Good Food is Everybody's Business
Truck Farm tells the story of a new generation of quirky urban farmers. Using green roof technology and heirloom seeds, filmmaker Ian Cheney (KING CORN, THE CITY DARK) plants a vegetable garden on the only land he’s got: his Granddad’s old pickup.
It’s been a cool, late spring here in Puget Sound, which means there’s still time to plant a garden. In fact, we’ve just gotten the tomatoes we bought at the Seattle Tilth Edible Plant Sale in the ground! Buying starts and seeds from local growers and at local sales ensures that you get plants that are climate-appropriate. There are some plants that just don’t do well in our short summers!
My favorite berry is black mulberry, because it is so delicious, and such a rare treat to eat in Seattle. I have requested that a black mulberry tree be planted on my grave.
Imagine growing vegetables that require just about the same amount of care as the flowers in your perennial beds and borders–no annual tilling and planting. They thrive and produce abundant and nutritious crops throughout the season. It sounds too good to be true.
Are you a seed saver and/or food grower? A new, one-person seed company has just been announced and it offers some fascinating items. The company is called Fertile Valley Seeds and it is Carol Deppe’s way of offering her innovative seed breeding work to gardeners, especially those in the Northwest. Her crop breeding techniques are in the public domain, rather than owned by a profit-making corporation
The San Francisco Public Library is launching a pilot program at the Potrero Branch where residents can “check out” seeds, borrow books, tap into databases, and find other information sources about urban gardening. The process is simple: residents choose from a list of vegetable seeds available in the Seed Library collection, borrow them, and plant their seeds. After they have harvested their crops, they save the seeds from the heartiest and healthiest of their harvest and return the seeds to the same branch.
