| 1. |
Eat-out Nation
|
|
|
Each year, the US Department of Agriculture compiles and publishes data about America's food habits and purchases. 2005 represented a turning point in the way Americans eat: for the first time since statistics were kept in this area (i.e. 1953), we ate more foods prepared outside our homes than ones we cooked ourselves at home. While the US has been famously dubbed "Fast Food Nation", it seems like "Eat-Out Nation" might be a more accurate term.
For those interested in seeing the raw data, you can find it here
|
| 2. |
September 2007 Newsletter
|
|
|
To read the full newsletter, please see: http://www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletterseptember07.html
Dear Kitchen Gardener,
I hope you're either enjoying or planning bumper harvests. We
harvested a great crop of participation and awareness raising at this
year's Kitchen Garden Day celebration and have put together
a short video to share some of what happened that day.
While it'd be nice to bask in
the warm glow of those harvests, October is too busy a gardening month
to kick back. In Maine, there's
pesto and
sauerkraut to be made, squash to be cured, apples to be picked, and
tomatoes to be canned or frozen. October also offers some of the
crispest, best-tasting salads of the year just ready to be
cut, rinsed, and
spun. Garlic traditionally goes in the ground on or around
Columbus Day, but that day seems to be slipping back a week or two in
our brave new, globally-warmed world.
October's also a month for
adding new life to tired beds through the addition of compost. For
those of you who don't have a heaping pile of chocolate cake-like
compost to dig into, autumn's a great time, the best time in fact, to
start a new pile using all those vines and stems that have stopped
delivering, fallen leaves, and the lush, nitrogen-rich grass clippings
that suburban lawns so effortlessly produce in the fall.
The fall is also the best
time for planning and starting new garden projects. Last week, I
paid a visit to the French School of Maine to help them identify a site
for a new "potager". Monsieur le Directeur and a
group of professeurs directed me to a rolling,
field available for the school's use just a three minute's walk from the
school. I felt a bit envious glancing over the grassy expanse,
doing quick math in my head at all the food that such a large plot could
generate. While the field was gorgeous and had very tall weeds
(usually a reliable sign of soil fertility), I urged them to scope out a
spot closer to the school. What holds for home gardens holds for
school gardens too: the closer to the kitchen, the better.
We ultimately chose to site
the new garden in a high profile and high traffic spot right in front of
the school. Not only is it the best spot in terms of sunlight and
promixity, but it sends a strong message that health and good food are
high on the school's agenda. Once they've got their potager
dug and their systems in place, they can consider turning the larger
piece of land into a true farm capable of supplying their cafeteria.
This experience and some
others I've been a part of recently have got me thinking about where our
schools' priorities are now and perhaps ought to be. A few years
back, Maine boasted being the first state to prepare its children for
the "information age" by
providing every 7th
and 8th grade student and teacher with a laptop computer.
Several years into the program, it's amazing to see how comfortable and
skilled Maine's young people have become with this important tool.
This, of course, got me
pondering new "firsts" for Maine and other forward-looking states or
regions, in the US or abroad. Which state or region will be the
first to prepare its students for the coming "ecology age" by mandating
that every primary or intermediate school in its area have an organic
kitchen garden and age-appropriate garden curriculum? Surely,
there is no better way to teach health and healthy eating than to engage
young people in the process of heathy food production.
As with the laptop initative,
such an idea would surely encounter resistance, but what revolutionary
idea hasn't?
Wishing you a delicious
October,
PS: It's still not too late
to win your chance at over $1000 in prizes through our
Grow-Off Show-Off Contest, but the clock is ticking. As an
added bonus, the first 50 entries automatically win a free subscription
to Mother Earth News. Deadline for entries is November 1st.
Note sure what you can enter, then see
here.
|
| 3. |
Start a "gPod" in your area
|
|
|
You've heard of an iPod and a pea pod, but what about a gPod?
The g is short for gardener. A gPod is a group of kitchen gardeners and other garden-variety foodies who get together from time to time, regularly or irregularly, to share information, plants, know-how, their gardening victories and defeats, and delicious, seasonal foods. More than being focused on just themselves, members of a KGI gPod also look for ways of giving something back to their community through their combined knowledge, time, and resources.
In his critically acclaimed book "Bowling Alone", author Robert Putnam writes about how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors and how we may reconnect. Kitchen Gardeners International is encouraging its members and supporters to form gPods because we believe that we are better and stronger together than apart. By banding together at the local level, gardeners can help alleviate global problems such as food insecurity, climate change, and tasteless supermarket tomatoes. We can also have more fun!
Efforts to bring about garden-powered community revival are already under way. In the course of the past year, KGI gPods have started forming and their members have worked together to plant new gardens in their communities, behind homes, schools, and churches. They have organized garden tours. They have hosted educational talks. They have helped to raise funds for local kitchen garden projects. They have held tastings and have organized potluck meals made with local ingredients.
As with peas, to start a new gPod, someone has to plant a seed. Why not you?
Below you'll find some resources we're offering to help local organizers start new pods in their areas. Once you have a group of 5 or more people organized, we will help you get your local effort organized by setting up an e-mail list, helping you pick a group name, creating a group logo, etc. Please let us know what additional organizational resources you need and we'll do what we can to help.
-----
1. How to start a KGI gPod. An inspirational and informational guide to local group organizing by John Walker, founder and lead organizer of Kitchen Gardeners Bluegrass (Kentucky, USA).
2. KGI informational flyer for downloading, printing, and posting in your area. Add your name and contact details on the tear-off tabs so that people know how to reach you.
|
| 4. |
Garlic's Unexpected Gems
|
|
|
By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, September 6, 2007 in The Washington Post
Some of the best garden discoveries are made by accident. Last fall a friend gave my husband and me some family heirloom garlic. Against the standard advice, he hadn't removed the flower stems, known as scapes, when they appeared, and when he harvested he pulled up the whole plants -- bulbs, stems and flower heads. Inside the flower heads were tiny bulbils (above-ground bulbs) the size of rice grains. We broke apart the regular garlic bulbs at the base of the plants and poked the individual cloves into the ground the way you normally would plant fall garlic. On a whim, we also planted those tiny bulbils, one by one, just to see what would happen.
What we expected to find, come spring, was green garlic, a tasty scallion-like treat you get by planting any small garlic cloves you think aren't big enough to make full-sized heads. But the green shoots the bulbils sent up were so spindly they weren't worth eating, so we let them grow through the summer.
|
| 5. |
Healthier Halloween
|
|
|
Halloween is truly a kid’s
holiday –- good friends, creative costumes, event-filled parties –- all with a
cool spooky theme -- who...
|
|
Everyday Menus: No Cook Recipes
Comment This Article
Refer it to Friend