Calling All Kids: Read and Seed on the Wilmington College Campus

Now that the kids are all back in school and Fall is decidedly here, we're planning a monthly educational series for kids about gardening and food. Mariah and Jen, our respective Youth Outreach and Community Gardens Coordinators, will be hosting the events, titled "Read and Seed," and kids ages 2-12 will have the chance to work with hands-on gardening demonstrations.

The first "Read and Seed" will be on Saturday, October 10 at 2:00 p.m, and check-in will start at 1:30 at the Center for Service & Civic Engagement on campus. Kids will be split into three categories: Lil' Sprouts - ages 2-4; Seedlings - ages 5-7, and Blossoms - ages 8-12.

If you or your kids would like to participate or would like more information, call Mariah at (937) 382-6661 ext. 488, or email her at mariah_fulton@wilmington.edu

Photo Friday - Down Tomato Alley

Kyle Baessler walks with a tray of transplants on the college farm, framed by rows of tomatoes.

Weekly Food Roundup - Tom's of Maine and the Gospel of Slow Food

*Weekly Food Roundup is a weekly recap of local, national and global food issues as they play out online, in print and in our everyday lives. Check back every Friday for new installments.*

On Wednesday of this week we learned that we were selected as finalists for a Tom's of Maine grant for $20,000, which would almost completely fund our projects for the next year. In our research for the grant application we noted that not once in the past 20 years had Tom's selected a local food initiative, in any capacity, for the grant. So we were confident in our application and optimistic that now was the right time to highlight a project like ours.

Well, any question of whether food issues were still on the collective conscious of the country was answered Wednesday when the list of finalists was announced, and on it were 10 projects, including us, dealing with community gardening or growing food for food pantries. We're still confident and excited, obviously, but we're not sure whether to celebrate the large number of gardening projects, or bemoan them, because they're competition.

What that really translates into, though, is the importance of our local network and those people who are already familiar with our cause. We can't rely on the random e-passerby reading our project title on the Tom's website and voting for us, because we don't stand out as much in that crowd. It's nothing a little elbow grease and some old-fashioned campaigning can't achieve though. And we have you to help us along. Please vote, and often!

***

Journalist and food writer Michael Pollan has been the topic of some controversy lately, mostly from Agribusiness interests who don't jive with Pollan's viewpoints on local food, sustainable agriculture and eating in general. Best known for his most recent book "In Defense of Food", which tackles the question of what the healthiest eating habits should look like and sums it up in seven words ("Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."), Pollan is responsible for a recent groundswell in the public voice on food issues. Not since Eric Schlosser's 2002 "Fast Food Nation" has our commodity-crop addicted food system been called out, but the debate continues on now stronger than it ever has.

Op-eds from industrial farmers have criticized the mounting number of "agri-intellectuals" preaching a gospel of slow food, and Pollan is always the fall-guy for that movement. But the critiques leveled at Pollan, that he isn't a farmer, doesn't understand farm life and its trials, aren't fair. He doesn't claim any of those things. What he does know is how far our national eating habits have shifted over the past 40 years, from agrarian and local to industrial and global. What he advocates isn't radical: know your farmer, read the indecipherable ingredient list and avoid anything Grandma wouldn't recognize.

Pollan will be speaking this Sunday at Xavier University in Cincinnati, as part of their Ethics, Religion and Society lecture series. The event is free and runs from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., and I definitely recommend attending. More than 7,000 people attended his speech last night in Madison, WI. I hope half that many people turn out in Cincinnati on Sunday!

A Day at FSR '09

The frenzy and the crowds returned yesterday to the Farm Science Review, the annual farm and agriculture conference that draws thousands of people to the sleepy town of London, OH, population 9,545.

For some scale, that many people will likely have attended the three-day agri-festival by tomorrow afternoon. It's huge, and the snaking line of traffic that greets you as you near the Molly Caren Agriculture Center will tell you as much.

Dessie and I spent our Wednesday at the FSR, small-farm schedules in hand, eyes widened by the number of Cargill hats and Yes! on Issue 2 placards. The overwhelming majority of FSR is geared toward conventional farming, but a small group of tents in one corner of the sprawling grounds is devoted to small farms and sustainable agriculture, so we bee-lined there.

