I Heart Farms

The Table Awaits (…and a Guessing Game)

Saturday was beautiful. I walked between the raindrops all over downtown Santa Cruz, looking for a client/friend who was hiding at one of three holidays fairs in an 8-block radius. I found her too late, and in a room too dark to photograph her wares. (More on her soon. She is Heidi Schlecht, former owner of the River Street Cafe & Cheese Shop (now owned by the talented Claire Palazzo), and Heidi has renamed her incredible preserves with the Plumline label.)

I headed over to Chocolate bistro next to Bookshop Santa Cruz, hoping to see my friend, the owner and chef, David Jackman. He was there, and we talked about the usual: friends, food, Wikileaks, our involvement with the internet and then…he was leaving. David owns a second restaurant called Backstage Kitchen, next to the Rio Theater. Originally started as a lunch-dinner venue, Backstage now only hosts private parties—absolutely delicious fare, as you can expect from David and his talented team.

THE EVENT

Before leaving, David gave me some news, and invited me to an event that was happening that night. A new enterprise in town is Lightfoot Industries, who hosts "Supper Club" events in a pilot program for at-risk teens. The students get to train in a real restaurant, learning not only professional skills that will serve them in life, but equally important: about sustainable foodways, community, family, and excellent communication. David has generously offered his restaurant for staging the events: professional guest chefs are employed to do the cooking. The work that falls to the teens is as you'd expect: set-up, service, and so on. But it goes further than that.

"Grow a Farmer" Summer Soirée: Downtown Santa Cruz, June 24

Click here to download and print the 1.1 MB PDF of this poster for your business window. Or your refrigerator!

Wednesday, June 24, after the farmers market next week, is a fine time to be in downtown Santa Cruz. Amy Padilla of Feel Good Foods (my personal favorite caterers in town, if not anywhere) is preparing fabulous appetizers (local, organic, seasonal, ya, you betcha) for the "Grow a Farmer" Summer Soirée. The party will take place at 101-B Cooper Street, underneath the NextSpace offices.

Wine, good food, good people, and probably live music. We hope to meet a lot of new people from the Downtown Santa Cruz Association, and look forward to hooking up farmers with new friends.

We are VERY close to making our original goal of $250K, and the Board of Supervisors will present a UCSC Farm representative with the official proclamation that "June is 'Grow a Farmer' Month in Santa Cruz County."

All proceeds benefit the campaign to build permanent housing for the UCSC Farm apprentices during the six-month residential program.

More details and ticket sales here. 

I'll have more news on that soon…it's been a very busy six months for me, but it's the best thing I've ever been involved with. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: (I'll trot out Barbara Kingsolver again: this is one of my favorite sentences, ever.) 

“Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, 

you will do them only because you first ate something 

that grew out of dirt.”

 — Barbara Kingsolver

It doesn't get any more elementally true than that. 

Have you made your plans to see "Food, Inc."? Variety magazine says, "[D]oes for the supermarket what 'Jaws' did for the beach." BWAH!

Thanks for visiting!

"Grow a Farmer" Campaign? Food Bloggers, C'mon Down!

Pictured here: Adrea Tencer, a former apprentice at the UCSC Farm & Garden's six-month residential program for training in all aspects of sustainable agriculture.

So, for six weeks beginning in mid-February, I did not take a day off. I was working on three websites: two directly related to today's BIG WONDERFUL & EXCITING NEWS post. I'm here to introduce the "Grow a Farmer" Campaign, a nationwide project to raise $250K for permanent housing for the apprentices who live on the farm during their residential program.

For forty-plus years, the apprentices have lived in tents on the periphery of the farm. Last year, they were told this is no longer an option, and UCSC began accepting bids for permanent tent cabins. One was accepted, and then costs for labor and materials went up—the result being that the bid rose by $250K. The Friends board worked on finding solutions, and in a frenzy of inspiration, the "Grow a Farmer" Campaign was conceived and born over a two-week span in January.

The response has been amazing. Newman's Own Foundation gave $50K, which is their maximum donation. The Obaboa Foundation and Olivia Boyce-Abel have created a $20K matching grant challenge (read more below).

The campaign is asking farm-loving chefs to support the cause in a couple of ways...either by hosting a benefit dinner, as Chez Panisse is doing on May 6 (among others whose number is growing daily), or by donating $10 a day for the Merry Month of May. That $300 will make a restaurant (or any business) a Partner, to be listed on the website.

Businesses like Earthbound Farm and Johnny's Selected Seeds are donors. Other business opportunities include holding "Community Day" and donating (for example) 5% of the day's sales to the campaign.

Non-profits and other organizations who can't hold events still have opportunities to participate, even by merely spreading the word via a mailing list, or making a donation. These people are Pollinators, and will be linked on the website.

