We are looking to fill an internship position which will train you in all aspects of growing vegetables in the harsh Plateau Region environment, as well as marketing. Please spread the word about this opportunity. Contact me at heil {at} highdesertfarmers(.)com for more information. Start date: April, 2009.
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25Jan
Categories: Uncategorized Comments Off
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21Jan
Categories: Business Comments Off
We had our first planning meeting for growers tonight at Coal Street Pub. We missed Erika, who has moved to Ecuador to grow veggies and her family in the tropics, but we are all excited about the partnerships we are arranging for this season, which we hope will result in growing enough local food even to sell at the farmers’ market, mentoring young organic gardeners, developing the workforce, and building the soil in more local gardens!
Amy and I are meeting soon to catch up on some membership and account duties, so expect an account update soon, subscribers. Also you’ll see a survey to tell us what special requests you have for 2009 fresh eats.
Anyone who is still looking for a share this season, subscribe soon so we can plan for it. Looks like there will be plenty of growing space but we need to plan for it. We also have a good system in place for keeping track of in-kind contributions like labor, land use, etc, so we are eager to barter with you!
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07Dec
Categories: Business Comments Off
Get your best price on a 2009 harvest subscription before the end of this month! $360 is 10% off and will get you 12 weeks of incredible vegetables for just $30/week. Imagine what that would buy you off a truck from California . . . not much.
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07Dec
Categories: Connections Comments Off
I wrote this summary for the Gallup Journey:
Work in Beauty, Inc., the non-profit organization spearheading the solar power plant for Gallup, has a second big vision for our town: a sustainable local food supply from our own high desert soil and sun.
Eating fresh, safe, local, and in-season goes against the flow in our global industrial food system. But, trendiness notwithstanding, knowing the growers as neighbors and friends and treating the soil as your own really is nice. It’s nice for the growers, nice for the soil, nice for the eaters, and more. Connecting all these participants face to face formally is called Community Supported Agriculture, and it’s a very popular model nation-wide for reforming our food system from the bottom up: eaters purchase a share in a farm’s vegetable harvest for a season, then each week they eat what the farm grows. The farm does its best to provide the greatest variety possible given the season, and the grower supports the farm by paying up front for a subscription to safe, fresh, local, in-season food.
With no vegetable farms or substantial market gardens anywhere near Gallup, newcomers may be surprised to know they can subscribe to a CSA here. The farm that provides for it is not, however, one tranquil country property. It is a coordinated network of backyard gardens each ranging in size from a few hundred square feet to fractions of an acre.
2008 was the Work in Beauty CSA’s first year, with 15 subscribers sharing a harvest for 12 weeks from July through September. Steve Heil, an elementary art teacher who also takes growing food very seriously, led a group of five growers through the planning, planting, cultivating and harvesting record amounts of vegetables from a few thousand square feet of soil using water conserving techniques and rainwater catchment. The success of the first season has encouraged members to plan for a second season CSA, improving and expanding the harvest. Fourteen of the 15 first year’s subscribers have signed up for next year already, but there will be room for more, as new backyard gardens are conscripted for use by the CSA and new partnerships are formed throughout the city.
Where will Work in Beauty stop with this plan for Gallup increasing nutrition, decreasing transportation, building the natural capital of soil tilth locally, and creating sustainable, environmentally friendly livelihoods for people? As long as there’s another person who want to join us, the project will continue to grow.
Check out our CSA blog at www.gallupgrowers.com. Contact Steve Heil (505-722-6842) and other growers, and get a membership form so you can get a share in the coming harvest.
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10Nov
Categories: Growing Comments Off
Manure, many tons of it. I just completed all that the tractor can help with. Another 1,000 square feet of ground are ready up on Canoncito, the main garden is ready with manure and winter rye planted, a new spot on Pine has it’s manure, Pam’s place is growing garlic (as well as Amy’s place and my place: over 1,000 cloves planted including Georgian Fire, Music Pink (both porcelain) and Kilarney Red (rocambole). Still to do, some soil prep on Green.
Anyone interested in an internship in organic gardening next summer? We may well have a paid position available. More on this in mid-winter.
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08Sep
When Kari asked me why we started the CSA this year I couldn’t come up with an easy answer. One thing I can say is, all of us working in the Work in Beauty demonstration garden were into it. Somehow we had a committment to a vision we had barely even articulated.
