Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I should say I’m looking forward to a much better garden this year, and I am. I am also, however, looking forward to one that doesn’t work out so well. By which I mean that I’m doing what I should have done all along – contingency planning to optimize my garden for non-optimal conditions, in this case, a non-optimal gardener.
•Fracking Our Food Supply
•Biofuels and the right to food: Time for the US to get its head out of the sand
•Farming the city
•The Non-Controversy Surrounding Local Food
•Restrict developing quality farmland: Farmers Union
In contemplative moments I like to think about all the manufactured products that could come from the soil surface rather than from deep underground.
What if the vacant lots in Mission Bay were activated into garden and event spaces?
The right to access land matters, in a fundamental way. It is a place to live, a source for food, for water, for fuel, and for sustenance of almost every kind.
My, how things have changed since the Pilgrims tasted their first cranberries in their Plymouth colony! Until 1816, cranberries were a thoroughly wild food; something gathered, not grown. But the discovery that allowed us to cultivate cranberries – adding a thick layer of sand on the soil where they grow – is now creating trouble in cranberry country. As it turns out, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, requires the same sort of sand as cranberries.
On October 18, 2012, the Associated Press reported that "a massive dust storm swirling reddish-brown clouds over northern Oklahoma triggered a multi-vehicle accident along a major interstate…forcing police to shut down the heavily traveled roadway amid near blackout conditions."
Fourteen people gathered on Saturday in our kitchen to make kimchi, the Korean dish of cabbage, peppers, ginger and garlic; a smelly, spicy fermented superfood reputed to repel colds, infections and other assorted health downers.
It’s a normal day at River School Farm, a central hub in Reno’s local food scene. I’m here to find out what that scene looks like, and what part River School Farm plays in its past and future.
This time of year our inside window sills clutter up with tree leaves that Carol and I have found in our grove while walking to and from the barn and which are so pretty we just have to save them.
•Peak Oil? What About Peak Food? A Conversation With Lester Brown
•Revolution in Mexico City, one lettuce at a time
•Chicago’s urban farm district could be the biggest in the nation
•Massive deforestation risks turning Somalia into desert
•These guerrilla cartographers are mapping the edible world
It’s quite easy to bury your head in the sand but even with our heads fully submerged, our bottoms cannot ignore the fact that over the last five years they have been intermittently frozen, drenched, dried out and/or baked at the most odd and unexpected of times.
