Food in Boston

Dick Pierce is hosting another Permaculture certificate course on Martha’s Vineyard, next month. I had a blast at last year’s session — see my wrapup if you want an idea of how it went.

About this year’s, Dick says:

What: Permaculture Design Course - 12 days – Martha’s Vineyard, MA

When: Sept 14 - 25, 8:30 – 5:30 daily; 1st day start at 12:00; last day ‘til early PM

Cost: Course: $600 (Is.-Residents, $500); Hostel Room, $220/11 nights; Meals, $280 est.

Presented by: DickPierceDesigns and hosted at Hostel Int’l – Martha’s Vineyard

Desc: Permaculture Design Certificate Course - Join Dick Pierce and a great crew of local experts/practitioners - gardeners, farmers, organics, Green/natural builders, land owners, small/coop businesses, renewable energy folks - in scenic, small-farm, self-reliant MV for this 12-day residential Permaculture Design course. For old pro’s to beginners, tenured land owners to those just starting out (even thinking about it), professionals, students, teachers, parents, retirees. Learn Permaculture design principles, see them in operation, talk with folks who live on/care for the land, create a professional design for your own property. Join a great, like-minded group for a wonderful experience – in the Fall beauty and charm of Martha’s Vineyard.

For more info please visit www.DickPierceDesigns.com, Or Email DickPierceDesigns@gmail.com; or, call Dick on his cell at 512-992-8858.

Boston’s most outspoken grocer is back with an up-to-the-minute take on our food system, which can be found both in the regular Lionette’s email newsletter and on the front page of the Lionette’s Market site. Preceded by a general market update that includes an excellent guide to the various cuts of meat they stock, with an eye towards grilling.

One of my favorite passages:

We feel that somehow and someway nature will have to compromise with us. Such absurd and futile notions that carbon offsets will appease the climate gods are similar to ‘uncivilized’ people of the past who made sacrifices to the rain gods. The ever burning climate will not ignore the carbon emitted from fresh figs flown into Boston because you recycle. Mutated e-coli and Salmonella do not understand your argument that recovering the economy takes precedent to a safe food supply, nor do they care about unemployment rates. Obesity and Diabetes do not comprehend the injustices of a class based economic system.

Amen!

• Helped friends install a raised bed in their front yard. We used stones that had been piled in the back yard to define the space — no lumber needed! I’m also encouraging them to try planting in sheet mulch, rather than buying a bunch of soil. To that end, recommended Gaia’s Garden for more on sheet mulch, and generally being an awesome resource.
• Picked up a used copy of Taylor’s Master Guide to Landscaping (recommended in GG). Far from permaculture in its outlook — one passage talks about grass as being way easier to keep up than plantings — but there looks to be plenty of use.
• Asked some pros about my knotweed mulch project. Loose consensus: as long as the knotweed bits are root free, it’s not totally crazy.
• Weeded the garden, mounded some soil around those corn plants that are growing the best, added some more knotweed leaf mulch.
• Tabled on behalf of the Board at the JP Harvest Co-op for Member Appreciation Day. Signed up at least one new member, and had some good conversations with long-time members.
• Last and definitely not least: picked some strawberries at The Food Project’s Lincoln farm, turned them into some fabulous dessert.

starts in a few minutes! http://www.radioboston.org/

Hello, readers! I’m happy to report that FiB is not totally defunct — just really distracted. However, today I am happy to pass on this good news from the Roslindale Farmers Market:

Roslindale Farmers Market Gearing Up For Biggest Season Ever

On June 13, the Roslindale Farmers Market opens in Adams Park in the center of Roslindale Village at the intersection of Washington Street and Cummins Highway. The market, sponsored by Roslindale Village Main Street will be held every Saturday from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM June 13 through October 17. This year’s market features five farms providing locally grown fruits, vegetables and flowers: Spring Brook Farm of Littleton, The Neighborhood Farm of Needham, MacArthur Farm of Holliston, Brookwood Farm of Milton and Ferrara’s Greenhouse of Hyde Park.  Additionally, there will be at least eight specialty food and product vendors offering handmade soap, gourmet baby food, artisan breads, cheeses, plants, eggs, meat baked treats as well as hand crafts and original art.  Cultural entertainment and children’s activities are planned for every Saturday throughout the season with Davey the Clown scheduled for June 13. The market has doubled the number of vendors this year and provides a unique shopping and entertainment experience in the center of Roslindale Village. More information about the Market including a call for volunteers, vendor applications, or the entertainment schedule can be obtained at www.roslindale.net.

