Celebrate Earth Day by cleaning out the fridge

Yeah, that's what I said. Clean out the fridge and celebrate Earth Day with me this Tuesday. If you can't get over to my gorgeous little mountain town of Sylva, NC, I'll post some pics and instructions on how to create a "second chance garden" from all that produce you would normally throw away (GASP! OMG! HEAVEN FORBID!) or compost. Whew, that's better. We're going to have a lot of fun snipping, watering and reviving romaine lettuce, beets, green onions, yellow onions and garlic, bok choi and sweet potatoes bringing those limp, shriveled, chopped off stems, roots and end pieces back to life.

Join us at Bridge Park on April 22nd. And thank yo Mama Gaia not just tomorrow but every day. Without her, there wouldn't be a you, ya know.

We made it through winter! (I think)

61 degrees yesterday in the mountains. Crocus and daffodils are blooming. Right now it's 39 degrees and snowing. Mother Nature just doesn't know which way to swing this year. While there is a scent of spring  flowing across the highlands from time to time, I'm busy looking through my seeds saved from last season desperately trying to discern when to plant. I moved from a place where I had weathered winters with lots of salad greens under plastic and old sheets...

... to a new location where I'm planning for much less ambitious growing situation in a few pots on my deck.

Sometimes it's enough just to have a few snips of garlic or onion or celery leaf to throw into my cooking and I'm excited by the leaves growing from the base of the bok choi I purchased last week.

Next time you have root vegetables like carrots, beets or daikon radishes, don't throw away the top ends. Instead push them part way into moist potting soil, give them some sunshine and water to keep them from drying out and wait for the leafing action. You can add marvelous tastes to your food just from the leaves! And what a way to garden inside if you don't have space outside. It just takes a few items headed for the compost bin and a windowsill with some sunlight to make you feel like a farmer. Need some music to get you going? Try this on--hip hop for gardeners!

Here's a great book with a refrigerator full of ideas for gardening with your garbage! Don't Throw It; Grow It! Deborah Peterson's book lists 68 windowsill plants you can grow from scraps. Who says you need a tiller?

April is trying to peek around the corner. Please don't give up on us.....we've waited sooooo long. Thank you heidi richardson evans at www.daisybones.com

Women feed the world every day!

DID YOU KNOW: Women farmers produce more than half of all food worldwide (Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organization)

Yet, these women don't own half the land base or receive half the income. 

According to Oxfam International, women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, but only earn 10 percent of the income.

Women farmers and gardeners produce food--to feed their families. And for this reason, aren't noticed except by researchers and governmental studies because what they grow isn't sold or exchanged as a commodity. So it's not counted in the wealth of a household or region or country. Really?

Well these women are changing the story of food-growing in many ways, among them, recognizing the inestimable value of women who grow the food. From FoodTank comes: 23 Women Changing Food! Check out their organizations and learn how they are putting a woman's face on the food we eat. 

Look around your town or city. Where are women collaborating, connecting, to provide good food to their families and communities? Are you one of them? If not, how can you link in or support women as farmers, gardeners or those who want to learn? 

Hey, it's spring! The very best time to get involved in a community garden, school garden or beginning to grow food on your back porch. The inspiration for my book, simply garden small! came from small landholders and kitchen gardens around the world, many of them women. 

Cabin fever diversions

January weather was unpredictable and downright temperamental . Not even our usual hint of spring-- a brief collection of warm days stuffed between bookends of cold temperatures and snow. This year, the weather is coming in waves of cold and snow and icy roads that only makes us long for sunshine and dream ever more deeply and dreaming about what really gets us excited this time of year: planting a garden! Yes, I know, perusing the seed catalogues, making long lists of things you want to grow or starting seeds inside...
...are a happy and pleasant diversion from going stir-crazy cooped up inside but nothing can replace the scent of spring, that nasal indicator that our time in the garden is nearly hear. Ah, waxing poetic is not helping me here. But one thing that has kept me busy and excited while waiting for the ground to thaw is our new adventure here in western North Carolina: forming a food co-op! Say hello to Ramp-berry Community Market Co-op.

So this has been my main occupation the last couple of months. Having meetings with locals, creating a community survey that is just now ready for distribution, pulling in key people from our community and visioning what it would feel like to have our very own food cooperative selling produce and other items from local vendors and suppliers. With the assistance of resources from the Food Cooperative Initiative and various coops throughout the region who have offered support, we feel this is a great opportunity to make a difference. Not just in what a retail venture can provide in terms of quality, organic food, but also by adding jobs to the area, educational events, and becoming the community hub for information that may not be readily available as we navigate the confusion of GMOs, clean water, climate change, bee die-off, and  many other problems affecting us.


You can join the fun! Co-ops are springing up all over with good reason: you become the member-owner, not just a consumer, and you have a voice in how your coop is run. BIG difference over corporately-own food stores. I'll keep you posted on how we progress. For now enjoy this little video about starting a coop (if you can tear yourself away from the *seed catalogues.)

