Archive for the ‘Organizations’ Category
Beacon Food Forest Update
Food Foresters, Friends and Neighbors,
www.beaconfoodforest@weebly.com or http://www.facebook.com/beaconfoodforest
While we can’t offer Beacon Hill grown popcorn this year, it is on our list of plants to grow at the Food Forest. We’ll make due with other organically grown corn this year, and an assortment of beverages suitable to the season. There will be an opportunity to purchase some small stocking stuffers and support both organizations.
So, join us! Admission is free, but donations will be accepted at the door (as will items for the local food bank). Let’s make this the first of many movie nights.
Yours cooking it slow and nutritious,
Friends of the Beacon Food Forest
Portage Bay Grange welcomes urban farmers
Joshua and Annette make whole-grain waffles
Portage Bay Grange in Seattle’s University District recently welcomed The Urban Farm Handbook authors Annette Cottrell and Joshua McNichols to their first Open House on November 19. While we enjoyed fresh-pressed cider, Joshua and Annette described local grain sources, grain mills, and whipped up delicious spelt, sourdough, duck egg, and goat milk waffles.
Urban farming tastes great!
Portage Bay Grange hosts Seattle 4H at Open House
Portage Bay Grange sells small livestock, feed, and a variety of thoughtful urban homesteading mercantile including BPA-free Weck canning jars.
A great place to visit with young kids, the Portage Bay Grange Open House also showcased the very urban and active Cooped-Up in Seattle 4H Club.
Seattle Grows Supper
Seattle Grows Supper on Friday, June 3, brought together a dynamic gathering of more than 30 chefs, farmers, food wholesalers, writers, nutritionists and others working on a community-based food system. The dinner was convened by the Seattle Tilth Advocacy Group, people who are farmers, food planners, processors and food justice advocates working to nimbly develop a more resilient Seattle.
As people made their way from table to table in a World Café-style potluck dinner, ideas bubbled up, were quickly reviewed, and refined.
Some fun, unique, and important ideas emerged from Seattle Grows Supper:
- Create an on-line Farmville-style game called “Farm Bill”
- Put recipes in CSA boxes that chefs develop unique to each neighborhood
- Provide spaces at farmers’ markets for very very local producers
- Permit farm stands in very small places, parking lots, corner stores
- Focus on mothers as change agents: Snacks, school meals, family dinners, are family-values issues we can all support
- Pay attention to the commons, particularly be aware of privatizing water rights
- Find stories and learn clear language that speaks across many cultures: food as medicine
- Develop achievable food system metrics and goals. Seattle can set a goal to grow and process 30% of what its people eat in the next five years — and we can compost 90% of our food waste!
People left the three-hour dinner “hungry for more”. Another Seattle Grows Supper over the summer seems likely. Stay tuned!
Tilth and FACN Chosen to run Rainier Beach Urban Farm!
Here is wonderful news from Peter Masundire of the Friends of Atlantic City Nursery. A huge congratulations and here’s to a great future of good growing, good community and good food.
Guess what, I have some great news to share with you! We have just learned that Seattle Parks & Recreation has completed its RFP review process and has selected the Friends of Atlantic Street Nursery and Seattle Tilth as the operators of the soon to be established Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands Preservation site.
This is a great achievement for Rainier Beach and could not have happened without your support. So, Thank You! Over the last two years, many residents of Rainier Beach and supporters of the urban farm idea worked tirelessly to make this a reality. Some wrote letters of support, testified in public meetings, attended numerous community planning meetings and others recruited supporters through the blogshere – all this has paid off. This is one example of what is possible when a community comes together towards a common goal. The Friends of Atlantic City Nursery and Seattle Tilth are committed to making this a jewel not only in Rainier Beach, but in the Puget Sound region as a whole. With your help, I know that what we have achieved together can be a model for other communities to follow!
To learn more about what’s next and how you can contribute to this exciting adventure, please come and join us at the next community gathering (and celebration) on Saturday, May 14th at 10:00 am – 11:30 am at the Rainier Beach Public Library which is located at 9125 Rainier Ave. S. Seattle, WA 98118
Feeding Kids Fresh From the Farm
Providing healthy, locally-grown food for school lunches is a no-brainer, right? Unfortuately, no. Farm-to-School programs turn out to be much more complex than one might suspect.
