, every year, through uneaten food, we waste 70 times the amount of oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico during the three months of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

That waste of resources continues after we throw away food. There is the energy required to haul the discarded food to the landfill. And once there, food decomposes and creates methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent a heat trapper than carbon dioxide. Landfills are the second-largest human-related source of methane emissions, and rotting food causes the majority of methane there. It’s climate change coming directly from your kitchen.

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America should be ashamed. More tomorrow.

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He Is Not A Survivalist – He just likes to do things the hard way

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MY favorite quote that I shall only paraphrase is, I could just jump in the car and go to the store for a lot of this stuff..but.

http://www.straight.com/article-357270/vancouver/peak-oil-spurring-locals-selfsufficiency

Brennan Wauters believes that the world has reached peak oil production, and that learning how to do things such as grow your own food and fix household items will help you take care of yourself.
By Carlito Pablo, November 10, 2010

What if you woke up one day and found that the world as you knew it had ceased to exist? It’s a thought that has probably crossed the minds of many and perhaps been quickly dismissed by most as silly.

For Brennan Wauters, this prospect is real. That’s why he’s preparing for what he describes as a “collapse”.

From Wauters’s perspective, the game changer is peak oil. He believes that in the past five years, the world has reached the point of maximum production of oil, and that the supply of this fuel source is on the decline. One day, the pumps may run dry.

But the 42-year-old Vancouver man is not the type to hunker in a bunker. He isn’t storing food, buying gold, or stocking up on weapons to survive in a post-oil world.

“I’m more a survivalist in the sense that I think we have to be psychologically prepared,” Wauters said. “I concentrate on being able to do things with as little as possible. It’s also an exercise to me, like there’s many things that I could just go to the store for. But I deliberately take a harder route just to test my own capabilities, to give me confidence that whatever happens, everything will be fine.”

Learning to grow food is one of those things. Peppers were ready for picking when Wauters showed the Georgia Straight the vegetable plots at the East Side house where he lives with a number of other people. There were also chickens and honeybees out back.

“If there’s a general economic collapse, people are not going to have jobs,” he said. “So they’re going to have time on their hands. And that probably means growing food so that they don’t have to depend upon some larger infrastructure. That’s the clear objective.”

Wauters is also collecting books on edible and medicinal plants. That way, when the Internet is no longer working, he’ll have something to rely on for farming information.

He’s also learning “wildcrafting”, or methods of gathering food from the wild and living off the land. He likewise considers knowledge of canning and smoking food to be important.

Wauters builds sets for movie productions for a living, and that partly explains why he has a large collection of tools. He particularly values hand implements—drills, saws, and sets of screwdrivers—which he said will all be useful when power devices can no longer be plugged into wall sockets.

He can also fix a bicycle, noting that this human-powered conveyance will eventually become more valuable than the automobile.

According to Wauters, neighbours come to him to repair various broken household items. The house where he lives has a shed that stores numerous tools, such as pickaxes, shovels, and rakes.

“The survival aspect is really two things,” he said. “It’s a mental exercise which helps you cope with adversity, and then the other thing is that it prepares you to be creative. You have to be creative to solve those problems that we’re going to face. We can no longer run to the store to buy something to solve our problem.”

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More tomorrow.

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Gulf Of Mexico Gusher – It kills some big stuff but it is the little stuff that matters

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While there should be some worry about big stuff like dolphins, pelicans and shrimp, the stuff to worry about is the small stuff, the worms, planktons, and snails. The bottom of the food chain next year is what the real worry should be. Once they are killed off, the top of food chain dies off too.

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Sampling For BP Contamination In The Mississippi River Delta

LEAN and Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper have begun a sampling project in collaboration with the six other Save Our Gulf Waterkeepers. The sampling project will cover the Gulf Coast from Galveston Bay in Texas to Apalachicola Bay in Florida.

