Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category
USDA People’s Garden Initiative Trainings
The USDA People’s Garden Initiative promotes growing healthy food, people and communities. It encourages USDA employees and communities to plant gardens because we believe the simple act of planting a garden can make real and lasting change to improve food access and healthy lifestyles.
The USDA People’s Garden Initiative brings you this series of training sessions on a wide variety of horticultural and garden related topics. There is no charge for registration and all sessions are open to the public. To sign up for the sessions, visit: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/broadcasts/emg/.
Wednesday, October 26
Webinar: Food Stamps Grow Gardens! Leveraging SNAP to grow gardens across America with Daniel Bowman Simon, founder of SNAP Gardens http://www.SNAPgardens.org.
Did you know that you can use SNAP (formerly known as Food Stamps) benefits to help plant a garden? This session will provide ideas for how garden-minded professionals and amateurs alike can spread awareness and connect SNAP recipients to resources and information that will enable productive gardening experiences for all.
Green Roofs Industry Embraces Urban Ag
Living Architecture Monitor–a magazine that advocates for green roofs–has dedicated its current issue to innovative urban agriculture policies and projects.
Included are articles on designing the edible building envelope, Seattle’s recently adopted urban ag policies, Brooklyn’s Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, rooftop pollinating in New York City, the economic valuation of rooftop farming, and macro-scale food production in Toronto.
Also of note is the 8th Annual Green Roof and Wall Conference being held in Vancouver, BC from November 30-December 3. The conference is featuring a half-day workshop titled, ‘Introduction to Rooftop Urban Agriculture,’ where folks can learn about multiple approaches to growing food on rooftops through design and maintenance principles. Course topics will include:
- Design Principles
- Economic Models
- Regulatory Issues
- Case Studies
To view conference details, visit CitiesAlive.
American Farmland Trust Expanding Environmental Markets for Farmers
The Pacific Northwest is anticipating significant growth in the years ahead, most of which is likely to occur in areas of environmental sensitivity.
Environmental markets (also referred to as ecosystem service markets) represent a way for growing communities to offset or mitigate for the unavoidable impacts of growth and development at the lowest reasonable cost. At the same time, they can provide supplemental income for our farmers and ranchers, improving their economic viability, and providing the funding necessary for them to protect their land and remain in agriculture.
American Farmland Trust’s Pacific Northwest Office is engaged in a broad effort to develop and improve the ability for farmers to access a wide variety of existing and emerging Environmental markets. These include carbon sequestration, water quality trading, wetland mitigation, wildlife habitat mitigation, renewable energy, water transactions, flood mitigation, and more.
They hope to make as many different kinds of conservation market opportunities as possible available across the broad spectrum of agriculture so that selling environmental services becomes a meaningful part of the everyday business of agriculture.
Join them this evening in Tumwater for their last evening workshop to help explain how to use these markets—either as a way to earn extra income or as a new source of funding for land stewardship projects. The workshops are designed for farmers and ranchers, conservation district staff and supervisors, NRCS personnel, Extension staff, land stewardship professionals and anyone else who is interested.
In addition to the workshops, American Farmland Trust has developed a Guide to Environmental Markets for Farmers and Ranchers.
More information about the project and the guide is available at: www.farmland.org/environmentalmarkets.
Garden Defense: Protecting Tomatoes from Late Blight
If you remember back to May, we had a very warm stretch of weather for a couple of days with temperatures in the 70s and sun all day long. The start of summer, right? Wrong!But in an effort not to miss out on the hot and sunny conditions that Seattle experienced last year around this time, tomatoes went into the ground early. I should have known that the heat wave last year was not going to be an annual occurrence. Instead we experienced mild days, more rain than normal, and not nearly the amount of sun my tomatoes were hoping for.