Dessie had circled a farmers' market seminar she wanted to attend called "How to Sell a Whole Truckload: Increasing Sales at Farmers' Markets and Roadside Stands." We decided to split up, because two of the seminars I wanted to sit-in on overlapped with hers. I decided, instead, to listen to "The Power of Local Food Systems," "The Business Climate in Ohio" and "What Makes Main Street Vibrant?" all of which were presided over by OSU extension educators. The first seminar, on local food economies, featured a well-known OSU researcher Jeff Sharp, who had some interesting insight into creating strong and thriving local food systems and what differentiates different markets around the state. All of the lectures were informative, and I was surprised at how interactive they became when the audience was probed for questions.

We made sure to eat some fair fare before leaving, chopped beef steak sandwiches, french fries and slaw. Below are some pictures from the gloomy but otherwise enjoyable day.

Free seeds from the OSU Master Gardeners! (I snagged Cosmic Purple Carrots, Yellow Cherry Tomatoes, Salsifies and Sunflowers)

In the Utzinger Memorial garden.

Vote for Grow Food, Grow Hope!

Vote for us! We've been selected as finalists for a Tom's of Maine community involvement grant of $20,000, and we need your help! We're listed under "Community."

Fifty finalists from across the country have been selected, and the public can vote on which project they would most like to support. From now until October 30, you can vote once a day, everyday, for five projects of your choosing. (Note: the more you vote for other projects, the harder it becomes for us to win, so just save those extra four votes a day for another year!) Come November, Tom's of Maine will announce the five winners of the $20,000 grant, based solely on the votes received by each project.

So here's the deal: if you can take 10 seconds out of your day, everyday, for the next month, we could be one step closer to receiving this generous grant which would fund almost all of our projects for the coming year. Click here to vote!

We're listed under the "Community" section, and, in the interest of fairness, the listing shuffles all the projects each time you refresh the page, so there's no telling where Grow Food, Grow Hope will be listed when you click on it. Just scroll down and keep your eyes open. Unfortunately (or maybe not?) we're competing with about five or six other community garden or agriculture based projects, so the help of our community, of people who are already familiar with our program, is crucial.

Please do your part, and vote for us! This really will take a collective, community effort!

Farm Science Review, 2009

The 47th annual Farm Science Review begins today at the Molly Caren Agricultural Center in London, OH. The three day ag conference brings together the latest in farm and agriculture technology and fills all three days with seminars and lectures from guest speakers and extension educators.

While the vast majority of the conference deals with conventional farming practices, there is a schedule of events specifically tailored towards small and sustainable farming, and many of the seminars deal with gardening techniques and practices. Two of our VISTAs, Eric and Jenn, drove up to London today for the conference, and they will be attending different seminars and lectures from that list above. Dessie and I (John) will be attending the conference tomorrow, and hope to bring back some new insights or learned information from the day.

I'll be tweeting and uploading pictures while there tomorrow, so make sure to follow us along for the day at twitter.com/growfoodandhope. Look for hashtag #fsr09 for tweets from the conference.

First Annual Tour de Farm: Rainy, but successful.

Our last event of the weekend brought us back to the community garden, where we started our 25 mile bicycle tour of four Clinton County farms. The weather forecast called for rain by 11 a.m., so we tried to rush along our 8:45 start time as fast as we could, expecting the best but preparing for the worst.

The first thing we noticed at the registration table, though, was that we were getting a lot more people than we expected. Based on pre-registration numbers and word-of-mouth interest, we expected 15 to 20 riders at most. By 8:30, 31 riders had showed up and registered, leading us to run out of tour shirts and water bottles. We apologized for running out of supplies, but we were secretly ecstatic that so many riders showed up to support us and our local farmers. (A sidenote: we are ordering more shirts this week for the riders who didn't receive one and for anyone who couldn't make the ride but would like to buy one. Only $10. See future posts.)


By 8:45, the Sagwagon was loaded up and the riders were eager to hit the road.


Our first stop was at Bethel Lane Farms, where Eric and Deborah Ward Beard had prepared a tossed salad with swiss chard and kale, some sliced oranges and bottled water, as well as some needed moral support. Deborah led riders around their front-yard farm, explaining their growing specialties and the history of their business.