There are other ways for individuals—including, hello? you former apprentices—to have fun Growing a Farmer. You can host a fundraising event—a farm tour, a house or garden party—and we'll have materials for you that will help your event succeed.

And then there are yet other creative ways to help this campaign, the most inspiring of which so far is the incredibly generous offering from Chef David Kinch and Manresa Restaurant. Concerned that a "mere" cash donation wouldn't maximize the potential to help raise the funds, the chef instead is offering up two Chef's Special Tasting dinners, with wine pairings. These dinners will be awarded to the highest donors in the Obaboa Foundation's matching grant challenge.

In the words of one of my personal heroes, Beth Benjamin, who co-founded Camp Joy Gardens, spreading the word to a local publication:

I have been involved in organic gardening, farming and seed production since 1967 due to my life-shaping apprenticeship with Alan Chadwick at the garden at the University of Santa Cruz. I worked at my own farm, Camp Joy, then with Renee Shepherd, and now am on the board of the Organic Seed Alliance. As farmers are the very base of all the fabulous food we cook at home or eat in restaurants, and the flowers that are such an important part of most of our lives, maybe this would make an interesting story, especially since the Garden and Farm is the mothership for so many of our local farmers – past, present and future. We need as many good farmers as we can get, and the training program in Santa Cruz has been training and inspiring folks all over the country and the world for over 40 years.

This is the website that was just launched for nationwide Grow A Farmer month in May – we are fundraising for permanent apprentice housing at the UCSC Farm and Garden. Living on site is an essential part of the program and the University has given us until June to raise the money to start actually building the shovel-ready project. I have been racking my brains for like minded businesses or individuals that might be able to contribute in any way. I’m sure your organization has subscribers who’ve been trained or inspired by the Farm and Garden or its offshoots, so I thought perhaps you might be one of our business contributors, or maybe write something up about our efforts. Please take a minute and look at our website, as it is a great way to explain what we are working on.  If there is someone more appropriate that I could speak to in person, please give me the contact information.

There may be a way you can help by going to a dinner or shopping at one of the participating businesses or restaurants, making a donation, or passing the publicity on to someone else or connecting us with someone who would like to be part of this exciting campaign – please go to the brand new site and see what you think!  Events will be added to the website as they are scheduled. 

So that's it, in one very large, very aromatic nutshell.

Do these apprentices a BIG favor: use Facebook, Yelp, and Twitter it up! Spread the word, spread the energy, and come on board. I'm counting on food bloggers to help here: we will arrange personal farm tours if you want to come visit. And we'll add YOUR blog to our website, both as a Pollinator and as a Blogging Partner.

Use LocalHarvest for Networking Events

If you're looking for a restaurant near you that supports local farms, start with LocalHarvest.org. Plug in your zip code, and see what pops up. Or contact us on the Grow a Farmer site: we might be able to put you in touch with former apprentices in your area who can hook you up.

If your restaurant IS going to participate, please get a free member listing at LocalHarvest and add your event to the mailing list called "Keep Me Posted." LocalHarvest's newsletter goes out every Wednesday morning to over 45,000 people, and they are the premier website in the world for their niche: guiding people to local food and eating well.

And that's the news across the nation.

Sorry to have been missing in action: this is the biggest project of my life, and by far, the best. Yes, we can!

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "Farmers are the only indispensable people on the face of the earth." —Ambassador Li Zhaoxing

Thanks for visiting. Will you be a Cultivator?

Oooh, last treat: Check out the website I designed for my friends at TLC Ranch: they're now the largest pastured egg production operation in the country! (Sun graphic on the site by Monika Wolff.)

Happy springtime, everyone!

A Month of Sundays: Where I've Been

Pictured here: squashes and pumpkins at Love Apple Farm, where I've been visiting lately. There are many reasons I've not been writing—all of October, even. Foremost, I've got some steady part-time work, and second to that, we've had more visitors and socializing in the last three weeks than in the past ten years. Some other projects and interests have popped up—not the least of which has been the birth of a baby boy in the house next door, and I've been (self-)appointed Court Photographer. I'm behind in e-mails and in other areas of life.

I only have time today for three brief announcements of some events very soon, and maybe you can avail yourselves of them. And then I hope to get back in the saddle with blogging. Much is happening on the local farm scene, and most all of it is wonderful.

Making a Difference

Yet another cool thing to do with your kids and their schools. On October 18, my friends Lori and Jeff Fiorovich will host a Farm to School Day at Crystal Bay Farm in Watsonville.

Read the press release below, and see the faces of your host farmers, when Logan was just two and a half.

Harvest Festival at UCSC Farm: October 4!

Grab your kids: this weekend is the biggest event at the UCSC Farm all year 'round! I took this photo a couple of years ago, when we took Logan for the face painting, pumpkin painting, apple bobbing, and other great activities for kids. And the whole family.

