Snow on Oaks

As promised, we had several inches of snow on Thursday and I had a snow ball fight with my fellow students (MFI-ers) and a gorgeous walk in the woods today before leaving Lied Lodge and Nebraska to fly home.  This has been a phenomenal experience for me and an invaluable investment in my professional (and I would say personal) development.  I feel incredibly lucky.

The front entrance to Lied Lodge.

The Morton Oak at Arbor Day Farm.

Over the river and through the woods, from Lied Lodge to Arbor Day Farm we go!

One of many quotes in the lodge from J. Sterling Morton, founder of Arbor Day.

The lobby of Lied Lodge.  What an amazing place to spend a week!

Planning for Planting in Nebraska

This week I'm immersing myself in trees and tree people at the Municipal Forestry Institute at the Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City, Nebraska.  It's a week of intensive training on how to be a leader in the field of urban forestry.  It's pretty rad, and it comes at a perfect time for me in my career.  Plus, this place is gorgeous!  Check out the sunset pics I took yesterday.  It's supposed to snow pretty hard on Thursday, so I may have more photos of an entirely different nature at the end of the week.

Visit from Jaja

Jaja came to visit this weekend and we had a blast!  We went to an incredible workshop at the Center for Art in Wood, in Old City where we created a "cabinet of curiosities" out of a cigar box and with great instruction and inspiration from the staff at the center.  We created a portrait for the front, and of course I chose to draw my cats.  Yes, I'm a cat lady.  I really like how it turned out:

 

They had great supplies for us to use, and the boxes already had elaborately patterned paper around the edges that we could use as a jump off for inspiration.  Apparently cigar stores just smash these boxes and throw them in the trash, so it's easy to get them if you're there at the right time.  Which I will obviously be doing now that I know how beautiful these boxes are without any decoration at all.

 

We also went to a work day at Farm 51, which is run by my friends Andrew and Neal.  We destroyed some raised beds and harvested broccoli, then had a bonfire and ate delicious home made coffee cake and cookies.  Their house next door is gorgeous and another constant source of inspiration:

 

 

 

An amazing and inspirational weekend and a great way to start the new year!

Sprout Love

My parents gave me this book for Christmas (which I forgot I had asked for and was so excited to see!), "Fresh Food From Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting." Unfortunately it's more of a beginner's book, and it's more vague and less organized than I hoped it would be. Regardless, I did learn some things about how to maximize the light that I have on my porch (levels are your friend, I will be experimenting with those this spring). I also remembered that I love to sprout, and there are some good examples of different types of seeds to sprout and how to use them. I've got some broccoli seeds going in this jar right now, and some mung beans and soybeans waiting in the wings.

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew

Red Earth CSA report, last week of July.



Beans, cukes, taters, peppers, onions and lettuce. Mmm, mmm, good.

You're Green with Envy

CSA box from Red Earth Farm.
July 14th, 2009: Escarole, red leaf lettuce, zucchini, green beans, cucumbers.

I Heart Produce

It was meant to be more circular but on second viewing it seems to be a heart. Frisee endive, summer squash, new potatoes, beets, bulb fennel, and Italian flat leaf parsley.

As always, see the entire season of CSA boxes from Red Earth Farm on my Flickr page.

CSA - Now in color!

More colors are starting to creep into the CSA box. I have to pick them up late in the day though, usually around 8pm, so it's hard to get a shot in before it gets too dark. This week we have one dozen eggs, snap peas, zucchini, baby pac choi, radish, and swiss chard. I added this one to my Flickr set along with the others.

On Monday M and I are going to California for a week for my friends' wedding and other visits, so we'll miss the next box. But I've been fiddling around with "scheduling" posts, so there will most likely be something to read here while we're away.

I'd like to be/under the sea . . .

This weekend I got hijacked by the thunderstorms that poured rain all up and down the east coast. I went to my high school friend Emily's wedding in Florida and I ended up spending an unscheduled night in Atlanta on the way home. Ick. But it was worth it, sunburnt shoulders and all.



I recently got back in touch with Emily after a six year hiatus while we both went our separate ways to college and beyond. As fate would have it we reconnected last fall, a few days before she and her now-husband were going to be in Davis as part of their let's-find-a-new-place-to-live road trip! So they stayed with me in Davis and we found out that we still had a lot of things in common (probably more now than in high school). A love for food co-ops, bicycle transportation, and good beer to name a few.



So last weekend I was lucky enough to be present as Emily, my high school friend, got married. I am now officially in the next stage of life.



Emily and Nick's wedding was perfect in so many ways. They did all of the planning themselves, on a budget, with as many eco-friendly touches as possible. I'm not sure if this makes sense to anyone else, but to me it seemed that every single detail was so well thought out and deeply personalized that the event itself was truly a symbol of their partnership and commitment to each other.



