A Chesapeake Urban Farming
Summit, with Will Allen - Friday, June 18
In collaboration with key
partners across the Chesapeake area, Engaged Community Offshoots, Inc. is
organizing and hosting Sowing Seeds Here and Now!: A Chesapeake Area Urban
Farming Summit on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at the Henry A. Wallace Agricultural
Research Center in Beltsville.
The keynote speaker and
inspiration is Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power in Milwaukee, WI. Mr. Allen (pictured at right) is a pioneering urban farmer whose organization Growing Power
does exemplary work and who was named a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow in
2008. (He also just happened to grow up
on a farm near Rockville.)
The purpose of this summit
is to educate attendees about the significant benefits of urban agriculture,
showcase viable projects across the county, help identify specific policies and
ordinances required to encourage urban agriculture in our area, and to bring
together healthy food system advocates and practitioners throughout the
Chesapeake area, along with policy makers and agency directors, for future
collaboration.
A few tickets are still
available! For more information on Sowing Seeds Here and Now!, including ticket purchase, click here.
Update on the Campaign for
School Vegetable Gardens
In case you missed it,
last week we publicly released our open letter to Montgomery County
Public Schools Superintendent Jerry Weast, urging that he revoke the ban on
vegetable gardens in our county's schools.
We haven't heard back from
Superintendent Weast yet, but we have heard from several more organizations
that want to sign on to the letter, including the Sugarloaf Citizens'
Association, Crossroads Farmers Market, the Dickerson Community Association, Earth
Day Network (which is national but does work in our county) and the Montgomery
County Green Party. The letter will
remain open for organizational signatures through the summer as we continue to
build community support for a vigorous program of vegetable gardens in our
schools, so please forward this information to any Montgomery County groups, large
or small, who you believe might be interested.
You can read the letter here.
Also, please take a moment
to write a short letter to the editor to The Gazette, which published this article on our struggle for school vegetable gardens - we need every voice of
support we can get! Your letter should
be no more than 200 words long, and can be emailed to letters@gazette.net - thanks!
Even More on the Benefits of School
Vegetable Gardens!
We have previously
mentioned - and will continue to mention - First Lady Michelle Obama's strong
support for school vegetable gardens.
In this short article, National Gardening Association President Mike Metallo (pictured at right with Michelle Obama) recounts his day earlier this spring at the opening of the White House Kitchen Garden. As he notes,
"We talked about how much the First Lady believed in gardening as a tool
to engage children in a healthier lifestyle. She views gardening as an integral
part of her 'Let's Move' initiative to raise a healthier generation of kids."
I thought of this as I
sat in on the meeting of the Montgomery County Obesity Prevention Strategy
Group last week, and heard Acting MCPS Food Services Director Marla Caplon
explain the challenges they had getting school kids to try fresh vegetables
such as broccoli. Yet there is a simple
and profound answer for this - school vegetable gardens. In fact, the USDA's newly released report on Local Food
Systems points to a recent study by McAleese
and Rankin (2007), which found that "children exposed to a garden-based
education curriculum reported greater fruit and vegetable consumption, even
though no effort was made to improve the availability of local foods at the
schools."
(This citation can be
found on page 46 of 87 of this long but excellent study, which you can see here. Thanks to MVGer Kristina for plucking out
this gem for us!)
The NGA article also has
this excellent chart on the benefits of school gardens. As President
Metallo concludes, "is there any greater satisfaction - or 'greener'
activity - a child can experience than smelling a flower from his or her own
garden, plucking a carrot from the ground, or digging new potatoes from warm
soil? What can make parents happier than hearing their child tell them they want
chard for dinner?"
And hey - when we finally win the fight for school
vegetable gardens here in Montgomery County, maybe we can get USDA Secretary
Tom Vilsack to come do a cheer for broccoli for us too!
How to Prune and Stake
Tomatoes
Like many of you, I have
for the past few years used those cylindrical metal cages to hold up my
tomatoes. It's easy as pie, the plants
grow as bushy as they want, and for the most part it works just fine.
