Good Food is Everybody's Business
Food varieties extinction is happening all over the world—and it’s happening fast. In the United States an estimated 90 percent of our historic fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. Of the 7,000 apple varieties that were grown in the 1800s, fewer than a hundred remain.
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!
Devon Peña – teacher, farmer, anthropologist – talks about food sovereignty and producer ethics. He is part of a co-op of 52 farmers in the San Luis Valley of Colorado who raise grass-fed beef and heritage corn and beans.
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
Fatou Batta, Co-Coordinator for West Africa from Groundswell International, spoke recently in Seattle about the causes of food insecurity in Africa, particularly in Burkina Faso; the role of rural women in agricultural production and food security; the challenges rural women face; and some of the solutions they have developed.
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.
If you garden in the northern US or southern Canada, there is still time to grow your own garden “starts” from seed. The folks at …
Marra Farm in Seattle’s South Park, an urban farm that grows food for the hungry, is caught in a moral dilemma. Should they use seeds donated from companies who also sell Monsanto varieties? Martha Baskin, Green Acre Radio, visits the farm and explores the issue.