Vashon Island Growers Association (VIGA), a local chapter of the Washington Tilth Association, held its first workshop on March 4, 2011 to hammer out details about how to bring local fruits and vegetables to the three local schools on Vashon. The workshop brought together a diverse field of growers, government officials, and non-profits.
“There are many obstacles we’ll need to overcome to making this work,” says Mark Musick, who helped to organize the VIGA summit. “Food safety protocols that meet USDA standards are complex. Big farming businesses can afford staff to do complex USDA paperwork. We need make meeting food safety protocols comparatively easy for small, owner-operated farms while still holding to a high public health standard.”
VIGA members will form a grower’s cooperative to wholesale produce sales to the schools, complete paperwork for individual liability insurance for each farm, and may eventually work on a shared processing site.
Vashon Island currently has 38 active farms, with estimated 2010 retail sales of $312,315. Over a quarter of the Vashon’s farmers are participating in the school pilot.
VIGA is a “groundbreaking” collaboration pointing the way towards providing healthy, local food grown on small farms for institutions and large buyers.
Easy Volunteer Coordination
Coordinating volunteers can be time consuming and somewhat confusing. Here’s a new tool to make things easier. Has anyone tried this type of thing out? How well does it work?
Here’s info from the VolunteerSpot site.
In some parts of the country, Community Gardens are getting ready for spring planting. I’d like to share VolunteerSpot’s free and easy online coordination tool .
Free online (calendar) sign up sheets makes it super simple to organize your garden jobs and then have volunteers sign up to help with soil prep, planting, watering, weeding, etc. No-date sign up sheets make it easy to ask for supply donations. Both eliminate spreadsheets, reply-all email and phone tag getting volunteers organized!
Setup your volunteer needs using a simple planning wizard and invite volunteers via email or put a link on your website or facebook page. Once volunteers signup (no registration required), VolunteerSpot sends automated confirmation and reminder emails to help everyone keep their commitments. More…
Hands-On Skills Revitalize Community Centers
Sustainable Northeast Seattle teamed up with staff at Seattle Parks Ravenna-Eckstein and Meadowbrook community centers to produce Hands-On: A Community Skills Fair on February 12, 2011. Seattle Department of Neighborhoods also contributed a Small Sparks cash grant.
Sustainable NE is part of SCALLOPS (Sustainable Communities ALL Over Puget Sound), a consortium of 62 community-based groups building the resilient skills necessary to live more local, less energy intensive, more connected lives. About a third of the SCALLOPS groups, including Sustainable NE, are also a part of the international Transition network.
In a day-long series of more than 40 classes, participants learned skills ranging from cheese-making to Morris dancing, plumbing to pickling. “We were overwhelmed by how many people signed up in a short time,” said the statistically astute Sustainable NE co-founder Leo Brodie, “more than 300 people took an average of 2.3 classes.”
The community centers were buzzing with activity. Pounding tools, soap fragrances, vocal harmonies and laughter blended with more traditional community center sounds and smells of youth basketball classes. More than one youth sports parent asked eagerly when to sign up for the next series of skills classes.
Young people were a sizable chunk of Hands-On participants. The 18- to 30-year-old crowd are part of the Seattle “greenhorns” movement, looking for ways to learn basic life skills and connection after years in front of the Simpsons and I-Phones.
I took basic plumbing and electrical wiring, while my daughter studied Tassajara bread making in the morning. In the afternoon we both signed up for a class in making herbal products. Our teacher, Heidi Meir, studied Ayurveda, herbalism, and aromatherapy, and was eager to share her knowledge. There is clearly a potent blend of eager teachers, eager learners, and underutilized Parks community centers.
Seattle Parks is in the midst of a responding to $10 million budget shortfall in 2011. Part of their response is converting some community centers to “limited use” sites. A blue-ribbon commission is meeting for the next six months to determine how to best respond to community center budget woes. Let’s hope the commission keeps in mind the incredible success of Hands-On!
Sail Transport: Strengthening That “S” In Regional Food Security
By Kathy Pelish
Some hundred years ago in the Puget Sound, the steam-powered Mosquito Fleet plied our local waters, carrying profitable loads that ranged from Eastern Washington grain to Scandinavian women from Poulsbo, carefully toting over farm-fresh baskets of eggs to the city.
But go back even further in time, to days when intrepid pioneers looked out over our vast lands and knew that a rich network of maritime and rivertine routes would help to build their communities. Before our bittersweet affair with cars, before the great transcontinental railroads, before Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats, Americans moved by sailboat.
