Will Allen has a vision for urban agriculture

Liz Falk, founder of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious example of urban agriculture, Common Good City Farm, recently flew off to Milwaukee to spend time with farmer/genius Will Allen and his mind-boggling chain of farm operations in Milwaukee called Growing Power. Last night Liz gave a slideshow talk on the experience that was worth every penny of my $2 donation to the cause.

Pictures of Allen’s growing methods are breathtaking. Imagine renegade farmer Joel Salatin’s holistic, earth-friendly approach applied to an urban setting. Greenhouses are crammed floor-to-ceiling with all manner of vegetable beds, seed trays, growing pots. Trenches are dug down the middle for fish ponds; the water circulates up through several levels to feed watercress. Workers scour the city for food waste and beer mash, turning it into tons of compost that then feeds endless troughs of worms to make fertilizer. A chicken coop consists of  recycled plastic milk crates as nesting sites. The chickens, along with active compost piles, are strategically placed inside greenhouses to provide heat.

As Liz describes it, Growing Power functions more like an ant farm, with staff and volunteers swarming over problems, depending less on actual organization that on frequent doses of genius from Will Allen.

Planted in a food dessert, next door to Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, Growing Power now feeds some 10,000 people and Allen has become a rock star in the new food movement. But what impresses me most is that even after 12 years of operation, and a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant bestowed on Allen, Growing Power cannot support itself from what it produces. It still relies on grants and earnings from training outsiders and other income sources not directly related to selling its vegetables (even with the watercress fetching $12 a pound).

Is Growing Power the proper model for a successful urban farm? Or is it simply an incubator for ideas about how we might farm in the city if we could ever find a way to make that idea an actual possibility?

Following Liz’s talk, discussion about worm composting techniques gave way to the Big Question: We have the know-how. We have the land. Why don’t we have urban farms that can make fresh, nutritious food available to everyone at prices they can afford? The answer, of course, is that current urban agriculture efforts are still running on grants and volunteers, just like Growing Power. They don’t really compete with our conventional food system because the price of conventional food has never factored in the true costs of producing it: overuse of water and fossil fuels, extravagant carbon emissions, destruction of soil, toxic pollution of air and water. It thrives on huge subsidies of tax dollars, and a license to destroy the planet.

We’ve allowed our free-market method of producing food to spin out of control. For a good idea of how we’ve permitted faceless corporations to consolidate and wreck  local food system, read this piece by Grist food editor Tom Philpott in Newsweek. He sums up the dilemma neatly. Our current food system, like much of our consumer economy, is unsustainble precisely because it is so destructive, because it has never been priced according to the damage it does.

Is there a day of reckoning coming? Dwindling resources. Overpopulation. Global heating. Overwhelming government debt. Nobel economist Milton Friedman liked to say that no true change occurs without a crisis. Perhaps visionaries like Will Allen and Liz Falk are only a few years ahead of their times.

Plans for Justice Park Community Garden

The last time I sat in on a planning meeting for our neighborhood’s new community garden I was nearly run out of the room for suggesting it be built along the lines of a CSA farm, rather than simply providing plots to individuals. I reasoned that lots more food could be grown on a small farm under single management, but gardeners want their individual plots.

The plans for this 1/4-acre garden have come a long way since then. Recently Mayor Adrian Fenty participated in a much ballyhooed ground-breaking. Since our last meeting, a working group of gardeners has put up a site on Facebook, registered a Twitter account and even printed business cards, along with the Yahoo! listerv we’ve been using to announce meetings.

Last night, revised architectural drawings were revealed to a meeting of about 20 prospective plot holders and representatives from the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, which is responsible for the land.

In all, the plans provide for 40 individual plots, each about 50 square feet in size. That’s a pretty good size for a community garden plot. But the parcel also has room for a public area with room to stroll, seating and even tables. The discussion now centers on a proposed storage shed that some members would rather not look at, or think is too big. But the more I look at the plans, the more I see a place for a community composting facility, or even a greenhouse.

One of the most frequent questions I get from neighbors is where can they compost their kitchen scraps if the don’t have a compost heap of their own. The District of Columbia does not have a municipal composting program (it needs one), and people want to be more environmentally responsible and not send their food wastes to the landfill, where it just turns into methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Last year, a group proposed building such a composting facility at another community garden but could not get the grant funding it needed to get the project off the ground. With the city funding our new community garden, this is the perfect time to take up the idea of a small neighborhood composting facility, perhaps an indoor worm operation that could be used as a model for the whole city, as well as providing valuable worm castings for the garden plots.

Better yet, if not a storage shed, what about a greenhouse? Even if it were just a large hoop house, it could not only house a worm composting operation, it would provide an invaluable site for gardeners to start their seedlings in spring and extend the growing season spring and fall.

