Good Food is Everybody's Business
With the beginning of the 2014 Summer CSA session, Jubilee Farm unveiled its new kitchen space including triple wash sinks, stainless steel counter tops, and tools like food processors and knives for shredding and cutting. Members can now get hands-on coaching and food preparation advice on pick-up days from Terrie, Jubilee’s resident food guru. No more wondering, “What do I do with THAT?”
I don’t think there is anything easy about finding the right urban agro-ecology, but I do know it needs to happen. That it is, in fact, already taking place.
Across the country, spring can’t come soon enough and the call to garden is getting louder and louder. We had the opportunity to speak to Lisa Taylor, author of Your Farm in the City, and get a little advice for new and beginning gardeners. It’s never too early – or too late – to tuck a few seeds in some soil and get growing!
By the time the first settlers reached the small spit of land that was ultimately to become part of Seattle Washington in 1850, the Olympia oyster population on the Pacific coast was already beginning to be over harvested. And in the early 1900s, poor water quality in Puget Sound threatened to finish it off. Puget Sound shellfish are at risk again.
It’s the end of March, thank goodness! We won’t have winter much longer, though right now summer seems like years away… Even in the middle – or late winter – gardeners dream about their gardens as they pore over the dozens of plant and seed catalogs that have arrived in the mail. How else do we get through these last weeks of cold, slush, rain, and grey days?
Farmers in the Snoqualmie Valley share a common awareness that although they have the potential to supply a great deal of the nearly insatiable demand for local and organic food, the future of farming in the valley is dismal. Why? The answer, in a single word, is flooding.
Double speak by the media is distorting the very identity of “farmer” for the average American. In fact, most of our food production – the food chain we’ve become so dependent on and can’t do without – is controlled by only a half dozen “chemical corporations.” What is a farmer? A farmer is NOT a global chemical corporation!
Lentils (those tiny little legumes often displayed in the “healthy grains” section of the supermarket) are not commonly on the dinner plate in most American …
