Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Mushrooms add minerals to the diet and flavour to meals, and can be roasted, boiled in soups, sautéed, pickled or dried. We are not experienced in harvesting wild mushrooms and will not do so without being certain of their safety, but there are many other ways to get them without buying the individual plastic packages at the supermarket. For example, you can order packets of mycelium – the fungi that yields mushrooms –to grow your own mushroom logs. (photos)
The twenty-first century’s uncertainty about the future abounds with predicaments like climate change, depletion of our water resources, and the end of cheap energy. And farmers are being called upon to assume a new role as innovators and stewards of the land because they know how to produce food.
When we started this endeavor, about two years ago, I could barely distinguish between a hammer and a zucchini. And that tells you all you need to know about my construction skills as well as my gardening skills. As I’ve pointed out many times before, if I can do this, I can hardly imagine somebody who can’t. But you’d better get cracking. The time to plant a garden is not when you’re hungry.
Three years ago, honeybees started disappearing in the United States and other countries. Hives that had been thriving were suddenly found to be devoid of bees. The epidemic of catastrophic bee losses is called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). This last winter was the worst yet for beekeepers.
What does a post-industrial relationship with the land look like? There are emerging clues.
It is hardly possible to read the news these days without tripping over another story about scrappy city folk turning wasted space into lush gardens that produce astonishing amounts of nutritious food—vegetables, honey, eggs, goat cheese—you name it. Every day, greater numbers of ordinary people appear to be answering Sharon Astyk’s call for an army of new farmers to return to the land, wherever they can find it.
In other words, this is no passing novelty.
I’m calling it the “stake your acre” challenge. And the sum of it is this – I want everyone who can to find an acre of land and tend it. There are so many profound pressures on the land and people around us – our places need us to take more responsibility for them, for keeping them safe, clean, humane, wild.
News flash: high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is a lousy product. As Tom Laskawy reported here Tuesday, a recent study by Princeton researchers found that rats fed chow laced with HFCS gained more weight than rats fed equal calories of table sugar. All processed sweeteners add empty calories to food; but calorie for calorie, HFCS appears to be even worse than white sugar. Although the two sweeteners have roughly the same fructose/glucose ratio, we mammals seem to metabolize the HFCS differently than we do cane sugar.
-Is urban farming Detroit’s cash cow?
-Looming citrus disease could annihilate county’s trees
-The Great Sustainability Debate: Meat Or No Meat?
-The London Orchard Project: bringing fruit to car parks
-Don’t confuse manure tea with Earl Grey
-China faces ‘diabetes epidemic’, research suggests
-Big food push urged to avoid global hunger
-The Radical Necessity of Cooking: Mollie Katzen, Vegetablist
Bolivia is watching its glaciers melt, early casualties of a changing climate. As communities struggle to adapt and the government tries to pioneer an alternative way forward, rural Bolivians believe the answer lies not in consumerist striving to live better, but in learning to live well.
Last spring, when hundreds of alums and faculty of the nutrition program of Columbia University Teachers College gathered to commemorate the department’s 100th anniversary, one speaker riveted the audience. Shoulders back, patrician chin jutting forward, Joan Gussow strode toward the stage. A recent octogenarian, she remains in remarkable shape.
In our family, there’s a tradition of sowing new clover on the Feast of St. Joseph, which in case you heathens don’t know, falls on March 19. So on that day this year you could find me, one of the more pious heathens, walking my fields, cranking away on my little broadcast seeder like an organ grinder, sowing red clover seed. Actually, I did it on March 18, but surely old St. Joseph wouldn’t quibble over a mere twenty four hours.