The way I see it we all feel strongly about creating something good right around us, and this is one good thing that seems to respond to the work we put into it: developing a local food system. The time is right, people around us are wishing they could eat local, fresh, in-season food. We want to grow it. If we didn’t do this we would all either be eating from our own gardens or supporting the dysfunctional food system our nation has developed for us over the last few decades, relying heavily on petroleum for fertility and transportation of veggies that are not even meant to taste good or nourish us when they reach our tables. Here we have flavor, natural rhythms, no chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, and fair treatment of growers all at once.
Morning in early September in the garden.
Suddenly in one season more than 15 families for 12 weeks have access to Good food in Gallup. What a deal!
And things went really well this season. We feel we can expand the system to make it available to more Gallupians next year.
There is a farm in Seattle that contributes to the local food system there, it is made up of only backyard gardens, carefully coordinated to produce what a market garden would produce. We didn’t know about it until after we started this, but we are amazed to see them modelling what we would like to do. (I’ll post that link soon.)
So please join us, everyone. Let’s build soil, grow veggies, build up the water table, catch rain on a citywide scale and let’s feed the whole city some day. The CSA is not the only way to do this, but it is a great way to start and it’s a perfect fitfor many of us. Acknowledging the importance of an active farmers’ market, next year we plan to plant enough for more subscriptions as well as sell at the farmers’ market.
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08Sep
Categories: Getting Veggies, Growing, People Comments Off
This is peak tomato season, the time of a garden that sticks in our memories and motivates us to plan the next season. We are so happy to have our families working along side us (and riding on our backs) as we develop a new local food system for our small town.
Andy and his son James are harvesting chard early in the morning.
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08Sep
Categories: Getting Veggies, People Comments Off
It turned out to be quite an event on Sunday afternoon, thanks to everyone spreading the word, Andy and Theo playing guitar and singing, Amy planning it and chopping up veggies, Brad and Lidio taking turns on the grill making scrumptious roast veggie fiinger food to complement the cake and sandwhiches others brought.
Mothers and their children hanging out under the shelter at the Open Garden 2008
Theo and Andy jam for an hour at the Open Garden 2008
Lidio took a turn at the grill with the freshest, ripest ingredients from the garden all around him.
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13Jul
Categories: Getting Veggies, People, Recipes Comments Off
Julie, thanks for this link to the article linked here and quoted below. It contains seven suggestions for dealing with the this wholly different food-getting system!
Seven Tips for Managing Your CSA
1. Deal with everything right away. We pick up our CSA on Saturday afternoons, which means we have no excuse not to aside some time over the weekend to sort, cook, and organize. If you pick yours up during the week, it’s a good strategy to plan on an hour or two that evening and make it part of your routine.
2. Make a list of what you have. It’s easy to shove your bundle of five radishes into the back of a drawer and forget about it until things get smelly. We like to keep this list posted right on the fridge so we see what’s in there and cross things off as we use them.
3. Take a seat and plan out your meals. Meal planning for the week is a good strategy anyway, but it’s even more handy when you’re trying to use up your CSA and avoid making the same stir-fry night after night.
4. Organize your fridge. Group together the foods that go together: greens in one place, salad fixings in another–whatever works for you. We cut off the tops of beets and put the bulbs in a separate space from the leaves. We also like to trim and discard or compost any parts of the vegetable that we know we won’t be using, like the tops of leaks (unless we’re making stock!).
5. Wilt down greens right away. Since the leafy greens take up the most space and usually get wilted down anyway, why not wilt them down to begin with? An armful of chard wilts down to about a cup, which can then be stored in a container and added to dishes as needed.
6. Save what you can. Often we’ll get very small amounts of something–a pint of blueberries or a handful of ramps–that aren’t quite enough for a whole recipe. Since you’re likely to get another pint the next week, try to determine if your first batch will keep that long and then combine them.
7. Freeze what you can. If all else fails and food is backing up, turn to your freezer. Berries freeze very well, as do many vegetables like beans and corn. If you have time, we recommend blanching vegetables until barely al dente before freezing them. This helps preserve the color and decrease cooking time on the other end.
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13Jul
Categories: Business, Getting Veggies, People Comments Off
Thanks, Lidio, for letting us document this first share of the harvest on July 12th, 2008.
Here’s what we each got for a full share:
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basil 3 oz
flat-leaved parsley 1-2 oz
onions 2 ea
leeks 2 ea
garlic 2 ea
cabbage 1 or beets 2
mustard greens 8 oz
collards 4-8 oz
kale 4 oz
chard 10 oz
chicory 2 oz
romaine lettuce 20 oz
baby carrots 10-20 ea
broccoli 12 oz