Sampling In The Delta

The sampling project will look for the presence of the components of crude oil and dispersant in the environment and what happens to them over time. Click the picture above to watch a short video of a recent sampling trip or go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5q25IPi3QA

SaveOurGulf.org

Visit SaveOurGulf.org to get more information about the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster from Waterkeeper organizations across the Gulf Coast and donate to Save Our Gulf!

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More tomorrow

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The Best Shopping Day Of The Year – But what if our economy wasn’t based on money

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As I promised the second part of the Basil Economy…It is everything a holiday should be happy, joyous, warm and wonderful…Enjoy.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/25675

Anatomy of a community garden: The riveting 2nd installment of building a basil economy

by North of Center | December 23, 2009 – 9:55am [Originally published June 17.]

by Danny Mayer

It’s 11 o’clock in the morning and I’m sitting on a stump in a shady spot of London Ferrell Community Garden, located in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. There’s no other way to say it. I stink. Bad. For the past several weeks I have been trying to meet up for an interview with Ryan Koch, co-founder of Seedleaf, a non-profit created to help establish community gardens throughout Lexington. Although he’d never fess up to it, Ryan is a busy dude.

Thirty minutes earlier, in hopes of catching Ryan on my way home from a morning jog, I had detoured through the fenced-in, rectangular patch of urban community farmland that is London Ferrell. He was there—he’s always there on Saturdays, it seems—and relatively available so I quickly proceeded home, grabbed my recorder for an interview, and made haste back to the half-acre patch of newly productive land, where Ryan was busy negotiating a collection of citizen community gardeners, student volunteers, bitter salad greens, weeds, some donated extra tomato plants, and now one seriously smelly amateur journalist/jogger.

Ryan wasn’t always this busy. A little over a year ago I recall working several Saturday and Thursday mornings alone with him, both at London Ferrell and at a garden Seedleaf helped establish next to Al’s Bar. (Produce from the Al’s garden helped offset food costs at Stella’s Kentucky Deli and Al’s Bar—and to provide its customers with fresh veggies.) Ryan appreciated the morning conversation and at times even the semblance of work I offered.

DOT DASH DOT

“I see gardening as a long, slow conversion for me,” Ryan began between sips of coffee as he grabbed a stump next to me in the shade. “I was 18 and in a college lecture. A professor whose name I couldn’t tell you—and I couldn’t tell you about any of his lectures—read ‘Mad Farmer Liberation Front,’ that Wendell Berry poem. And he read it in the beginning of class and said ‘that doesn’t have anything to do with today’s lecture. I just liked the poem.’” While remaining an intermittent fan of Berry’s work, it wasn’t until 2004 when he married Jodi that the two “committed to trying to do a garden whenever we could as one of our habits of marriage. I thought lettuce was hard to grow. In our first year, I don’t know if we grew any lettuce, but we had a tomato. So we called it goal achieved for year one.”

Before I could get around to asking Ryan how he saw his connection to gardening as an intimate “habit of marriage,” a dog barked behind us in the old Episcopal Burial grounds located at the approximate east flank of London Ferrell. The two neighbors from Campsie who owned the dog began chatting with Ryan; meanwhile, my friend Andrew arrived, the first time I”d seen him since he returned from a two-week sojourn to western Canada and back. Before I noticed it, Ryan had slipped off to help out some other volunteers and neighbors, who asked questions, told stories and awaited directions as to what should be picked,what mulched, what turned under.

Oikos
Although I never recaptured that Right moment to follow up, Ryan’s comments resonated with me. Two weeks earlier I sat in the kitchen of Sherry and Geoff Maddock discussing a range of topics that circled around the ins and outs of what I clumsily call “a basil economy” and they called “food systems.” Through the course of our conversation, I asked Sherry about how she viewed her position as head of the North Martin Luther King Neighborhood Association (NMLKNA). Sherry explained that she viewed the neighborhood association as “as a civic unit for change. The capacity to work out change in our lives,” she continued, “starts in our own households and then with who we live next to.” Her position as NMLKNA head was simply a considered outgrowth of her everyday life.