what

a 10-day Permaculture Design Course

when

mid-September

who

instructor Dick Pierce; over a dozen Vineyard residents whose farms, businesses and homes we visited; me & 10 other students.

where

the Hostelling International on Martha’s Vineyard — a shining example of the breed. Very clean, with a super friendly staff, very reasonable rates for the Vineyard, and a flock of chickens & ducks to boot. The staff was very supportive of the class, letting us mostly take over the common room, and also install a few things on the property.

why

Before and during the course, I had some good conversations along the lines of what is permaculture anyway and why study it? Obviously I had some ideas when I signed up, or I wouldn’t have committed my money & time — I’d say that I had a general sense of permaculture as a body of theory and practice refined over the last few decades, having to do with designing & implementing ways to live ethically in the face of declining energy supplies.

what it was like

Some days were mostly listening, with some projects thrown in (turning the compost, or walking the property looking for wind, water and elevation changes). Some days were mostly field trips.

I hadn’t thought much about the fact that the course was going to be on the Vineyard, but that turned out to be a hugely influential aspect of the experience. Dick lined up 10 field trips to area farms, orchards, homesteads, and organizations, all of which exemplified some aspects and approaches to sustainable living. I was struck by how much consciousness our hosts had about looming challenges of climate, energy, water and soil, and food production, and how generous everyone was with their time and with their hard-earned knowledge. Not everything we saw fit exactly into the principles we were studying, but that’s the real world for you; discussing the similarities and differences was instructive.

What was it like living in a hostel with a dozen strangers (and dozens of others passing through), taking this course for a week and a half? The overall experience was surprisingly good, though there was definitely some friction and frustration. I think that the main controllable factor was that the course had a tremendous amount of material and activities crammed into 10 days. This was the first time for this particular configuration of the course, so I’d hope that future incarnations would either cover a bit less, or spread it out over another few days. Despite / because of this, the group did build a great relationship & will hopefully continue to collaborate.

where I could go with the experience

The last few days of the course consisted of a design exercise. I worked on a design for the yard of the property I’m renting, focusing mainly on protecting and building the soil, and will be pursuing implementation of that design. I’ve also talked to a few friends who own land about doing designs for their properties, and hope that the chance arises to pitch in on other students’ projects as they come up.

Longer term is less clear. I can definitely see the potential to turn permaculture design into a part-time pursuit, if the above projects go well. Even if I find that it’s not as good a fit for me as I’m currently thinking, I’ve got a whole new set of skills and ideas for evaluating and dealing with any property I’ll be living on in the future.

thinking of signing up for a course?

Apart from the money, spending 10 days away from family and job is a big commitment. It’s really worth thinking through what you want to get from the experience, and verifying with the instructor that what you’re interested in is going to happen. For courses such as this where students do a design exercise based on a piece of property of their own choosing, it really does pay off to get to know the property ahead of time. I’d definitely do it again, and it sounds like Dick’s intention is to do the two trainings again next year, one in Vermont and one on the Vineyard — I’d expect details to be posted at http://www.permie.us/ as the time draws nearer.

In my new-ish capacity as the person responsible for most things electronic at The Food Project, I met the other day with Kelley O’Connor of Massachusetts Local Food to discuss possible overlap of our work. In particular, we at TFP maintain a list of local farmers and the things they produce on their farms, which is also going to be one of the many pieces of Mass Local Food’s job.

