May 4, 2008 by Sara Zoe.

from his April 20th article in the New York Times Magazine:

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

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March 23, 2008 by Sara Zoe.

 From the New York Times comes a story on people who are turning their landscapes edible by planting fruit trees >

“Nothing is more local than the backyard, after all, and home orcharding, as the practice is sometimes called, guarantees freshness and cuts the energy costs for transportation to nil.”

One of the best pieces of advice is to plan your backyard orchard so that your harvest is spread out over time, instead of having a too large bumper crop of any one thing, so that you can have a continual supply of your own fruit throughout the summer and fall.

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March 14, 2008 by Sara Zoe.

The Strafford County Cooperative Extension is pairing up kid wanna-be gardeners with Master Gardeners for a really cool summer project:

• Learn to build your own raised bed garden and to grow plants using the square foot gardening technique
• Help build and plant a community garden with your team on the Strafford Cty Farm
• Learn from your Master Gardener; who will inspire and teach you about local agriculture, where your food comes from, plants, soil, bugs, seeds and so much more
• Share our community garden’s harvest of vegetables, herbs and flowers with Riverside Rest Home
• Have the opportunity to have your “Home Garden” judged by our Master Gardeners for the Rochester Fair.  This judging will take place on July 17^th (or as weather determines.)
• Have the opportunity to join with other KCG youth gardeners in developing a “Kids Can Grow” exhibit at the Rochester Fair.  All youth wishing to be a part of this experience will meet at the 4-H Building at the Rochester Fair on September 10 between 6:00-8:00pm to create this exhibit.
• Learn about the new Food Pyramid, nutrition and food safety
• Have fun, make new friends and have a great time under the summer’s sun

Kids Can Grow Cover Letter

Kids Can Grow Application

My only question, since I am older than 8-14, is: Where can I get a Master Gardener mentor willing to come to my house and give me advice and materials and help for only $10?

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