Understood in this context, London Ferrell—which owes much of its rebirth as a productive space to the creative social energy of Sherry Maddock—seems like a logical next step. The plot sits less than two blocks from the Maddocks’ house. Its redevelopment as a community agricultural space reflects the Maddocks’ commitment to working out change alongside their neighbors.

DOT DASH DOT

“If you want to care for the earth more,” Ryan observes before ditching me, “put a basil plant in a pot and watch how much you care about when it rains. That’s been very real in my life. I really stress out after four dry days in a row. I never used to be that kind of guy. I’m irritable. I pray more. I’ve never prayed so much for rain. It’s changing me; it’s part of how gardening is converting me.”

Imagination and Action
I recall being mildly surprised when Sherry told me that, as a producer of food, London Ferrell does little to effect the larger presence of hunger in the greater Lexington area—our most immediate neighbors. It “doesn’t even make a dent in…the provision of local food,” she says. It’s too small; for it to have a tangible impact, London Ferrell would have to scale up its production, its volunteers, its space. All of these things have consequences of course—more labor, more dialogue about best use of the communal space, more places ready to receive and process the increased amount of food coming in. These things take time, Ferrell is a limited space, and meanwhile people are still hungry. Instead, Sherry talks about the garden’s main function residing “at the level of the imagination…it begins to stimulate people’s minds to possibilities.”

I’m normally skeptical of these assertions because they tend to ride into the more politically passive realm of symbol. As in, that London Ferrell garden is a “symbol” of change in the community. However true that may be, I tend to add more value to even the smallest material changes in people’s lives. Did anyone get fed because of the garden’s existence? If so, for me that outweighs any symbolic meaning that, like money, we can’t use to sustain ourselves for long. It’s a little like Obama’s message of “hope” in that way.

But I must admit, as important as those food routes may be for the nourishment of at least some North side residents, viewing its chief work as working “at the level of the imagination” makes a lot of sense. If taken correctly, London Ferrell is both model and challenge for action; Seedleaf is both an invitation to imagine gardens sprouting in most any place and a working pamphlet guiding us along through spring, summer, and fall plantings. One can already see people answering the call of Seadleaf and Ferrells’ challenge of our imagination. Seedleaf is up from three to ten gardens this year; some of the gardeners tending plots last year took the knowledge learned from watching things develop at London Ferrell and moved on to other lots—some no doubt at home, some in a friend’s yard, some at other community lots.

This year Ryan seems finally able to have a go at Seedleaf fulltime. He’s secured a little city money that will pay him to scale up his compost retrieval from area restaurants who would otherwise dispose of it. The increased amount of decomposing vegetable matter will ultimately overwhelm London Ferrell, so he will soon bring his scraps out to PeaceMeal Gardens, a twenty acre patch of rolling hillside at the back of the Bluegrass Community and Technical College’s (BCTC) Leestown campus that is being converted into a working suburban farm. Jessica Ballard, the farm manager at PeaceMeal, worked with her UK sustainable agriculture class to help Ryan develop good composting practices to more quickly and beneficially turn the scraps into usable compost and soil. Both Ryan and the sustainable ag class had their imaginations sparked by a visit paid by urban farmer and activist Will Allen. Some of Jessica’s salary is provided by the Catholic Action Center, who in conjunction with Rebecca have plowed under an acre of soil to grow things that will feed into their food kitchens for the hungry who show at their Godsnet location. Another portion of Jessica’s salary will be paid for through a market garden that will provide BCTC students a dearly needed dash of fresh produce in what is otherwise an educational food desert.

To paraphrase Sherry, there are a lot of imaginations being stoked here, a lot of new configurations of of power and productivity arising through these new food systems. Importantly, several people have done the hard work of translating the imagination into the realm of possibility and eventually actuality.

We need more of that.
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Is it too early to say have a HAPPY NEW YEAR? nawww never is.

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