surprise gardening

Maybe it's just another urban garden featured by the New York Times,

but I find it particularly charming.

look here

markets world wide

Focused as we are in the St. Louis farmers' market scene, it's easy to forget how widespread they are. Some are thriving here, others aren't doing so hot. Halfway across the globe, community residents and artists are collaborating to turn their vision of what a market should be into a reality:



http://culiblog.org/2009/06/speaking-of-the-future-how-bout-the-market/

Free kitchens where community entrepreneurs can try out their own value-added products? How awesome is that?

hello again

KUMQAUTS! It's been so long, but I've stumbled across more garden-related internet love and wanted to disseminate the info...

the urban field guide : a good blog with some simple garden inspiration. growing potatoes in shopping carts? radical gardening? yes, please.

another interesting but less logical site is yes we can food
it's based in san francisco, and you can buy seasonal fruits and vegetables that they can, but REALLY, everyone should just can their own... 

The Magic of Time-Keeping Bees

I just thought this article was oddly interesting...

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/guest-column-lets-hear-it-for-the-bees/?em

Out of the Wild, SF Weekly

This article is about collecting and selling wild edibles by creating a CSF -- community supported foraging boxes. The Bay Area is rich with edibles such as miners lettuce, sour grass, and mushrooms, and you'd probably be looking for a different set out around StL. Horrah for gathering, a basic human skill.

http://sfweekly.com/2009-03-18/news/out-of-the-wild/

Frontrunners

The Kumquat was featured in the Spring 2009 issue of the Washington University Magazine.

The State of our Fellow Farmers

The February release of the 2007 USDA Agricultural Census has some tasty little statistics about the state of food and farming in American agriculture. Here are some of the highlights from the data.


Some cheerful trends in U.S. agriculture show:

• There was a net increase of in the number of small farms from 2002 - 2007 and new (young) farmers too.
  
• There was a 17% increase in the number of direct to consumer sales and a 335% increase in organic sales in the country since 2002. (Like the Kumquat!)
• Both the ethnic and gender diversity of farmers has increased significantly. 30% more women now act as primary farm operators, compared to 2002.

On the flip side:

• U.S. lost 16.2 million acres of farmland during this period.
• The concentration of agriculture increased during the years in question. Whereas farms with net sales of more than $1 million in annual sales accounted for 47 percent of U.S. agricultural production in 2002, farms in this sales class were responsible for 59 percent all production in 2007.

If you want more than this taste, the full census results can be found here.

-Lucy