(*Hands down favorite: Sow True Seeds, Asheville, NC. We LOVES our local organic seed company!)

My New Year Resolution: GROW MORE GARDENS!

As an elder, it is my responsibility to pass on what I know to the newer humans on the planet. Not because I'm so smart or even more experienced. Some times it comes down to what my mother and grandmother liked to tell us: don't do as I do, do as I tell you to do!

Let's face facts: the elder generations came from a time when technology and chemicals were believed to be the salvation of the planet. We know better now and certainly a great deal of that knowledge has come from those younger than we but still....we have gifts to share, we have to remind them over and over HOW we were taught what we came to believe, HOW to perceive the world in a way that is different perhaps than we were taught to believe.

In some parts of the world, hunger remains simply because people do not know how to utilize what is all around them. That is until someone around them begins to grow food and the spell is broken. Oxfam International works in a variety of ways to empower people all over the world to become self-reliant in feeding themselves. Come watch an amazing elder from Uganda and you can see how well bag gardens and raised bed keyholes and growing in found objects can produce food in limited spaces. These are the types of small gardens I promote in my book (simply garden small!) and which are flourishing all around the world. Try one this growing season!

Tis the Season for Giving and Receiving

Ah! this strange time of year when we attempt to cram 12 months worth of passive caring into a few weeks of crazed, focused attention. Whether that resembles doting on family, co-workers, employees, or our neighbors in the community, why don't we take a longer-view, like we do in the garden.

So gift whenever the mood strikes you. Space out that adrenaline rush we get from haunting the malls and specialty stores between Halloween and Dec. 24th. Keep that child-like excitement alive every day by exploring ways to give something of yourself. Wrapping not required.

And if you're stuck with the most difficult person in the world to buy for, the one who has seemingly everything, wants nothing but will be disappointed if overlooked, may I suggest: SEEDS!

• http://www.off-grid.info/food-independence/heirloom-seed-suppliers.html

Actually I would suggest this gift for every single person you know. But they need to be heirloom seeds! These are the gifts that truly keep on giving.

This year each of my four children will be getting seeds I saved from my garden this summer. I was gone the entire season, walking in Europe, and my housemate insists she is clueless with the garden so nothing was done. When I returned in late August, the nasturtiums were creeping along the edge of the raised beds for several feet and the blossoms were the size of teacups! Marigolds had created a hedge and the zinnias tall with massive stalks and brilliant colors. It was a riotous and unkempt border around the area where a garden would have been. And seeds everywhere. As they dried, I carefully collected them and stashed them in my refrigerator. Until now. I happily pass along to them the beauty and energy of hardy annuals to add to their own gardens next season. And maybe they will think of me as the flowers bloom. ; )

There is no greater gift of life, longevity, love and compassion for the Earth our Mother, than continuing the inherent diversity which has sustained us for millennia. Buy some for yourself and buy seeds to give away....to family, friends, seed banks, community gardens,* schools. WOW! The list is as endless as are the varieties. Spread the joy!

Happy Merry Solstice Yuletide and may verdant gardens and luscious foods finds their way to your homes, 

Yvonne                

  *Now is the time to envision your school or community garden projects for the coming season. Need a little financial boost to put things in motion? Check out this list of available grants from Kitchen Gardens International.

A college where the football field became the farm

Yes, it's true. A small private college in the urban confines of Dallas, Texas, wasn't scoring with their football program. In fact, the college was losing money. A lot of money. So of course, there was only one thing to do: create a farm! And that's just what they did. (Note the goal posts.)

The WE Over Me Farm at Paul Quinn College is a story of a courageous reversal of mindset from "business as usual." Paul Quinn took a dreary situation--a financially challenged sports program--and turned it around--or rather upside down. Dug up the football field, planted a garden, started a farming program and brought fresh vegetables and fruits to an area of a large city notoriously recognized as a food desert. The students sell their organic produce--which makes way more than ticket sales to their football games--and donate 10% of what they grow to food banks and feeding programs in the Highland Hills community. Stories like this give me goose bumps and hope.

And here are 14 more things to smile about this week from Nation of Change including a book produced by the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, promoting small-scale, sustainable farming as the most potent method for feeding the increasing population. Check out:  Save and Grow - A new paradigm of agriculture

And finally a must-see video, a visually enchanting movie exploring our human relationship to the soil, the skin of the Earth, and the use and misuse of agriculture as well as deforestation and development. Listen to the voices of some of the most esteemed scientists, farmers, and ranchers share their work and their connections.  If you love the Earth and wish to understand how the most dynamic, powerful and complex activity of the planet is going on beneath and not above the soil, you will be mesmerized by Symphony of the Soil. 

"Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be." ~ E.F. Schumacher

Till next time...many blessings, Yvonne