Skipper Fulvio Casali readies boxes of fresh produce for loading at the Sequim dock. Photo by Forrest Jackson
Think sail transport is a quaint notion for our high-tech lifestyle? Think again: in Ballard’s backyard, a local group of skippers, sailors and land crew are performing a labor of love in resurrecting pure sail. Sure, the boats have an engine for emergency backup, but the journeys take place overwhelmingly under sail, gliding gracefully through day and night to arrive on time to meet boxes of fresh vegetables from Nash’s Produce in Sequim, then a quick loading and a quicker casting off.
Customer Paula Jenson transfers her fava beans into her bicycle basket. Photo by Yann Riche
A trip leg can range from 10.5 to 36.5 hours carried out by volunteer boats sailing over the season; a fleet consisting of a 26′ Ranger to a 38′ custom-built vessel by a local boatwright.
Once safely docked, a small electric flatbed truck meets the sailboat and the vegetables travel their last low-carbon mile to Aster Coffee Lounge in Ballard, the delivery pick up point for the CSA.
With a practical range of 10 miles, the mini-electric truck sips its fuel economically from a household 110-volt connection. Photo by Kathy Pelish
Celeriac Has Sent You a “Friend” Request
With unusual vegetables like celeriac, it quickly became clear that the CSA customers might need some ideas for home preparation and enjoyment. So for each delivery, the co-op partners with a local chef, (from places such as Macrina or Ray’s Boathouse), who donates a recipe highlighting some of the vegetables. The back side of the flyer is given to the chef so he or she can tell their story and their interest in local foods, (sample below).
Land Ho! Vegetables Sighted On Those Thar Docks
Started in June 2010, the Salish Sea Trading Cooperative deliberated over its name, finally settling upon the regional name of Salish Sea to honor both its home roots and the original Coastal Salish tribes.
The structure, too, was crucial – with a fierce commitment to the more community-based model of a cooperative, the co-founders, (both Sustainable Ballard members), hope to eventually share out their model with SCALLOPS and Transition Towns. On January 18th, they presented their “lessons learned” for Sustainable West Seattle to ponder, (West Seattle has the potential resource of city-owned Seacrest Dock.)
Right now, their small CSA program shipping organic vegetables from Sequim to Ballard is the primary project but the co-op is busily exploring other transport opportunities, such as sailing in oats for Sound Spirits, Seattle’s first legal distillery since Prohibition.
CSA’s, of course, are a vital ingredient of a healthy foodshed. The co-op also periodically hosts customer socials, collaborating with other groups to add a fun or unique touch, such as BBQ’s on one of the boats, an oyster roast with Petite Madisons brought over from the successful restoration efforts on Bainbridge Island and a tour of Theo’s Chocolate Factory, (won at a Silent Auction at OUT for Sustainability’s Eat Local Now dinner).
Sailing I-5
At the first-ever Cultivating Regional Food Security Conference this past December, Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon raised his concern over how easily the Seattle region could hit roadblocks in replenishing its food supplies. He referenced the famous picture of I-5 during the 2008 flooding, wholly impassable, and the mountain passes also closed. Add in a vulnerable silver thread of just one railway running north and south, closed at times by landslides and transport alternatives seem scarce.
But what can get through in this difficult scenario are boats!
From halyard to hoe, from binnacle to broccoli, what your Ballard neighbors are envisioning and working toward is a redrawn model of transport that also adapts to increasingly expensive fossil fuel energy resources and adds very little carbon to our planet.
In this shift they are not alone: last summer the Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, proclaimed “Making better use of our rivers and coastal routes offers an intelligent way to relieve some of the biggest challenges we face in transportation – congestion on our roads, climate change, fossil fuel energy use and soaring road maintenance costs. There is no better time for us to improve the use of our rivers and coasts for transportation.” And also having an enormous amount of fun along the way!
If you’d like more information go here or are interested in volunteering for the 2011 season, please email here.
Brahm Ahmadi Praises Clean Greens
Reverend Robert Jeffrey. Brahm Ahmadi, David Korten of YES! Magazine and many food justice supporters in background.
Clean Greens hosted their first fundraising dinner January 29 at Garfield Community Center.
Hundreds of local supporters listened to speakers Cheryl Cobbs, Director of Solid Ground, Webster Walker, Director of Central Co-op, Heather Day Director of Community Alliance for Global Justice, and keynote speaker Brahm Ahmadi from the Oakland, CA People’s Grocery as they spoke movingly about how to connect the dots between food, health, and strong local economies.