Next stop on the tour was Peaceful Acres Lavender Farm, just a few miles down the road along scenic, sparsely traveled back-roads. On the way to the lavender farm, though, the rain started falling lightly, and the impending rainstorm loomed closer overhead in fast approaching clouds. The riders didn't seem to mind though.


At the lavender farm, Mike and Kym Prell prepared some now-famous lavender lemonade for the cyclists, and we took cover from the quickening rain inside the farm's gift shop.


Unfortunately, the rain really picked up as we were leaving the lavender farm, so the pictures stopped with the downpour. It really is unfortunate, too, because from talking to the riders, many of us were starting to hit our stride in the last fifteen or so miles of the tour, and Brad and Marcia Bergefurd's farm on St. Rt. 350 is a picturesque one.

By the time riders were done eating Brad's delicious varieties of watermelon and canteloupe and leaving the Bergefurd's Farm Market, the rain had picked up even more and showed no signs of abating. The last stop on the route, Bob Webb Farm on Fife Avenue, was left optional for riders who didn't feel comfortable riding in the rain. The rest of the group made its way back to the community garden

We were extremely grateful for all of the farmers for participating in our first Tour de Farm, and for all of the riders for embracing it. Not only were we able to raise more than $700 for Grow Food, Grow Hope, but we exposed a group of people to some of the most important and often overlooked members of our community: the farmers. We're already making changes to the 2010 Clinton County Tour de Farm, and we are excited to expand the event and hopefully double the number of farms and riders.

Thank you to all the participants, and keep your eyes open for next year's ride!

Farm to Table Benefit Dinner

On Saturday night we gathered beneath a green and white circus tent at the community gardens, for a Farm to Table benefit dinner sponsored by Wilmington College's food service provider, Sodexo.

The proceeds from the event will go toward expanding our community garden from 20 to 40 plots in 2010, so it was only a little symbolic that the tables were set-up on the land where the new garden plots will be built.

The menu for the dinner was excellent, and Sodexo deserves credit for sourcing all of the meal from local producers (if not directly from our college farm). For an appetizer, guests drank BLT and melon & prosciutto shooters and ate three types of vegetable tapenade on flatbread. The salad was topped with local cheese and roasted corn relish. The main course featured chicken stuffed with late summer vegetables, smoked tomato vinaigrette, roasted baby vegetables, potato caramelized leek gratin and corn fritters. For dessert there were mini caramel apples, homemade ice cream in pate choux and angel food cake topped with fresh cream and local berries. In few words, the dinner was amazing.

Photos of the night:

Mariah and Sonja at our information table.

The menu for the dinner, printed on seed paper that, when planted, will flower.

The chefs for the dinner talking a little bit about where the food came from and how it was prepared. They deserved all the applause they received.

Saturday night was another successful "first" for us, and we were honored to have our efforts recognized by Sodexo and Wilmington College.

Fall Fest, Farm to Table and the Tour de Farm: All successes.

Monday morning rolled around a little sooner than we would have liked here at the Service House, after a bustling weekend of events and goings-on around campus. As mentioned in this post, last week was a busy one and the weekend was even busier, with events on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Friday night brought the 3rd Fridays Concert series to Wilmington's campus for the first annual "Fall Fest." Live music from three local bands (Ugly Brown Coat, Sons of Sophistication and Me&Mountains of Dayton) provided the backdrop for students and community members as they visited booths of local restaurants, businesses and organizations. The greek community on campus organized a well-attended cornhole tournament that brought more than fifty students out to play.




Grow Food, Grow Hope had a booth, too, where people could pay 50 cents to throw a mud pie at a VISTA. The ever-artistic Sonja painted our favorite VISTA mascot Cowboy Carrot on a piece of plywood, and the people lined up. We "worked" shifts behind the board, taking pie tins of local (!) mud to the face-- and we managed to raise $37 in the process. There is either some pent up VISTA aggression floating around campus or we are marketing geniuses. We're betting on the latter.



Our friends at Energize Clinton County had a novel idea in selling local apple cider at their booth, which they bought from A&M Orchards of Midland. They had a steady flow of traffic all night waiting for the cider to heat up, even though it never quite got there. It's OK guys-- lukewarm apple cider is almost as good, especially when it's from A&M.