The festival has expanded this year to include workshops and cooking  demonstrations among the already packed schedule of live music, apple tasting, an apple pie bake-off competition, and so much more! There are walking tours of the farm, tractor rides, and so on. And LOTS of good food to eat. $5 and under for admission to one fantastic farm event.

Highly recommended! To see the complete schedule, including the live music, visit the CASFS website here.

That's all until tomorrow. I've been under deadlines with four clients, and hope to catch a break in the action soon.

Here: a joke. "Sarah Palin is a post turtle." (I laughed, even though it's older than John McCain.)

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY, from Michael Moore: "The Rich Are Staging a Coup This Morning."

Thanks for visiting, and now get on the phone with your Congresspersons.

Fundraisers & Fun!

Next weekend is a good weekend to be in Santa Cruz: two wonderful fundraising events are taking place for farm lovers and foodies, young and old.

Saturday, September 27, between noon and sunset, Freewheelin' Farm(a little less than six miles outside of Santa Cruz, just off Highway One) is hosting its third annual Farm Art Show. I heard about the previous two from organizaer, Melinda Lundgren, and from plenty of people who attended that this event is a blast.

Freewheelin' Farm is the subject of adoration with locals: they run a CSA with 40 shares, bicycling the six miles into town to deliver their produce. I'd written about it after a stop on the Eco Farm bus tour a couple of years ago.

Amy, Darryl, and Kirstin work the farm together, and they run a great show—figuratively and literally. Check out the details on the flyer: organic brew, wine tasting, wood-fired pizza, kids' table, and more. All for a $5-$10 donation, and there is also art for sale. Great stuff!

The next day, a high-end culinary event is taking place in honor of The Vanilla Queen, my friend, Patricia Rain. Read on for "A Culinary Event Fit for a Queen!" It should be wonderful.

Slow Food Notion: I Don't Think So.

Pictured here: a bouquet created by the apprentices up at UCSC's Farm & Garden (aka "CASFS") for a dinner last night. I shopped, chopped (500 cherry tomatoes, eight pounds of yellow wax beans), cooked (the beans), and prepped for eight great hours.

SLOW FOOD NATION 2008

So, unlike tens of thousands of people in San Francisco who are paying $58 and up for the privilege of suffering through traffic and parking and being crammed into buildings like sardines, I am absolutely committed to avoiding all things under the Slow Food umbrella this Sunday. Slow Food Nation: Come to the Table 2008 starts tomorrow.

When I first heard about it, it sounded exciting. But I realized I was Having Thoughts about it, and that most weren't pretty.

Turns out I'm not alone. (I might not be in the majority, but that doesn't matter.) With her usual graciousness and aplomb, Jennifer Jeffrey (who lives in San Francisco) wrote her plus-minus take on the event. She manages to find the possible positives, which honestly would have eluded me.

Hazon Is Hebrew for "Vision"

A fellow member of the Board of Directors for the Friends of the UCSC Farm & Garden gave me this postcard at our monthly meeting this week, and I promised her I would put it on my weblog.

Emily Freed writes:

Come be a part of the New Jewish Food Movement!

You are invited to join us at the 2008 Hazon Food Conference which will take place December 25 - 28, 2008 at the Asilomar Conference and Retreat Center, on the Monterey Peninsula, CA. The conference experience will cover the spectrum of food interests, from health and sustainability to food justice and Jewish tradition. Join hundreds of others from all over North America, Israel, and beyond as this group of young, not so young, singles, couples, families, rabbis, farmers, educators, chefs, writers, students and enthusiasts gathers to celebrate Chanukah, Shabbat, and the New Jewish Food Movement. To register or find out more about the Hazon Food Conference, visit: www.hazon.org/foodconference

If you have questions about the Food Conference or want to find out more information about Hazon, feel free to contact Emily Jane Freed at [email protected].

• • • • • • • • • • •

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "The vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart - this you will build your life by, and this you will become." — James Lane Allen

Thanks for visiting.

High Ground Farm's Open Space Alliance Farm Dinner

Set atop the rolling hills near a slough in Watsonville, beautiful High Ground Organics farm is a vision within a vision. I'm having trouble finding words to describe it, so here are some photos from a visit a couple of years ago.

High Ground Organics partners with Mariquita Farm in a robust CSA, and one of the charming things High Ground brings to the table (so to speak) are all the varieties of flowers they grow, which make the farm itself exceptionally beautiful.

On August 17, you can have the chance to dine on the farm: Open Space Alliance is hosting a farm dinner with Chef Jozseph Schultz (formerly of India Joze). About Jozseph's food: he catered the sit-down dinner at my best friend's wedding a couple of weeks ago for 150 people. The food, with all its Pan-Asian influences, was fantastic. See his menu below, and read the press release from Open Space Alliance: one of my favorite groups and causes in the county.