When conditions turn bad
though, tomato cages can be problematic, specifically because of the
bushiness of caged plants. Many tomato
diseases, such as the deadly late blight, grow and are transmitted most readily
when the plants are wet, and the leaves of bushy caged plants stay wetter
longer, since they block out both sun and wind.
(Yet another reason why you should avoid wetting the plant's leaves when
watering them.)
Like many commercial
growers, a lot of home gardeners are starting to stake up their tomatoes in a
different way. The key thing to remember
is that tomatoes are vining plants like beans or cukes, except that they don't
attach themselves as they grow. But if you
give them something to grow on and tie them loosely as they go, a healthy
tomato plant will grow up a mighty tall pole - or even a handing string. And if you grow them this way, and prune
accordingly, not only do you reduce the incidence of disease, you can also
produce more tomatoes because you can plant them closer together.
This four minute video from Fine Gardening does an excellent job of explaining how to grow and prune tomatoes in this fashion. And while you
may not want or be able to build a tomato structure like you'll see here, it's
easy enough to do something similar with materials you can find at hardware
stores, lumber yards, etc. (For a "pros and cons" listing of different staking methods, click here.) I'm going to
try one of these in combination with the cages this year - check it out!
"Dirty Dozen"
Produce Carries More Pesticides
As Dr. Sanjay Gupta notes
in a recent installment of CNN's "Toxic America" series, if you eat
the recommended daily amounts of fresh fruits and vegetable, you are likely
consuming as many as 10 different pesticides each day. Yummy, huh?
As a result, the
Environmental Working Group has produced the "Dirty Dozen," a list of
fruits and vegetables that carry an extra load of pesticides, even after
washing, and that you should buy organic whenever you can. Fortunately, many of these are ones you can
easily grow yourself or buy from local organic producers, including lettuce,
spinach, strawberries and potatoes.
While the government says
- naturally - that consuming pesticides in low amounts doesn't harm you, some
studies show a link between pesticides and cancer, hyperactivity, and nervous
system disorders, while others suggest exposure could weaken immune systems.
Interestingly, there is
relatively little data from long-term studies about the effects of eating food
sprayed with pesticides. But as EWG's Amy Rosenthal wisely notes, "Pesticides
are designed to kill things. Why wait for 20 years to discover they are bad for
us?"
Some doctors also warn
that children's growing brains are the most vulnerable to
pesticides in food. "A kid's brain goes through
extraordinary development, and if pesticides get into the brain, it can cause
damage," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, chairman of the department of
preventive medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
Does this sound like
anything you want to eat, or feed your children? Click here for the "Dirty Dozen" and "Clean Fifteen" lists, and to watch the video segment with Dr. Gupta.
To go straight to the
source, click here to receive EWG's 2010 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides, and hear a few more words of advice from Dr. Andrew Weil.
And don't forget - to make
sure it's clean food, buy locally whenever possible, or grow it yourself!
Visit Maryland's Largest
Organic Vegetable Farm
And while we're on
organics, why not take a tour of One Straw Farm, Maryland's largest organic
vegetable farm?
While it's a bit of a haul
(the farm is above Baltimore), this "Field Day" sponsored by Future
Harvest will be an excellent way to see organic farming done right, and on a
large scale. Tended by Drew and Joan Norman since 1985, One Straw Farm supplies
families, restaurants and wholesalers with certified-organic produce. Drew will describe the challenges of organic
growing as you tour the fields, hoop houses, and warehousing facility, while Joan
will describe the diversified marketing approach they've adopted, selling at
farmers' markets, restaurants, and grocery stores, and through her CSA.
Sounds like an awesome
trip to me! For more information, and to purchase tickets through Future Harvest, click here.
That's it for
this week! Please help
support Montgomery Victory Gardens - click here to make a 100%
tax-deductible contribution online!
And don't forget to
send us your feedback and ideas for stories or local food events we can promote,
by emailing us at info@montgomeryvictorygardens.org.
Yours for clean, organic eating in 2010,Gordon Clark,
Project Director
Montgomery Victory Gardens