Next to ECC was Main Street Yoga Center, which held a yoga lesson behind their booth and demonstrated 108 sun salutations for peace.



For its first year, "Fall Fest" seemed to be a hit with the community and we are definitely going to expand on next year's festival. Saturday and Sunday also had first-year events that, save for some inclement weather on Sunday afternoon, went off unhitched. You can read about those in today's upcoming posts.

Tour de Farm shirts are in!

The shirts arrived today, just in time for our Sunday ride! The blue shirts are for event organizers, and the green are for participants. Click here for more information about the Tour de Farm.

Can't make it to the ride but you want a shirt anyway? Contact us at growfoodgrowhope@wilmington.edu.

Photo Friday - Remembering Those Lost

Wilmington College freshman Sam Nieves spent the early morning hours of Friday, Sept. 11 creating this flag memorial to those who lost their lives in the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the plane crash over Pennsylvania. In the background, Tara Lydy and Robert Delay work on the can sculpture.

Weekly Food Roundup - Canstruction and Inside the Beltway Initiatives

*Weekly Food Roundup is a weekly recap of local, national and global food issues as they play out online, in print and in our everyday lives. Check back every Friday for new installments.*

Our "Share the Surplus" food drive ended last Friday at the home football game here, where we rewarded anyone who brought canned and fresh foods with raffle tickets for prizes from local businesses. We collected 172 lbs. of food from the game alone, and added that to our larger total of 750 lbs. donated throughout the two-week period. In the end, 991 cans, boxes and bags of food, some 14,500 oz., were collected at the end of the day, bringing the end donation to 906 lbs. of food for our local food pantries. We consider that a success.

To add some fun to the whole process, Tyler (an Ohio Campus Compact VISTA here at W.C.) organized a can sculpture building of the bell-tower on campus. We used everything from fresh string beans, bags of pasta and canned corn to recreate the tower, leading us well into the night before we finished.



The "canstruction" rounded out our project for the 9/11 National Day of Service and Remembrance. Though the United We Serve initiative has thus come to a close, the broader concept of national service can't be summed up in a press-release or confined to a 6-month window: it's an everyday way of life.

***

The surprisingly pro-active USDA keeps rolling out exciting announcements and initiatives from inside the beltway, and this week was no exception. On Tuesday, September 15, Ag Secretary Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Merrigan announced the "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" initiative, "to connect consumers with local producers and to create new economic opportunities for communities."

Among the more exciting aspects of this announcement is some $50 million allocated for states to invest in school-lunch reform, and the creation of Farm to School Tactical Teams, a menacing sounding name for a traveling group of surveyors who will visit our nation's schools to offer help and advice to school administrators. The "Know Your Farmer..." initiative will invest a total of $65 million into local and regional food systems. Sec. Vilsack has been championing local agriculture almost daily for the past few months, only now backing it up with tangible funds for the otherwise overlooked segments of our local economies. Here's what Deputy Secretary Merrigan had to say:

"Americans are more interested in food and agriculture than at any other time since most families left the farm," said Merrigan. "'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food' seeks to focus that conversation on supporting local and regional food systems to strengthen American agriculture by promoting sustainable agricultural practices and spurring economic opportunity in rural communities."

Hopefully the red tape and sluggish pace that normally plagues federal funding will be sidestepped in this process, but only time will tell. And hopefully the upcoming cold months won't slow the pace of this new initiative. Again, we wait to see.

***

Busy weekend, endless local fun

This upcoming weekend is filled to the brim with unique and fun things to do in Clinton County, and we're excited to be a part of all of them.



On Friday, the Buy Local First Clinton County 3rd Fridays concert series is coming to Wilmington College campus, for the first annual "Fall Fest."

The event will feature live music from three local bands, a cornhole tournament, food and drinks from area restaurants and representatives from local and student organizations. Stop by for dinner at 6 p.m. and stay for all the action.

Performing on the Fall Fest stage will be Wilmington bands Ugly Brown Coat, Sons of Sophistication, and the Dayton indie-rock five-piece Me & Mountains. The live music will be organized by Clinton County Live!, and the sound will be coordinated by Tom Ibaugh of Elite Sound Productions.

