Seeing the Trees and the Forest January 13, 2008

This is part two in my response to comments made on the post “Making Eating Public.” The first post looked at reframing the idea of guerrilla gardening to consider ways of taking advantage of what already exists in the community around us through “guerrilla harvesting” or urban fruit gleaning.

The second point Dave pondered in his comments was about how the Community Supported Agriculture model might be applied to orchards. I have always dreamed of eventually having a small orchard and so this idea was really intriguing to me.

Guerrilla Harvesting January 8, 2008

In my recent post “Making Eating Public” I talked about the potential shift that we might see if we made our eating, our growing, and our food choices and values more public. I mused about guerrilla gardening and other urban agriculture projects. In a comment on that post, my friend Dave suggested two ideas that had not occurred to me previously but are worth considering further. In this post I’ll cover the first.

Noting that guerrilla gardening can be seen as confrontational or even destructive by other community members, Dave suggested we think about what it might be like to do more “guerrilla harvesting.”

All That’s Left Behind January 6, 2008

This was a banner day. Today’s nearly 50 degree temps reminded me of this one day last summer.

We made a huge batch of salsa, and with the left over tomato juice that we drained off as the salsa was cooking we made a wonderful gazpacho. The salsa included tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, onions, corn, jalapeño peppers and Hungarian wax peppers, and cilantro, all from the farm (we also included garlic, not from the farm). For the gazpacho we also added green bell peppers and cucumber.

Then we made refrigerator pickles from a combination of cucumbers and lemon cucumbers (small round yellow cucumbers). The pickles had cucumbers and parsley or dill (depending on the batch) from the farm and garlic (again, not from the farm).