The ceremony took place on the beach and the reception took place in the space underneath their rented beach house. The colors were recycled-paper-brown and yellow green, and everything had this fabulous upside down octopus on it. The party favors were screenprinted reusable grocery bags and the table cloths were screenprinted recycled paper. Each table had glass jars filled with sand, wild flowers, candles and crayons. And check it out, a cupcake tower!!



All of the friends stayed in neighboring beach houses and we all helped to set up the event (which was really awesome because it felt like more of a community undertaking that way). There were events to attend all weekend too so I actually got to spend some time with the bride and groom.

So I have a wedding to go to in June (plus two others in June that I can't go to because they are all on the same exact day) and another one in September. They are all friends' weddings and I'm sure all will be just as highly personalized as this one. It's overwhelming to be entering this phase of my life, but I'm such a sap that I'm actually looking forward to them.

Settling in, compost style

One of my favorite Christmas gifts this year (other than this, of course) is a book called "The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City" by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, writers of the blog Homegrown Evolution. It's an incredible primer on all things livegreen in the city, full of instructions on how to make things like self-watering plant containers that you can use to grow veggies on your fire escape. I used their instructions to make a new and improved worm bin for my basement ( I had to leave this old one behind in Davis). The new one is a double layered system that will make harvesting the compost a lot easier (it involves drilling holes in the tupperware to allow the worms to migrate between bins, tee hee!).



To get my worms I sent out a request on the American Community Gardening Association listserve and Dorene in Phoenixville let me come harvest about two pounds of red wigglers from her worm bin to start mine.



I also started an outdoor compost bin for yard scraps and veggie scraps. I don't have enough land to repeat the one I made in Davis so I just got a plastic garbage bin, drilled some holes for air flow and stuck it on my patio.



The worms can't handle the amount of compost we produce in the house (which as you can see is mostly egg shells and coffee grounds right now), so it's neccessary to have the other compost bin to handle the excess. It will take longer than the worm bin to become usable compost, but I can wait.



Other parts of the book that I love include the section on how to harvest and eat "feral edibles," weed veggies like dandelion leaves, nasturtium pods, sheep sorrel, and purslane, the section on how to make your own solar food dryer, and the section on raising chickens in the city (have I mentioned that I want some?). The attitude of the authors is that anyone can do these things, you don't need to have a lot of money or land. You can grow lettuce in a tub in your living room. You can brew beer in your basement. You can harvest greens for dinner from a vacant lot. The attitude is very "can-do" and inspiring. You will be reading more about this book here in the future, you can bet your sweet patoot.

Our new CSA!

We just joined a CSA for the 2009 season! Our new farm is called Red Earth Farm in Orwigsburg, PA and they have a drop off site in West Philly. We will be getting a partial share (6 items a week) which should be plenty for the three of us (me, M and Jonathan).


(picture by 427 from the CSA Flickr pool)

The difference between joining a CSA on the east versus the west coast is that the season here in Philly goes from June through November instead of all year long. So we made our investment for the whole growing season and we are now a partner in the process, having put our faith in the farmers and Mother Nature to give us a season full of yummy veggies.

Until June I am keeping my spirits up by looking at the pictures in this CSA Flickr pool.

Passivhaus Institut

Ooo, check out this article from the New York Times on furnace-less houses in Germany. Houses built with thick insulation and sealed windows and doors which allows inhabitants to use their own body heat and the heat given off by appliances to warm the house. Die Revolutionsleben!

Woolly Love

This past weekend a few friends and I biked out to the Yolo Wool Mill open house, pretty much the best thing, ever. I've been looking forward to the open house this year for a few weeks now.



This year we got there earlier than last year and we got to see the sheep shearing demonstrations. I took a few photos, as you can see. And it had nothing to do with the adorableness of the sheep-shearing-guy, no sirreee . . . (ahem, check out the second video, right at the end, ahem).





We got to see them shearing by hand and by machine, and learn about the pros and cons of each (and the pros and cons of shearing white versus black sheep; apparently you want to shear a black sheep when you're in front of an audience because they can't tell when you nick the sheep with your shears, ew).





Oooh, and these guys were there, too! Alpacas and something rarer that I can't remember. So cute and soft.





Check out those bangs, that's gonna be my new look. God, I love farm stuff. Pretty soon I'll be trying to figure out urban farm stuff. Speaking of which, read this wild article about urban farming in Toronto.

Presto . . . PESTO!

The summer edition of the salad bowl garden is in full swing, and something has to be done about the basil. We planted over five different types of basil back in May and they have been happily bolting for the past few weeks.

The only solution to the problem is to make pesto. Clearly.







So a while back Mags, MWolff, and I spent an evening harvesting and processing the majority of the crop, producing a total of 12 jars of pesto. I'm saving my jar of lemon pesto and freezing it for a winter treat. The others are pretty much gone already. Yuuuuuummmmmmm!