Dear Kitchen Gardener,

My name is David Buchanan and I'm a KGI member as well as a member of its board.  Roger has been busy building our new community site the past few weeks and asked me if I'd be willing to help out by writing this month's newsletter. 

Despite my love of winter in New England, this past month I traded my snow shovel for a pickax and flew from Portland, Maine to the delta grasslands of Buenos Aires, Argentina. For the past three weeks I’ve been working with two schools on the outskirts of the city to design and build kitchen gardens funded through KGI's mini-grants program.

How much can I manage in a short time frame? I’ve focused most of my energy on a new school called La Providencia, located in a shantytown neighborhood in the town of Garin. Currently they squeeze 100 students into a modest bungalow with one barely functional bathroom. The teachers want a large kitchen garden for teaching purposes and to provide fresh vegetables for school lunches. They have a good growing site, but no other resources: no tools, hoses, watering cans, wheelbarrows, seeds, or money. Nothing but a couple of garden spades whose flat edges aren’t sharp enough to cut into the hard ground.

I threw myself into this with the understanding that nothing would likely go as planned. So it’s been no great surprise that from the day of my arrival, when the man who promised to make all my arrangements decided he had other things to do, I’ve been winging this. One day I find myself visiting farm implement dealers in a ’69 Ford with no air conditioning (not exactly a luxury when the temperature hits 103 degrees), and the next I’m sitting at a kitchen table in a colonial-era bungalow, drafting garden designs.

The people here have been wonderful. Warm, open, friendly, and concerned about my safety. Some have gone completely out of their way to help me, especially KGI member Vicky Sigwald and her husband Pablo, who’ve made this trip possible. It was especially gratifying to break ground last week with a group of a dozen students, parents, teachers and friends. With the addition of several cubic meters of compost and more pick and shovel work, we’ve turned roughly 1000 square feet of trash-filled, compacted soil into raised planting beds. Tomorrow we’ll return to plant vegetables and perennial herbs.

These gardens will continue to be worked by hand, so I wasn’t constrained by the rototiller to design square grids. The layout for one school includes a sort of cloverleaf with integrated plantings of herbs, flowers, berries, and fruit trees, and the other uses a pergola to join two oblique ovals. Everyone seems happy with the results and I think the designs will function well for access with large student groups. I’ll leave behind construction drawings and stay in touch to provide ongoing advice.

Here in Vicky and Pablo’s neighborhood of San Isidro, an elderly Italian man used to harvest fruits and berries from his garden every morning to make gelato for his shop. I believe that to be successful the local food movement needs to rediscover this kind of personal connection with the soil. Sometimes getting started can be as simple as providing tools, seeds and information. For me this trip creates a model for ongoing garden design and construction, and I intend to travel more in the future to turn neglected ground into gardens.

Thank you for supporting KGI and for helping kitchen gardens to flourish in your community.  Together, we're making a difference.

David Buchanan

PS: For more details about my trip and photos, please visit my website www.eatbydesign.org and go to the “travel” section.

About our new online community:  Here are some of the things you can do with our new online features: create your own profile page and blog, participate in a discussion, start up your own group (e.g. focusing on a particular issue or geographic area), share recipes and gardening tips, and meet kitchen gardeners from other part of the world.  Check it out: http://my.kitchengardeners.org

Posted by at 6:50 PM | Permalink

Chimichurri is Argentina's national condiment and a requirement for the famous Argentine asado or barbecue. The recipe for chimichurri that follows is only one of many, but it is typical of those you will find in the Pampas. Some locals use it as a salad dressing as well. It can be served with any broiled or roasted meat or poultry.

Ingredients:
1 cup (packed) fresh Italian parsley
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup (packed) fresh cilantro
2 garlic cloves, peeled
3/4 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt

Procedure:
Puree all ingredients in processor. Transfer to bowl. (Can be made 2 hours ahead. Cover and let stand at room temperature.)

Recipe source: Epicurious.com
Photo credit: Gabo. Used with permission.

Posted by at 7:08 PM | Permalink

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, January 17, 2007 in The Washington Post

You could say 2007 was the year of the "locavore," a word coined by California food activist Jessica Prentice to describe people who eat food that is locally grown. While the New Oxford American Dictionary was declaring "locavore" the Word of the Year, shoppers were scurrying about in search of onions grown in nearby fields, beef grazed on local pastures, chickens who had come home to roost.

This kind of foraging can take a bit more effort and time. Farm stands, farmers markets and subscription farms make the job easier but are not always close at hand and may not be open for business at the instant you need a pound of fingerling potatoes or a ripe melon. Many of the passionately locavoracious who have followed this trend find that it leads inevitably to their back yards. What could be more local than your own vegetable garden, berry patch or orchard? Once these are established, the time spent tending them is often no more than that spent scouring the county for arugula or probing a produce manager about where she gets her mache.

For others, planting a garden is too daunting a step. "I would love to have one," a would-be yardavore will lament, "but I have a full-time job." Or kids. Or arthritis. So here's a solution: Hire somebody to install one for you and return weekly to tend it. If you're a busy person, you may already employ a cleaning service, lawn service or a landscaper. Why not a foodscaper? It's another expense, but one that pays for itself at least in part by putting food on the table, and the freshest possible food at that.

Landscapers are often asked to put in food gardens for customers. I used to do this once upon a time, and I found that instant veggie plots and apple trees brought their owners more pleasure than they got from yew hedges and junipers. In fact, if I were to nominate the job opportunity of 2008, it would be a specialty in implementing home food gardens. Call it foodscaping if you like, but I guarantee that if the practice takes hold, the apt word will emerge.

I've noticed that even a kitchen garden created by others soon invites more intimate contact. The owners get a kick out of picking beans and peppers. So do their kids, who now eat more vegetables than before. ("These are our carrots!") Weary commuters might even unwind for an hour after work by pulling some weeds, thinning the spinach or learning how to prune a tomato vine. The fact that professional backup is available makes the project less of a burden and provides a comforting safety net against neglect. Then again, the garden might draw you in completely until you have made it your own. But that's skipping ahead to 2009.

Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.

Posted by at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)