The September 3rd Friday builds on a great summer of Downtown Alive concerts hosted by Main Street Wilmington which drew hundreds of people from around the county. Fall Fest will mark the first time a 3rd Friday event has expanded out from the downtown area, and festival organizers Buy Local First Clinton County, Clinton County Live! and Grow Food, Grow Hope are excited about the new venue.

For more information about the event or to register to have a booth at the event, contact Dessie at (937) 382-6661 ext. 488 or email dessie_buchanan@wilmington.edu.


Farm to Table Benefit Dinner


Come join us for a family-style dinner featuring all locally grown, locally sourced food while supporting Grow Food, Grow Hope. Come watch the sunset, meet and eat with local growers, and celebrate the spirit of community. Read the menu for the dinner here!

Reservations are $65 per person, and include a commemorative recipe book. Reserve your seat at the table by September 12, 2009.



Click here or above to reserve your spot!

This event is sponsored by Sodexo and hosted by Wilmington College with all proceeds benefiting the community garden initiative.


Clinton County Tour de Farm


We are hosting a Clinton County "Tour de Farm" Bike Tour on Sunday, September 20. The ride will start and leave from the community garden on Wilmington College campus and visit four Clinton County farms along the way. The 25 mile route features moderately flat roads to rolling hills, with farm stops around every five miles. We will be visiting Bethel Lane Farms, Peaceful Acres Lavender Farm, Bergefurd's Farm Market and Bob Webb Farm. Registration is $20 if you register before September 19, and $25 on the day of the ride. Students can get a reduced rate of $15 before the ride, and $20 the day of. The registration fee will cover a tour t-shirt, entry into the ride and refreshments at the farms. All the rest will be donated to Grow Food, Grow Hope.

Registration will begin at 8:00 a.m. Sunday morning, and the ride will depart around 8:30 a.m.

Click here to print off a registration form for the ride. You can either mail the form to the address provided, e-mail the edited online version to us, or bring it with you on the day of the ride.

We hope you'll join us and our local farmers on this on this fun-filled ride!

Click here to view a Google map of the route!

We hope you'll be able to join us for one or all of the events we have planned this weekend, and we look forward to seeing you!

Photo Friday - Farmer to Consumer

Our favorite farmer's market shopper, Alora Stuckert, getting some quality time with her local grower.

Weekly Food Roundup - Sharing the Surplus, School Lunch and National Food Safety

*Weekly Food Roundup is a weekly recap of local, national and global food issues as they play out online, in print and in our everyday lives. Check back every Friday for new installments.*

If you haven't already, please consider donating some canned, non-perishable or fresh food to our "Share the Surplus" Food Drive, which ends today. We are collaborating with other Wilmington College VISTAs in organizing this drive, and we hope to collect a significant amount of food to donate to our area food pantries. The event will culminate tonight at the Wilmington High School varsity football game, where a food donation will earn you raffle tickets to a number of prizes donated by local businesses.

So far, we've collected almost 400 lbs. of food (or 6,350.42 oz; Thanks, Data Collection Sonja), and hope to increase that number tenfold after tonight. More information about the food drive can be found here.

***

This past Labor Day, while Americans across the country were relishing the day off of work or school at picnics and cookouts, a great many of them were eating for a cause. In all 50 states, some 307 "eat-ins" were organized to address the ongoing issue of the quality of government-subsidized school lunches, which are notoriously unhealthy.

Originally spearheaded by the food advocacy group Slow Food USA, the Time for Lunch campaign is a call to action directed towards Congress and our lawmakers in D.C. to re-evaluate our outdated School Lunch Program, which was signed into law in 1946 and feeds more than 30.5 million children everyday. Slow Food has long championed the revitalizing of our school cafeterias by replacing (or at least supplementing) the heavily processed school food with real, fresh food. By investing additional time and money into our school kitchens, we'll not only address the skyrocketing childhood obesity epidemic but we could educate kids about healthy eating habits at the one place where they spend the majority of their early lives: school.