From my perspective, the issues with our current list is that it’s a bear to update, being just a bunch of static pages, and that there’s some duplication between it and other people’s lists. Seems like everyone involved (farmers, local food buyers, and food organizations like us) would be better off with a more up-to-date and trustworthy listing, which is only going to happen if keeping it up to date is a simple process, and if there wasn’t so much potential confusion between the various farm listings (more on that below).

We spent a fair amount of time just trying to put together a picture of the different parties already engaged in providing online lists of MA farmers (for my benefit; Kelley has this stuff down cold). It turns out that most regions in MA are covered by one site or another, mostly not overlapping with one another, though there’s certainly duplication.

Massachusetts farm listings:

• Berkshire Grown: their own listings
• CISA in Western Mass: listings are provided through farmfresh.org
• The Food Project’s Boston-area listings, which we maintain ourselves
  
• Essex County & Merrimack Valley has their own listings
  
• SEMAP listings also through farmfresh.org

Side note - after Kelley walked me through this list & I dug around, I noticed that the Mass Department of Agriculture has all of this info and more.

There are also some national listings which include Massachusetts farms:

• the Eat Well Guide has a few
  
• Local Harvest has many
  

It’s pretty silly to be duplicating all this info, but it’s not immediately obvious how to effectively share data while still presenting the relevant parts through existing channels (to wit, the above sites). For the Mass Local Food project’s purposes, the easiest thing would be some facility tied into the local food coop software that they’ll be running their operations through. If that was done in a modular fashion, it might also be a labor saver for all these sites that are either maintaining manual lists of farms, or maintaining their own web databases.

We also tossed around the idea of a standard Farm Markup Language for exchanging updates. FML, anyone?

Next steps include digging further into the food coop software, and continuing to reach out to potential partners on the information-sharing and web DB aspects. This isn’t the most urgent project on my pile, but it’d be great to come up with something over the winter that put us in a position to do smart things for the ‘09 season.

Update: while I hope it’s implied, I realized this post is incomplete without an explicit acknowledgment of all the hard work done by TFP staff and interns to assemble and keep our guide up to date, as well as the maintainers of all the other farm lists mentioned. When looking forward to possible improvements, it’s all too easy to take for granted the labors that got us where we are.

First of all, it’s strawberry season in NE. Woo!

On that topic, all reports are good on the CSA front this year. Here’s one from an exciting new player on the local food in Boston blogging tip, Boston Localvores. Special props for their local beer section, and personable about page. In some alternative reality where I manage my time more efficiently, this site might be a bit more along their lines, or any of the other fine sites that continue to pop up. Maybe it’s time to turn FiB into an aggregator or something.

Finally, the latest Lionette’s newsletter is also worth a mention (it’s not on the web yet, but go ahead and sign up for the emails) — some really interesting stuff about local & sustainable fish, and a new program for delivering Lionette’s goods to other parts of town, kinda like a CSA dropoff point. Warning: I really dig Jamey’s closing thoughts, as usual, but I suspect they are a tonic too bitter for most folks just yet.

The NOFA winter conference is coming up this Saturday! It’s in Worcester, just an hour out of Boston. Workshops on a range of food and sustainability issues, a big ol’ potluck lunch, and a chance to holla at Agricultural Commissioner Doug Petersen — what’s not to like?

An alert reader pointed me to the local rag stuff@night’s latest issue, which has a number of food-related items. Of greatest personal interest is the article detailing some local chefs’ food sources. Meat and fish sources are all over the place, but some interesting trends emerged from the 10 interviewees:

• Russo’s is the overwhelming favorite for produce
• Iggy’s dominates in the bread category
• a few of the restaurants have more or less exclusive relationships with local farms for their produce
• Christina’s gets the most nods for spices, Eva’s Garden for herbs, Formaggio Kitchen for cheeses

Special props to Tim Wiechmann of T.W. Food for his particularly local stance on meat, fish, and everything else. Having said that, the overall level of local food sourcing was impressive. The profiled restaurants are relatively high end, so it’d be interesting to see how more affordable places measure up.