In this update:

* February Food Gardening Series at Brookside Garden
* Ready, Set, Grow! - Saturday, Feb. 20
* Nagging You About Seeds
* DC  Food Blogger Ed Bruske on Kojo Nnamdi Show
* Facing Food Insecurity

* Ten Misconceptions About Soil
* Food, Inc. Nominated for an Academy Award!

February Food Gardening Series at Brookside Garden

Our friends at the Montgomery County Parks Department and Brookside Gardens in Wheaton are joining together to launch a great series of FREE gardening lectures for the month of February, all starring local experts on their subject. All the presentations take place from 10-11:30am, and seating is first come first served, so don't be late!

Saturday, February 13 - Patrick Harwood, compost manager for Montgomery Parks will be giving a free talk on the 'Benefits of Compost and Compost Teas". He will focus on the importance of compost in your vegetable garden and even more importantly how to build your own home compost tea brewer.

Saturday, February 20 - Mike Raupp from the University of Maryland will be giving a talk on 'Common Pests and Controls for the Vegetable Gardener," focusing on identification and organic controls of those pests.

Sunday, February 28 - Local gardening expert and author Cindy Brown will give a presentation on "How Does Your Garden Grow?" Specializing on vegetable gardens, Cindy will talk about planting schedules, varieties, and how to grow from seeds in the mid-Atlantic area.[NOTE - This talk has been rescheduled from its original February 6 date due to the snow storm, and will be held 1-2:30pm.]

Please join Montgomery Victory Gardens at one or all of these great events! For more information and directions to Brookside Gardens, click here.

 

Ready, Set, Grow! - Saturday, Feb. 20

Such an abundance of riches we have here in Montgomery County, that you have to choose between two excellent gardening classes on the same day!

For a full day (8:30 am - 2:45 pm) intensive food gardening class with the  Montgomery County Master Gardeners' "Grow It, Eat It" program, check out Ready, Set, Grow!, to be held at the County Extension office in Derwood (just outside of Gaithersburg). The $45 fee includes lunch, all materials, and a day of expert training. Choose from sessions including Basic Vegetable Gardening, Secrets to Vegetable Gardening Success, and Edible Flowers.

For more information on Ready, Set, Grow!, click here. But do it soon - the registration deadline is February 10th!

Nagging You About Seeds

Have you ordered your seeds yet?? There, consider yourself nagged.

And what could be a better time to look through your seed catalogs or browse online than the snowy, snowy shut-in weekend we're about to get? Here is the previous MVG Update with links to some of the best seed companies in the area.

For those that have been growing for many years, do you have particularly good luck growing one variety vs. another of eggplant, cucumber or squash, or any other edible? Let us know, we'd love to share the information with our readers in a future update!

 

DC  Food Blogger Ed Bruske on Kojo Nnamdi Show

"Foodie" blogs often focus on the culture of high-end restaurants and celebrity chefs. But Ed Bruske, a former journalist who now runs an "urban farm" in Washington, D.C., is using the blogosphere to spotlight everyday issues confronting a hungry city. He joins Kojo to explore local food politics, from public school kitchens to to local farmer's markets.

In case you missed this great interview on the Kojo Nnamdi Show this past Wednesday, you can listen to it here. (Thanks to MVGer Ira for tipping us on this!)

Ed is the Co-Founder of DC Urban Gardeners and a Certified Master Gardener. While we like here at MVG to focus obsessively on our county, Ed's DC-focused blog The Slow Cook is nonetheless a highly recommended read!

 

Facing Food Insecurity

We're going to hear the term "food insecurity" a lot in 2010, and for good reason. Converging forces of climate change, market speculation and pressure from biofuels already caused worldwide food shortages (and riots) in 2008, and that was before the current economic downtown - one that has strectched local food pantries around the country to their limit. Food insecurity is not just a developing world issue, and if you don't think you or your community will be affected by it in the coming years, well... you might want to think again.

Fortunately, this is something we can do something about. (Hey, it's the reason Montgomery Victory Gardens was started!) Courtesy of The Growing Edge, here is a short opinion piece about facing food insecurity. Even though it's from Sustainable Gardening Australia (SGA), it does, as Tom Alexander of The Growing Edge notes, have relevance for anywhere and everywhere in the world.

Click here to read SGA's "Food Security - Your Mission, If You Choose To Accept it"

And for Tom's blog on Feeding America's brand new "Hunger in America 2010" report, click here.

Ten Misconceptions About Soil

Our civilazation depends on the top 12 inches of soil around the planet, yet we know less about it than we do about the surface of the moon.

For a quick, helpful guide of things we need to understand about soil, check out Ten Misconcpetions About Soil.

 

Finally, we're delighted to announce that the documentary Food, Inc. has been nominated for an Academy Award! While containing an unfortunate "greenwashing" of Walmart, this otherwise bracing critique of industrial agriculture is a highly-informative must see, and available on DVD. Rent it if you haven't seen it already!

That's it for this week, friends! Don't forget to send us your feedback, as well as ideas for stories or local food events we can promote, by emailing us at info@montgomeryvictorygardens.org.

Yours in ordering those 2010 seeds this weekend,

Gordon Clark,
Project Director
Montgomery Victory Gardens