Another interesting side-note to this story is Slow Food's call for a School Lunch Corps- a job-generating national service organization dedicated to increasing healthy eating in our nation's schools. From Slow Food USA's release on the topic:

We can’t serve real food in schools without investing in school kitchens and the people who prepare and serve lunch. This spring, President Obama signed the Serve America Act, which expanded Americorps and reinforced his call for Americans to serve their country. Right now, our nation has an opportunity to train young and unemployed Americans to be the teachers, farmers, cooks and administrators we need to ensure the National School Lunch Program is protecting children’s health. President Obama has called for an end to childhood hunger by 2015; let’s answer that call by putting Americans to work building and working in school kitchens nationwide.

Imagine a garden on every school ground and a crew of AmeriCorps volunteers who planted, harvested and prepared that food for our kids. Grow Food, Grow Hope would willingly be conscripted for that job.

***

Big news came out of Washington on Wednesday at the Consumer Federation of America's food policy conference. Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services Secretary, announced a new food safety website intended to streamline information for consumers about food news, product recalls and other food-related issues.

Foodsafety.gov is a collaboration between the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture and HHS, and comes after an FDA announcement on Tuesday mandating stricter guidelines for reporting food contamination and the creation of an online database where manufacturers can report food issues.

"Tour de Farm" Bicycle Tour

We are excited to announce the latest upcoming event we have planned for September. We will be hosting a "Tour de Farm" Bicycle Tour of four Clinton County farms on Sunday, September 20, to celebrate the end of the growing season and to highlight the importance of our local Clinton County growers.

Registration is now open for the event, and details can be found in our "Upcoming Events" page. This should be a very fun event, and we hope you'll come out and join us!

Don't want to cycle but still want to participate? Consider volunteering at the registration booth or ride in our Sagwagon to support the riders. Contact Eric Guindon for more information.

Share the Surplus Food Drive

Although this is a bit belated, it's not too late to donate your canned or fresh foods to the "Share the Surplus" food drive, which runs until this Friday, September 11.

Grow Food, Grow Hope has partnered with our housemates and Ohio Campus Compact VISTA colleagues to collect both non-perishable and fresh food for local food pantries, in conjunction with the September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance. The national day of service marks the end of the United We Serve initiative, President Obama's call for American citizens to serve their country in some capacity during this economic downturn.

If you have fresh food you would like to donate, from your garden or elsewhere (and you live in Clinton County), you can call us at (937) 382-6661 ext. 596 and we'll come pick it up for you. If you have canned goods you would like to donate you can drop them off at the "Share the Surplus" bin in the foyer of Wilmington Kroger, or on the Wilmington College campus (both the Center for Service and Civic Engagement and Pyle Center have bins available.)

Also! Bring your canned goods to the WHS home football game on Friday, Sept. 11 and you'll receive raffle tickets for a number of prizes from local businesses. In the end, it's a win-win. So share the surplus!

AP: Former DHL Workers Move On in Different Ways

The Associated Press published a story today that features a handful of former DHL employees who are making ends meet in new, sometimes wildly different ways.

There's Nancy Hertlein, pictured above, who with her husband has started growing berries and raising honeybees, using the fruit in homemade pies which they sell at local markets. (You can find them at the Clinton County Farmers' Market. Full disclosure: I've tried them. They are easily the best slice of pie you will find in the county.)

Though the Hertlein's haven't turned a profit yet in their new business, they realize that slow-food is slow coming, and new businesses take time. The Hertlein's have personally expressed interest to us in growing food on their property, and it's great to see them featured positively in this story.

Also in the story are Eric and Sandy Wogomon, whom you may know from Next To New Apparel in downtown Wilmington. The Wogomon's opened their second-hand clothing business after Eric lost his job at an auto-supplier in January, and Sandy was laid off from DHL in July. Next To New is a Buy Local First business and the Wogomon's are very active in the local business community in Wilmington. Stop by their storefront at 14 North South Street downtown for some great deals on name brand clothes.

The story ends with another familiar name, 47-year-old Mike O'Machearley, who was laid off as a bus driver for DHL in the first round of layoffs. O'Machearley has turned his hobby of making customized hunting knives into a business, and thanks to the 60 Minutes piece about the DHL departure which also featured Mike, he has 2 years of orders to fill. Read more about his business at his website.