Clean Greens is owned and operated by residents in Seattle’s Central District. Founded by Reverend Robert Jeffrey of New Hope Baptist Church in 2007, Clean Green’s mission is to improve community health by making healthy, pesticide-free produce available and affordable. Volunteers farm 22 acres in Duvall, WA and deliver healthy produce July through mid-November via church and community center CSAs and farmer’s markets.
Brahm Ahmadi praised Clean Greens for “exemplifying a project that builds the infrastructure necessary for healthy communities.” Food is a great community organizing tool, said Ahmadi, “it is personal, universal, social, and cultural. Reclaiming our food sources allows us to take modest, simple steps towards long-term community health and wealth.”
Time to Rake! Updates from City Fruit
From our friends at City Fruit here are tips and info for November.
Fruit tree tip of the month: Rake. Rake. Rake. Leaves and fallen fruit contain spores that spread fungal diseases (e.g., scab) and the pupae of apple maggot fly. These pests overwinter beneath the tree and emerge to cause damage in the spring. Removing leaves and fallen fruit is the easiest, least expensive, and thus most effective way to cut down on future pests. So get outside on one of these beautiful days, and rake. Another idea: sprinkle agricultural lime (not dolomite lime) on the ground beneath the tree to change the pH and discourage scab spores.Worst year for fruit . . . Bob Norton, the northwest’s preeminent apple expert, noted: “This has been a very disappointing fruit season, the worst that I can remember.” and Erik Simpson of Sequim wrote: “Of 250 fruit trees only 30 bore any fruit; and, of those, only ten trees bore more than ten fruits each.” In Seattle, plums were way down — if we harvested 200 lbs from a tree in 2009, we got 25 lbs in 2010. The reason is probably weather — rain at the wrong time, keeping the bees inside.Learn to prune, one-on-one: As he does every winter, Don Ricks, one of City Fruit’s founders, will be pruning fruit trees in Seattle’s Urban Orchard. Don has offered to provide one-on-one mentoring to anyone who would like to prune with him. If interested, let me know; gailsavina@cityfruit.org .Tree planting class: On Nov 20, Jana Dilley will teach a class on the correct planting and care of young fruit trees at the Phinney Neighborhood Association. Jana works on the Green Seattle Initiative with the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment. She has a masters degrees in Forestry and in Public Affairs and has organized community tree-planting events in Seattle and California. Register at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/editevent.html?e_id=135119 .Change in City Fruit Update/Newsletter: Starting in January, City Fruit will be sending out a monthly newsletter to members and volunteers. The Update — this Update — will go out to everyone else each quarter. If you would like to get the monthly newsletter, please join us! http://www.cityfruit.org/membership.htm Otherwise, you will continue to receive a quarterly Update. If you would like to be removed from this email list altogether, let me know.Join our board? The City Fruit board is a stable bunch, with the same folks hanging in there since our birth, almost two years ago. They don’t plan to leave. But we would like some new blood. If you would like to work with us to promote, protect and harvest urban fruit, consider joining our board. Details are on the .Blog .Events. The Seattle Tree Fruit Society ( http://www.seattletreefruitsociety.com/ ) maintains an excellent calendar of fruit-related events. Some highlights coming up:
- Nov 20 - Planting and Care of Young Fruit Trees class, City Fruit. https://www.brownpapertickets.com/editevent.html?e_id=135119
- Dec 4 – 5 – Cultivating Regional Food Security Conference. http://depts.washington.edu/uwbg/news/food-security/ WSU Extension and the UW Botanic Gardens are collaborating to jointly host a conference about recent research and issues related to regional food security.
- Dec 13 – 17 - Advanced Class in Cider Production. This class provides a range of techniques involved in cider development, mareting and operation of a successful cider production business. Mt. Vernon: www.agbizcenter.org/node/61
Join us! City Fruit needs your support. In 2011, we aim to fund an even larger portion of our two fruit harvests ourselves. Our ultimate goal is a self-sustaining harvest. Fruit tree owners are contributing to this effort; restaurants are buying a portion of our fruit; and we need the help of supporters like you. Be part of this effort; join City Fruit. http://www.cityfruit.org/membership.htmTake care, and enjoy the harvest holiday.Gail
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