I thought this Google Earth view of our vegetable garden labyrinth was pretty cool. Our own little mysterious suburban crop-circle.
Go here to see the start of the labyrinth from awhile back. The end result of the first year's garden is featured on the cover of the book.
I was also stoked to see this view of the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden. It looks like an earthy patchwork quilt.
Go here to see the tranformation of an empty lot into the community garden.
Alongside Architecture and Water Fun badges, Girl Scouts can now get a Locavore badge by learning about local food and cooking up a meal with local ingredients. According to Alisha Niehaus, Executive Editor, Program Resources:
"All of our badges reflect what today’s girls said they wanted to know about -- girls are interested in what they eat and how it affects their health and the environment, so the Locavore badge gives them a chance to delve into those issues in their communities....Plus, what’s more fun than making your own food, and truly knowing it from farm to table?"
Neihaus points out that there is a strong history of food-related badges with the Girl Scouts, including a Canning badge from the 1920's.
It might be time for the Boy Scouts to get with it and bring back their Beekeeping badge, (Go here to sign the petition) or their Poultry Farming badge. They already have a Gardening merit badge.
In another sign of the trend, a local Boy Scout chose to make a nice dual compartment compost bin for the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden as his Eagle Scout project.
The heart of the local food movement is about developing a healthy connection to where your food comes from. It's hard for me to understand why some people are so concerned about it. It's as American as Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and apple pie (made from organic, locally grown apples).
This week saw the final harvest of our garden. There is a small mountain of potatoes, tomatillos, green tomatoes, cucumbers, and spaghetti squash in the garage. It got me thinking about what the dollar value of this year's harvest and I came across this infographic at Mother Nature Network that puts the dollar value of home food gardening in perspective.
The statistic that jumped out to me the most is that $2.5 billion invested in home gardening resulted in $21 billion worth of fruit and vegetables. To put it more simply, for every $2.50 invested in home gardening we harvest over $20 worth of food. They calculate it more precisely and estimate that on a per household basis, the average home garden translates into $530 worth of fresh goodness.
An enterprising restaurant in New York has developed a farm to table garden on the dormant construction lot next to their location. According to a Fast Company article, "The farm now contains 7,400 milk crates and over 100 types of plants. Riverpark currently gets about 25% of its produce from the farm, but expects to get more soon."
It's a ingenious design created out of the necessity of not being able to dump large amounts of garden soil on the temporary site they had secured.
Ortuzar and Zurofsky presented their quandary to ORE Design and Technology Group, which proposed the milk crate idea: Staple a piece of landscaper fabric (a material that allows air and water to pass through) to each milk crate, and fill it with soil.
There is now truly no excuse for not growing some of your own food. All you need is a milk crate, a piece of landscape fabric, and a litle dirt. I love it. Now all we need is a design for a milk crate chicken coop.
Here's a VFYG submission from Cat. You can read more about her garden at her blog Growing on the Swan Slough.
I was practically raised in the farmers market scene, coming along with my mom while she sold her homemade soap and home harvested honey when I was a kid. A few years later she started Flying Tomato Farm of Snohomish, WA with my stepdad and I really started to get interested in growing food. I'd keep coming along to market and would also help out a little here and there in the greenhouse, then I was hired on as a farmers market seller by an organic farmer in the Skagit. For the past six summers I've spent my weekends peddling all sorts of unique heirloom fruits and vegetables: orange and pink striped beets, numerous varieties of fingerling potatoes, super sweet shuksun strawberries, snap peas and english shellers, fava beans, rainbow carrots, mixed greens with edible flower petals, peacock kale, speckled troutsback romaine, purple tomatoes, jahrdale and cinderella pumpkins and far much more. I have found a passion for produce and feel fulfilled when I can grow, cook and enjoy it!
This is the first year that I've really had the opportunity to get my very own garden going. It's been a very mild summer but I've done fairly well regardless. Right now I have all of the following growing in my garden: rhubarb, raspberries, blueberries, sugar snap peas, lacinato kale, brussel sprouts, french fingerlings, red thumb fingerlings, nordland potatoes, yukon gold potatoes and peruvian purple potatoes, red runner beans, blue lake green beans, turnips, candy onions, red onions, yellow onions, three types of sunflowers, marigolds, sugar pie pumpkins, delicata winter squash, jack o'lantern pumpkins, Japanese red pumpkins, hops, and in the greenhouse I have pink brandywine tomatoes, evergreen tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, sweet 100 cherry tomatoes, basil, and agnes pickling cucumbers. Today, I harvested two wheelbarrows full of garlic! I had two spicy red hardneck varieties growing and elephant garlic. I feel soul-satisfied when I can get my hands into the dirt and raise my own crops to enjoy with loved ones at the dinner table. Life is certainly good when you can keep a garden!
Email me if you want to submit a pic and a paragraph about your garden.
CNN has the story of a growing, but still small urban farming movement in Hong Kong.
For just $15 per month, Lam rents out toolbox-sized planter boxes to businessmen, elderly couples and families alike, and even runs horticulture classes. He uses imported soil from Germany to fill his planters and lets the humid, subtropical climate do the rest.
Fifteen dollars a month seems pretty steep but Hong Kong does have some of the highest property values in the world.
