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Gene Yale, living in a Chicago suburb, has 170+ apple trees in his yard. And six high-bush blueberries! By growing tiny little trees – grafted and managed like Bonsai – Gene has a yard full of 3-foot apple treas that bear full size fruit. 
I am a novice baker trying my darnedest to learn how to make good bread. I would rather have bought a book by Michael Pollan called Baked. In his book, Cooked Michael talks about his time with guru bakers, farmers, and millers. He reminds us that to make good bread you only need a few basics: flour, water, salt, yeast, time, and heat. Here’s our take on local and regional grain and flour, and baking bread. 
Just glance at the magazine shelves or the menu of your favorite restaurant and you will see that Americans are eating more fish than ever before, from sushi to ceveche to the classic tuna sandwich. Fish are healthy, fashionable, increasingly expensive, and consumed with a clearer conscience than meat. But can this continue? As journalist Charles Clover shows in his global exploration of the destruction caused by overfishing, we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans in a single human lifetime greater than any yet caused by pollution. High-tech fishermen are trashing whole ecosystems, wrecking economies, and impoverishing the lives of people in poor countries – all to put fish on our plates. 
As two Midwesterners who moved to Puget Sound, we found out exactly how little we knew about seafood. After all, the fish we grew up on came out of lakes and streams. Today fishing industries around the world – both finfish and shellfish – are continuing to harvest as large a quantity of fish as possible, mostly without regard to the remaining fish stocks, the environmental effects of wild and farmed catch, and the careful labeling and identification of the product in restaurants and markets. And to make matters worse, we are facing the introduction of genetically engineered fish into the American food system. 
If you think watching a documentary about wild fish sounds boring, this film may well change your mind. It provides sobering insight into the inner workings of government agencies, and includes rare footage of the bureaucrats tasked with food and environmental safety. It reveals how the very agency tasked with protecting wild salmon is actually working to protect the commercial aquaculture industry, to devastating effect. 
When it was first issued, Tassajara Cooking became an overnight classic. Ed Brown’s recipes for cooking—for learning to appreciate all the steps involved in making a meal, from selecting the ingredients to serving the finished dish—struck a chord with people who care about food and nutrition. This groundbreaking book, in a completely redesigned format, is just as timely and relevant today, more than thirty years later. 
It’s Spring and we’ve got strawberries! Well, actually we have strawberry flowers! Fragaria vesca – the wild woodland strawberries native to the Pacific Northwest – are starting to bloom! Those lovely little white flowers (generally 1/2″ to 5/8″ across) begin blooming here in early to mid-April and soon produce tiny sweet fruit. Fruit that is often no bigger than the nail on your little finger. 
Washington State University Extension, Snohomish County, has field tests in place using locally produced compost (from Cedar Grove) as an experimental input on local farms. 
Scientist, author, and activist, Vandana Shiva presented the University of Victoria’s President’s Distinguished Lecture and Special Convocation address marking the school’s 50th anniversary. 
One of the most visible consequences of our society’s breakneck level of production and consumption is the increasing amount of land designated as landfill and other waste disposal and processing sites. Often located in marginal areas or adjacent to politically and economically dispossessed communities, these places are usually ignored by mainstream society, as is the garbage that fills them. Even with the greater awareness of the problems of waste disposal inspired by recycling programs and anti-littering ads, we would much rather take the garbage out than think about where its going. |
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