One of my visions for the world is that every home have a garden and people learn again how to grow their own food.  Michael Pollan, writing for the NY Times, provides a bunch of good reasons to do that: 

"Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs."  

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?pagewanted=1&sq=the%20green%20issue%20michael%20pollan&st=nyt&scp=2

The USDA is at it again.  And this time your ability to procure local fresh leafy greens is at stake.  According to the San Francisco Chronical's article, How Safe Is Your Salad? -

"New industry rules for leafy greens aim to protect consumers from E. coli.  Farmers and conservationists question the science behind the standards.

The consequences of the crisis fell heavily on California's Central Coast farmers, who are now being pressed by buyers to comply with a con{fllig}icting array of new food-safety measures, some of which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies, are costly, scientifically unproven and environmentally harmful. Some violate state regulations, and may even be counterproductive to food safety. But the growers must follow these measures in order to market their crops to the larger contractors or handlers.

The new set of rules is jeopardizing the future of sustainable agriculture and of the habitat and clean water it supports, according to the Nature Conservancy's Monterey Project Director Chris Fischer: "Farmers and conservationists in California have been working together for more than 20 years to develop practices that help protect water quality and wildlife habitat, but since last fall, farmers have been under enormous pressure from their buyers to go the other direction. To stay in business, they are being forced to build miles of fences along streams, cut down trees and bulldoze ponds. Some actions, like creating bare-earth buffers along waterways, may actually increase the risk of contamination downstream." "

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/16/CMMQSSF81.DTL

see also:  http://www.caff.org/foodsafety/

"While all growers should use safe farming practices, the “one size fits all” approach of the rules does not work for family farms." 

Eliot Coleman, a well-known advocate of organic farming today, suggests that

"The label "organic" has lost the fluidity it used to hold for the growers more concerned with quality than the bottom line, and consumers more concerned with nutrition than a static set of standards for labeling. "Authentic" is meant to be the flexible term "organic" once was. It identifies fresh foods produced by local growers who want to focus on what they are doing, instead of what they aren't doing...."

He talks about moving beyond the organic label which has been largely taken over by corporate interests. 

"'Authentic' growers are committed to supplying food that is fresh, ripe, clean, safe and nourishing. "Authentic" farms are genetically modified organism-free zones...With a definition that stresses local, seller-grown and fresh, there is little likelihood that large-scale marketers can steal this concept."

-Eliot Coleman

This weekend Carl and I attended the first Georgia farm aid concert at Whippoorwill  Hollow Farm in Walnut Grove, 30 miles from downtown Atlanta. 

Some of Atlanta's top chefs turned up to perform cooking demonstrations:

Chef Anne Quatrano from Bacchanalia
Michael Tuohy from Woodfire Grill
Pithya Kongthavorn from L'Thai Restaurant
Chef Scott Peacock from Watershed
Chef Tamar Adler from Farm255

Anne Quantrano's shrimp pilau with south carolina yellow rice was outrageously good.  The others weren't bad either, and the bluegrass/southern rock music was great.

We walked around the farm, enjoying the chickens, turkeys, sheep, goats, horses and fields of green.  It was like a day in the country at a friend's farm.  Sitting around with a beer, listening to down-home music, and watching the horses kick up their heels with cool-weather spirits.

We saw a demonstration on how to ferment vegetables (good to know the little secret ins and outs of fermentation), and bought beautiful red pickled cherry bomb peppers, hot spicy pickled garlic and delicious mild pickled okra (from Full Moon Farms), along with fresh veggies from the farm table of Tucker and Celia's Woodland Gardens.  We had tasty samples of sweet potato chips from farm 255, "a restaurant that seeks to reconnect food to its roots & people to their food."

Other Georgia Organics events are found here.

At last year's Georgia Organics Conference, the keynote speaker was Janisse Ray.  Her book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, tells her story of growing up in a junkyard on Highway 1 in the heart of the rural South.  She reminds us of our Celtic origins and the forest of Longleaf Pine that once surrounded our ancestors. 

On the Longleaf Alliance site, Ray's testimonial begins:

"The landscape that owns my body is the longleaf pine. I was born to it, as my ancestors for seven generations were born to it, although as a child I did not know its name, or its habits, or the names of its inhabitants. All this I have come to know.

Maybe through my genes I inherited a vision of the original longleaf pine flatwoods, because I seem to remember their endlessness. I recollect when the coastal plains of the South were one daybreak-to-dark, rust-and-bronze longleaf forest. It is a monotony one learns to love, through days and seasons and years, for this is a landscape of loyalty, that you devote yourself to more with the passing years, like a beloved friend. The more you know of it, the more you love it. The more it gives you, the more you give in return. A longleaf pine forest never tells its secrets at first meeting, but reveals them slowly over time—and a longleaf forest is full of secrets.

In a longleaf forest, miles of trees forever fade into a brilliant salmon sunset and reappear the next dawn as a battalion marching out of fog. The tip of each needle carries a single drop of silver. The trees are so well spaced that their limbs seldom touch and sunlight streams between and within them. Below their flattened branches, grasses arch their tall, richly dun heads of seeds, and orchids and lilies paint the ground. Purple liatris gestures across the landscape. Our eyes seek the flowers like they seek the flashes of Bachman’s sparrows and ruby-crowned kinglets, and the careful crossings of fox squirrels and gopher tortoises."

It's that time of year when the passionflower vine's green egg-shaped fruits are ripening. Yesterday I picked a handful for eating. Sweet and tropical, they're almost like eating a pomegranite;  the flavor is in a pulp sac enclosing small hard black seeds.  Another reason to buy a good juicer...

All summer I've been harvesting the vines, with their exotic purple flowers and fruit, to dry for passionflower tea.  (see earlier post: Recent Interview for a description of the tea)

In the garden, while I begin to clear the beds for fall planting, there are 3 humming birds visiting the abundant flowers on morning glory vines that have sprung up on all the fences.  The flowers bloom in two shades of red, white, blue, purple and pink.  The hummers love the reds and purples. 

In the far corner, where we composted the debris from clearing out the flower beds in the yard this summer, bits of rhizome took root, and now huge red and yellow canna lilies bloom there.

Most of the summers veggies have finished, though I'm still picking a tomato or two every weekend.  Yesterday I pulled up foot-long daikon radish and set them to pickle in a salt brine with ginger and red peppers.  In a day or two, they'll be slightly fermented and ready to go in the fridge.  Daikon is considered, in chinese medicine, to help the digestion.  I like its mild taste and tenacious growth habit.