I thought this comment regarding resistance to gardening was interesting:
Outside of convincing politicians, Chau said Hong Kongers themselves have historically been resistant to the idea of farming as a suitable pastime.
"It is the lowest of our traditional caste system. In traditional Chinese culture, if you're good at nothing else, you work on the farm," Chau said. "Also, Hong Kong is a very money-minded place... land is also very expensive in Hong Kong, so people don't spend time worrying about growing their own food."
America has its own version of this caste system story. The consensus opinion on the growth of the US economy is that advances in farming freed people up from working on the farm so they could apply themselves to other more GDP-enhancing activities. This chart tells the story of the movement out of farm work in the U.S.:
China has its own version of this chart but relative to the American move away from the farm they are in 1850. This chart compares farm employment stats around the world and puts China at 47% in 1999.
In countries that have moved dramatically away from the farm there are efforts in place to reconnect with land and food. My sense is that this, in large part, is what drives the local food movement, the interest in farmers' markets, CSAs, and rooftop gardens - even in Hong Kong. It's a kind of farming-deficit disorder. It may be awhile before perceptions in China change around farming but they are already shifting dramatically in North America.
We had a great work day today at the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden in the west valley of Spokane. As you can see from the picture even the little guys were putting their muscles into preparing the soil for a new growing season. We added 12 more beds today, giving us a total of 42 10x4 ft raised beds. If you're interested in having a garden plot this summer there are still some openings. Go here to find out how you can be involved. If you're not close to the Pumpkin Patch go here for a map of all the community gardens in Spokane.
Ragan Sutterfield's collection of essays, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline, is a call for churches to start gardens and grow food. He introduces the essays by saying:
My hope is that Christians will come to see one of their tasks as staking out claims for God's Kingdom by redeeming land from the margins and using that land to create gardens that offer not only good food but also community development and hope.
True to his comments in the book about the need for patient preparation of soil, he aims with this small book, to prepare the topsoil of the church with amendments of biblical reflection, kingdom theology, and agrarian sensibilities.
He starts out with the assumption that before engaging the practice of farming we must first grapple with our understanding of creation, which is ultimately a question about how we see ourselves in the order of creation. He says:
Farming is essentially the practice of cultivating creation, and how we see farming depends entirely on how we see creation.
Sutterfield grounds his understanding of the human place in creation in a perichoretic, or social understanding of the trinity, with God inviting us into the "eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," and into the task of widening that divine embrace of love. The author lifts up sustainable farming as a generative practice that anchors us in the humus of created order, and ultimately in the triune embrace of the creator God.
He makes a keen observation about our typical response to the wreckage of rapid industrialization and the burgeoning green movement. He says:
So far, the answer seem to be mostly, keep doing what you are doing, only do it "greener."
Again here, he points to farming as a path to not just tweaking what we're already doing, but shaping an alternative path. He says:
Humility and frugality are both practices born of accepting our creaturely limits. Farming, perhaps better than any other practice, brings us up against the realities of the creaturely life and forces us to live within the limits of our power, knowledge and resources.
The two main essays are followed by a sermon given to Englewood Christian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. Sutterfield argues that the church should "seek a foothold for Eden," as a way of looking ahead to the ultimate fulfillment of what God is doing in the world. He says that the best place to start is with places on the margins, on abandoned patches of earth that need resurrecting.
It's getting quite interesting reading all these 28 books in a condensed period of time. I'm learning that perspectives on environmentalism and faith are shaped significantly by the places where people are standing in the world. Scott Saban sees the movement from the missions field among the poor, Tri Robinson sees it from his role as an evangelical pastor and leader in the church, Jonathan Merritt, author of Green Like God, sees through the lens of being a Southern Baptist, and Ragan Sutterfield's perspectives are shaped primarily through his experience as a farmer. All four advocate for the church to embrace the care of creation.
Sutterfield offers a small critique of some of these other approaches. It wasn't a direct critique that he targets at others, but one that I can see in the middle of all of this reading. He says that there are two heresies founded on the idea that we, as humans, are not part of the created order. One of these heresies has been roundly rejected in all of my reading so far, which is a rejection of an extreme environmentalism that sees human impact on the earth in a wholly negative light, as if the creation would be better off without people. That's a bit of a straw man, but I understand what he is saying. The other heresy, he says, envisions "creation entirely in terms of human use and value...," which includes those that warn of global warming because of it's negative impact on humans.
Tri Robinson lists as one of his foundational assumptions, that the earth exists for human use. Saban's main observation is that caring for the environment is a way to care for people, especially poor people. I have often spoken of care of creation in the context of loving our neighbors as ourselves. Sutterfield's point is that there is something in the story of caring for creation which runs deeper than human use and valuation. I think he's arguing against a modern, reductionist view of the earth, but I'd like to hear more about what he means by this.
Farming as a Spiritual Discipline is a small book that packs a big punch. It's more like a fresh layer of compost than a flashy quick-release packet of NPK fertilizer. Sort of unassuming at first glance, it is packed full of health and a great contribution to the debates about faith and environment. Personally, it has re-sparked my imagination around my work with the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden and Millwood Farmers' Market and helped me see how those fit into God's unfolding kingdom.
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