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KGI News: September 2007
Contents:
Gardening: -Seeing October in a new light
Food and Cooking: -Interview with food writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins -Macaroni from the Island of Ischia -Southern Italian mountain minestrone -Video: Cleaning and preparing leeks -Chocolate zucchini cake recipe -Vegetables that cut to the quick
Food and Health: -Fruits and vegetables growing bigger, not better -Whither the Mediterranean Diet?
News from Abroad: -Food fight (of the red and juicy sort)
Food systems change: -Global food crisis looms as climate change and population growth strip fertile land -Food fight (of the political sort) -James Howard Kunstler on relocalizing the food system -Scientists point to cause of bee colony collapse
KGI News: -Kitchen Garden Day 2007 video
KGI Leftovers:
Blogs worth watching:
Fall Funding Campaign Off to an Orange Start!
Thanks to all who have chipped in early for our fall membership drive. We're off to a solid start and hope many new folks will join in. As you will read from one of the articles linked above, we will face formidable challenges in meeting the nutritional requirements of a growing world population over the course of the next century. Kitchen gardens will have to play an important role. Your support helps us promote their many benefits and bring new people into the garden.
Search well, do good
There is a search engine called "Good Search" that uses the same search engine as Yahoo and yields the same results. The difference is that every time you search for something with Good Search as opposed to Google or Yahoo, you earn 1 penny for a nonprofit organization of your choice. Click here to learn how you can help KGI in this painless, pennyless way.
Pasta machines and pizza peels? Yes, we got 'em in our E-store
If you can't buy what you want from your local kitchen supply store, then please consider buying through us. 6% of your purchase goes to supporting our work and it doesn't cost you a cent more than if you were to buy direct from Amazon. Check out our webstore and have a poke around.
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Dear Kitchen Gardener,
While it'd be nice to bask in the warm glow of those harvests, October is too busy a gardening month to kick back. In Maine, there's pesto and sauerkraut to be made, squash to be cured, apples to be picked, and tomatoes to be canned or frozen. October also offers some of the crispest, best-tasting salads of the year just ready to be cut, rinsed, and spun. Garlic traditionally goes in the ground on or around Columbus Day, but that day seems to be slipping back a week or two in our brave new, globally-warmed world.
October's also a month for adding new life to tired beds through the addition of compost. For those of you who don't have a heaping pile of chocolate cake-like compost to dig into, autumn's a great time, the best time in fact, to start a new pile using all those vines and stems that have stopped delivering, fallen leaves, and the lush, nitrogen-rich grass clippings that suburban lawns so effortlessly produce in the fall.
The fall is also the best time for planning and starting new garden projects. Last week, I paid a visit to the French School of Maine to help them identify a site for a new "potager". Monsieur le Directeur and a group of professeurs directed me to a rolling, field available for the school's use just a three minute's walk from the school. I felt a bit envious glancing over the grassy expanse, doing quick math in my head at all the food that such a large plot could generate. While the field was gorgeous and had very tall weeds (usually a reliable sign of soil fertility), I urged them to scope out a spot closer to the school. What holds for home gardens holds for school gardens too: the closer to the kitchen, the better.
We ultimately chose to site the new garden in a high profile and high traffic spot right in front of the school. Not only is it the best spot in terms of sunlight and promixity, but it sends a strong message that health and good food are high on the school's agenda. Once they've got their potager dug and their systems in place, they can consider turning the larger piece of land into a true farm capable of supplying their cafeteria.
This experience and some others I've been a part of recently have got me thinking about where our schools' priorities are now and perhaps ought to be. A few years back, Maine boasted being the first state to prepare its children for the "information age" by providing every 7th and 8th grade student and teacher with a laptop computer. Several years into the program, it's amazing to see how comfortable and skilled Maine's young people have become with this important tool.
This, of course, got me pondering new "firsts" for Maine and other forward-looking states or regions, in the US or abroad. Which state or region will be the first to prepare its students for the coming "ecology age" by mandating that every primary or intermediate school in its area have an organic kitchen garden and age-appropriate garden curriculum? Surely, there is no better way to teach health and healthy eating than to engage young people in the process of heathy food production.
As with the laptop initative, such an idea would surely encounter resistance, but what revolutionary idea hasn't?
Wishing you a delicious October,
PS: It's still not too late to win your chance at over $1000 in prizes through our Grow-Off Show-Off Contest, but the clock is ticking. As an added bonus, the first 50 entries automatically win a free subscription to Mother Earth News. Deadline for entries is November 1st. Note sure what you can enter, then see here.
Thoughts on food and happiness:
“It is not really an
exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically,
where garlic is used in cooking.” “In general, I think,
human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much
in love or very alone.”
“The keynote to happiness
within the four walls that make any home is plain: wholesome, well
cooked food, attractively served.”
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