The compost hunt is on

The compost hunt is on. The county sites are stocked, but will go quick. Community gardens are jostling for a complimentary delivery. Residents all over are looking at their woeful soils thinking, "I need some compost". Yes you do!

This is a perfect segue to highlight the compost bin sale that is happening now. Its also a great opportunity to reveal that the Hamline Midway Environment Group is hot on composting too, so much so they are working on a compost Google map much like the original community compost map of Philadelphia.

In this vein, I want to share a post written by Kirsten Saylor of Gardening Matters. It appears they have noticed the compost cries too.

"It's the time of year (spring), when folks start asking us about how to get some compost for their garden. This question comes up every year on the listserve. I recommend people checking out the COMGAR archives (search on keyword "compost") for additional advice and insight, but basically here's my quick recommendation...

If you're a community garden in Minneapolis or Ramsey County, there's instructions for compost on www.gardeningmatters.org. If you're a community garden not within Minneapolis and Ramsey County, then contact your city or county to see if they have any resources or policies about providing free or deeply discounted compost to community gardens.

If you're private/home garden, then here are some options for you...
1) ask neighbors if they have more compost than they can use. You may be surprised.
2) www.yardstogardens.org just advertised that they are trying to help people with surplus compost connect with those that need it.
3) make your own -- worms or a bin out back -- and I don't mean to be flippant, gardeners need to be on the vanguard of keeping valuable nutrients in their "ecosystem" and not letting any of that good compostable stuff get away and stuck in a landfill or burned for energy. If not gardeners, then who will?"

Happy Planting! Kirsten

Occurring now are two notable trends nationwide - 1) a rabid and valuable desire to grow-your-own food which requires good soil, and 2) a needy trash system which is overburdened with food waste. Compost intersects both of of these trends, each satisfying the other.

Community Garden Spring Resource Fair on Sat., March 27

This year's line-up is shaping up to be one of the most exciting Resource Fairs to date. Ashley Atkinson from Greening of Detroit is coming! She is a very respected community organizer, with expertise in community gardening and urban agriculture. Ashley will share her story and experiences in the keynote speech kicking off the Fair, and then presenting at two workshops later in the day.

Ashley is part of a collaborative that has created an inspiring real-life example of how to enhance neighborhood-based food production and make our communities more resilient and our community gardens more sustainable. Detroit's Cluster Networks have inspired Twin Cities community gardeners to think about a metro area where there is strong support for gardening at the neighborhood level-

* where community gardens are at the core of this community-based food system...
* where flower gardens are crucial to the livability of our communities and food production system -- we're all in it together!
* where neighbors are creating an infrastructure and network so that everyone interested in participating in a community food system can do so...
* where there is ongoing support and learning to improve how we garden for the yummiest yields while improving the health of environment at the same time.

But that's not all -- strong workshops, diverse exhibitors -- learn about what's happening in Minneapolis and St. Paul are enhancing local foods, hear what Extension is up to and pick up a Urban Soils Guide.

You can download and print the flyer at www.gardeningmatters.org//Events/2010Fair/SRF2010.pdf


The Sixth Annual Community Garden Spring Resource Fair
Saturday March 27th, 2010
9:00 am – 4:00 pm
Sabathani Community Center, 310 East 38th St, Minneapolis
Free Parking $5 Suggested Donation at Door

Keynote Ashley Atkinson, Director of Project Development and Urban Agriculture, The Greening of Detroit: How Detroit Works Together to Strengthen Neighborhood-Based Food Production. Twelve workshops, activities for the kids, and engaging educational displays throughout the day! Details and directions at http://comgar.blogspot.com/p/community-garden-spring-resource-fair.html or call Gardening Matters at 612-492-8964.

Hamline SPROUTS and Frances Moore Lappé: Hunger and the Food System

The season of learning has begun now that the gardens are near buttoned up. Reading, attending lectures, conferences, meeting with other folks with good ideas are thankfully re-appearing on the calendar.

This week, a Panel Discussion about Hunger and the Food System was put on by Hamline University's SPROUTS. The conversation was meaty and the panelists from IATP, Gardening Matters, HECUA, and MN Food & Justice did a fine job of connecting climate change, cultural barriers, poor quality food, wasted food, hunger and the need for community based change.

The delivery person spotted my hens and he asked, "Are the worth it?". He meant are the costs of hens and their upkeep really less than store bought eggs? I shared with him that backyard chickens are not just about getting eggs. Just as valuable is their ability to consume most of the food waste our 4-person household creates, and then make significant nutrient contributions to our urban soils via composting. All very true, however, what I did not bring up was that my homegrown eggs do not have any of the hidden costs which industrial food prices ignore. In the case of factory farmed eggs, the hidden costs include environmental, public health and societal hidden costs which never appear into their retail price. For example, how much of the price of factory farmed eggs does the farmer see? The SPROUT panel discussed that in the case of our population in hunger, calories-for-the-sake-of-calories may fill empty stomachs, but the long term chronic disease encouraged by America's cheap diet is certainly wrought with further hidden costs.

