Kale & Collard Seedlings
It’s been a busy week! The homemade seed-starting shelf has been well used, plus a few brave sugar-snap pea, spinach and kale seedlings are already out in the garden. The cute baby kale and collards above are just waiting to get a bit bigger and for it to stop raining long enough to get them in the ground. Strawberries went into the ‘row of shame’ this week, more about that later…
I previewed a lovely, lovely movie for Dig In! Fayetteville’s 1st Food & Farming Filmfest coming up on Saturday, March 19th. “Ingredients” is a celebration of fresh, local, organic food and the creative farmers and chefs who bring it to us in the most delicious fashion! I made the mistake of watching the film on an empty stomach and had a lot of trouble with drooling and stomach growling! It’s really inspiring and beautiful on many levels… Highly recommend! And I love envisioning how supporting our local farmers and restaurants who make the extra effort to use local products will create an even more vibrant foodie community in Fayetteville! You can check out the preview here:
—A Larrapin Garden www.larrapin.us
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5 Comments
reachable, but ambitious goals… real numbers to strive towards and hit. That sounds smart….
That video preview is very nice, but doesn’t it get a little old hearing from people in Portland or Seattle about local food systems? They have AMAZING soil and GREAT weather. Northwest Arkansas has some of the worst soils imaginable for vegetable agriculture. And though our winters are mild, our summers get so hot so fast that we have little time in the spring for a nice round of spring greens, peas, or brussel sprouts. And we aren’t far enough north to enjoy the lengthy summer days.
I think we have to be pragmatic about the feasibility of local food systems. We don’t have much working FOR us in NWA except perhaps quite a bit of open land (but much of it not flat), lot’s of deciduous leaf litter, and a heck of a lot of chicken poop. It seems to me that a slightly expanded view of what “local” agriculture could be might be in order.
NWA used to grow a heck of a lot of apples in this are. With our thin soils, it seems that we should focus a bit more on tree crops like apples, peaches, and nuts. Large scale or even widespread small scale organic, local agriculture seems to be a bit resource intensive because of the natural conditions going against it in NWA. Of course I still love my vegetable garden!!!
What about the local chicken industry? We are reasonably close to large corn growing areas and there is lots of local chickens being produced. If we wanted to locavores, wouldn’t we by geographic circumstance be carnivores? Same goes for beef….it’s a growing industry in NWA because there is just enough grass on hillsides that aren’t of use to traditional agriculture. Of course they are still being fed corn as well, but it does seem like our local diet is a bit meat heavy.
It’s just too simple for the folks living in an Eden like Portland to tell the rest of the United States about food production.
Hey Casey! I totally agree that we are in a very different bioregion-situation than Portland (not to mention a very different political demographic). But that’s not to say we can’t learn some stuff from the systems they’ve explored…even though our raw ingredients would look very different. (And I totally agree Portlanders can get *really* annoying at times….teacher’s pets! haha!) Judging from the tables at our farmers markets…and from the contents of my freezer right now, there is lots of stuff that will grow here quite well.* (*lordwillinandthecreekdontrise)
Chef Dan Barber in a great podcast on this topic makes the same observation as you – that in some bioregions, eating meat can make much more sense than just grains in terms of local feasibility and resource use. I don’t think we have to worry about NWA suddenly going locavore — and that’s NOT what this filmfest is about. It would be a REVOLUTIONARY change for our local food systems and economy if folks would just put 10-20% of their food dollars into local food. And I believe that’s totally do-able as far as local food systems. That’s the level of change I’d be thrilled to see start happening. Can’t wait to get to talk to you on Saturday — great comments and observations here. Thanks so much!
Stephanie, so good to hear from you! CSAs rock. Best of both worlds. Then you get to concentrate on cooking and eating! Are you guys too busy with work to grow much?
Even though we don’t plan to put in many crops this year, your blog is getting me so excited about the spring and all of the bounty to come … from my CSA! Yay fresh, local food!