Growth slowed during these cooler days and the fear of late blight increased. Late blight is a disease caused by a mold fungus that just loves the type of weather we experienced this spring and early summer: damp conditions and temperatures over 60 degrees. Infected tomatoes develop brown, leathery lesions. Blight can be hard to get rid of and can cause fruit to rot or become inedible. (To put things in perspective, it caused the potato famine in Ireland back in the 1800s.) More…
Time for Fall Garden Planting
It’s hard to think of fall when we have finally just gotten started with summer but it is indeed time to plant fall and over-wintering crops. Clear a space in your crowded garden, use this handy guide from Oregon State University to choose the most suitable varieties, and start prepping for the next season.
A nice patch of dirt for planting collards and beets.
Pollan Collects Questions and Resources
Food journalist and author Michael Pollan has included a resources page on his website. He has many pages dedicated to food such as FAQs and useful links on growing food, agricultural and food policy, and diets including meat.
Here’s a sample of his insight in regards to school lunch programs:
Which organizations are working to reform our school lunch program and how can I get involved?
The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health problem of America’s children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy. Today the problem is over-nutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. We are essentially treating our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce. So what can we do as parents, students and teachers to get healthy foods into our schools?
Webinar Series Explores How to Create Healthy Communities
PolicyLink, a national research and action institute aiming to promote economic and social equity, is promoting the Convergence Partnership’s five-part webinar series, which focuses on how to create healthy communities. The free webinars will provide examples and tools for how to collaborate and effectively enact change to reduce economic inequity and create healthier, more prosperous neighborhoods.
All calls will take place on Tuesdays between 11:00-12:00pm (PST). You can RSVP here.
Here’s the schedule:
April 27 – Healthy People, Healthy Places: How to Implement Environmental and Policy Change Strategies.
In this webinar, panelists will delve into what it means to create healthy community environments using policy. Specific examples will be provided.
Learn How to Save Water
If you have a vegetable or flower garden you won’t want to miss this workshop on April 8. Jeff Thompson, a Master Gardener, will explain how to develop your yard for easy maintenance and low water usage. A good water system targets the exact area where you want the water (for example, the roots) and allows you to deliver it at the exact time you wish (using a timer). It also prevents disease by minimizing water contact with the leaves, stems, and fruit of plants.
Jeff will show you what you will need to buy and how to put the system together with hands-on demonstrations plus how you can customize and expand your own system. He will also explain the benefits of using drip irrigation such as for containers, raised beds, vegetable rows and even balconies. More…
Bucket Brigadiers In Action
In the early morning sunshine, four women –Sandra Pederson, Becca Fong, Diana Vinh, and myself–piled into a car and drove out to Maple Valley for an Urban Land Army mission–to seed plant starts for the first round of Bucket Brigade events happening in early May.
The term bucket brigade historically referred to a method for transporting items where items were passed from one stationary person to the next–think firefighters before the advent of hand pumped fire engines. Interpreted for the twenty-first century, Urban Land Army’s Bucket Brigade is a fun community event that rescues unused buckets, plants them up with veggies, and passes them along to folks like you and me. In its third year, Bucket Brigade has grown from a few scattered outposts to an organized series of community gatherings where long-time and brand new gardeners alike learn a bit about container gardening and food sustenance.
In order to prep for the first event being held May 8, we planted more than 28 trays of seeds including italian parsley, marigolds, violas, chives, and two different varieties of tomatoes, all of which are well suited to containers. We’ll be heading back out to Maple Valley in April to check on the seedlings and plant the next round of seeds…can you guess what they’ll be? More…
New Research Recommends Federal Interdepartmental Task Force on Food Policy
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) recently published a new paper that finds many federal agencies are deeply affecting what, and how, food is raised and consumed in the U.S.–not just the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Beyond the USDA: How other government agencies can support a healthier, more sustainable food system, by Maggie Gosselin, reports on federal agencies and their role in administering programs, grants and regulatory oversight that affect food. This agency-by-agency review covers food safety regulations, community economic and housing development, health education, food procurement, labor standards, trade negotiations and transportation infrastructure. More…
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