SPROUT-ites also heard that food waste reduction is a goal worth obtaining in the efforts to reduce hunger. As Addie Broyles of the Austin American-Statesman reveals, 25-50% of the food produced in this country goes to waste! Food that is produced, transported, and gotten to a market, home refrigerator or restaurant and then wastefully allowed to go bad or tossed because it doesn't meet some standard. There are known interventions to change this. It does not require sophisticated knowledge to implement smart purchasing, gleaning, or local foods initiatives. When the food waste percentage is seriously attacked, our hunger concerns will lessen, and so will greenhouse gases emitted from food buried landfills.

Frances Moore Lappé hit this message well on the Friday evening session of the Wisdom Ways Soul Conference, It's all tied together-- the choices we make in our dinner table ripple into the our food system and directly influence those around us.

August is National Community Garden Awareness Month and 4th Annual Parade of Community Gardens

The 4th Annual Parade of Community Gardens!!
August 22nd - 10:00am to 2:00pm

There is a great group of community gardens participating this year on the Parade, all are bringing attention to & celebrating in these vital greenspaces in our communities! Forty community gardens from across the Twin Cities & greater Minnesota open their gardens to the public. Experience the unique and individual gardening efforts happening around the state. Gardens will feature a variety of attractions including music, cool treats, a goat, heirloom tomato festival, a beehive and more! Here are a couple profiles:

• At the Accord Community Garden in SE Como Minneapolis, visitors will find viola music, birthday cake and ice cream along with beautiful native plants under a one-of-a-kind sculpture.

• At the Midway Greenspirit Garden in the Midway, the feature will be the bees! Community beekeepers will be on hand to describe the symbiosis of having a hive in a community garden and what it entails.

The event is a free & self-guided tour, rain or shine. Details and brochure maps, in English & English/Spanish, can be found at www.gardeningmatters.org or call Gardening Matters at 612-492-8964.

Find more information on National Community Garden Awareness Month at OBSNews.com.

Buzzing at the Midway Greenspirit Garden

An urban beehive has come to the Midway neighborhood, just recently installed at the Midway Greenspirit Garden. A recent Saturday, the Mighty Midway 4H group got their own tour of the bees! It was fascinating! Even the couple of kids who were truly afraid were soothed by the calmness of beekeeper Virginia and the bees themselves. We learned that these bees may go up to 5 miles away to find nectar. That means that we could see Greenspirit's bees in our backyards!

The garden was able to install this beehive with a grant from Gardening Matters. Bees are integral to pollinating crops, for veggie gardens, and in the case of Greenspirit, a future orchard! Diane, one of the beekeepers/community gardeners, had this to say about the garden's new flying friends:

"With little to no fanfare, members of the Bee Team from Midway Green Spirit Community Garden installed what may be the first legal bee colony in a community garden in the Twin Cities this afternoon.

The permitting and fence building occurred last year. The legal aspects (animal control permit and building permit for the fence) dragged on for so long in 2008 that it became too late to feasibly get the bees hived up in time so that they could build up their ranks and stores to take them into the winter (the window of opportunity to install package bees is soon coming to an end this year), so the Bee Team decided to wait until this spring.

It was a perfect day (cool and cloudy) for hiving up our two pound package of Minnesota Hygienic bees and it's proven queen and the process went off without a hitch. There is an abundance of pollen for the girls to gather, and we're feeding them sugar syrup until the nectar starts flowing.

We're mighty excited!!"

To follow the hives' progress, check out Virginia's blog. Oh yeah, the bees will make honey too.

Aquaponics and more at the Community Garden Resource Fair

I plan to be at this event. I will be listening carefully about home scale aquaponics. Aquaponics are a fish tank that have hydroponic vegetation growing above the tank. The fish fertilize the plants, and the plants cleanup the water for the fish. They can be designed so you can harvest from the top and bottom! Just what an urban homestead needs. Ask me more after this event:


5th Annual Community Garden Resource Fair
When: March 28, 2009 9am to 4pm
Where: Unity Church-Unitarian, 732 Holly Ave, St Paul

Keynote: Paula Westmoreland, Permaculture Research Institute-Cold Climate
Workshops:

• Aquaponics 101
• The Urban Barnyard
• Doing More with Less: Superabundant Small Gardens
• Preserving Food Safely
• Breaching Barriers to Just Food
• Farm Dreams: Assessing Risks and Resources to Start a Farm Business
• Organic Soil Building
• Creative Consensus Building for Community Gardens
  

Kids Activities, Music, Resource Fair, Seed pick-up.....
& closing the day with a Town Hall Meeting on local food systems! Stay tuned for more Resource Fair details!

www.gardeningmatters.org