And dare I mention chickens? Can you picture a community garden with chickens, just a mile from the White House? Kids would be lined up around the block to get a look. And the gardeners would have fresh eggs every day.

Well, I’m not sure they’d go for the chickens. But there are all sorts of tantalizing possibilities for making this site a valuable food resource. It’s a blank slate–a completely vacant lot–with tons of room around the perimeter for fruit and nut trees. A landscape architect has been working with the group, and apparently a desire for shade trees has been expressed. But why not trees that feed people? Walnut, hazelnut, chestnut: with very little care, these not only provide shade and valuable carbon sequestration, but shed edible nuts year after year. Cherry, plum, apple, peach, pear, fig thrive in the city. Paw paw has the added virtue of being native to the area.

The group has also requested hedging. But why not berries for hedges? Raspberries, blueberries, black berries, currants: they are all worthy landscape plants, as well as providing a bounty of nutritious food at different times of the year. Fruit and nut trees, berries, perennial vining plants such as grapes or kiwi–all should be features in any modern, sustainable community gardening scheme, to my mind.

On its Facebook page, the Justice Park Community Garden lists the Capitol Area Food Bank as a partner. In fact, 10 percent of the garden–or four plots–are to be set aside for a local food bank. But it was disappointing at last night’s meeting to see only white faces representing an area of the city that is heavily populated with blacks and Hispanics. This garden is one of the most urban of any in the city. It is surrounded  by apartment buildings. In fact, the garden site abuts a low-income housing complex.

At one point early in the planning process it was suggested that an effort should be made to go door-to-door, with interpreters if necessary, to encourage people who might benefit most from growing their own food to participate. I wonder if a more valiant outreach effort should not be made. We were told that anyone belonging to the Yahoo! listserv automaticallyqualifies for a garden plot. But as one would-be plot holder noted, many of our neighbors don’t even have computers.

The question sits there waiting to be answered: how do you get the entire community involved?

A new record for us

This weekend I recorded the highest temperature ever in our compost pile here in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House: 150 degrees. I love digging into the pile to deposit kitchen scraps, seeing steam wafting out of the debris, feeling a blast of heat.

That’s bacteria at work, thermophiles who thrive at high temperature. When they’ve had their fill, they will die back and the pile will cool, indicating it’s time to turn it over and inject more oxygen.

I attribute the higher temperatures to all the coffee grounds we’ve been foraging from Starbucks and horse manure collected at a friendly riding stables. I’m not trying to set any records here, but a little heat does speed the composting process along, and with winter approaching activity inside our uninsulated pile is likely to slow a great deal.

A sample of summer from the pantry

Our kitchen could be in a museum, it’s so old. But it’s big enough to fit a dinner party, start to finish, and the big island has enough counter space for a substantial buffet, a real advantage feeding a crowd.

When six friends came to dinner last night we went to the pantry for hors d’oeuvres and put out quite a spread representing our garden’s summer production. On one plate we had sweet pickled green tomatoes along with extra-crispy bread-and-butter cucumber pickels. There was a platter of more piquant items, including our favorite Texas-style pickled okra, our recently discovered spicy green tomato pickle mix and pickled banana peppers. There was a separate dish of Italian-style marinated vegetables–carrots, cauliflower, green pepper, onion–as well as the eggplant we like so much preserved in olive oil with basil and garlic.

I put out a platter of cheeses, including a fresh goat cheese to be spread on crackers and topped with a sweet green tomato mincemeat. Since I am not eating starches, there was also a small bowl of zucchini slices. I like to smear goat cheese on a zucchini slice and dab it with the mincemeat. Try it with a gin martini, you can’t go wrong.

 A bowl a fresh radishes mixed with mildly peppery Hakurei turnips also goes well with cocktails.

You tend to forget how busy you’ve been putting food by from the garden–or what a great assortment of food you have stashed in the pantry–until you see it all spread out like that. Everyone was invited to serve themselves with small forks and tiny plates.

Dinner was a repeat of a menu recently prepared for a client: mixed salad greens from the garden with mizuna, red mustard, arugula, toasted walnuts and honeycrisp apple, all tossed with a honey-mustard vinaigrette; pork tenderloin, brined then grilled, with mashed rutabaga garnished with fried shallots, and braised red cabbage with smokey bacon; and for dessert, apple crisp and vanilla ice cream.

Normally I don’t like to cook a la minute at dinner parties. It’s so much more relaxing to have all the food done ahead of time so you can enjoy your guests. So I spent part of the evening by the grill and this time of year, when the sun is setting around 5 pm, that can be a challenge unless you’ve thought to place some strategic lighting around the grill. We hung Christmas lights, which work just fine.

Will Harris, grassfed beef famer, and family

How’s this for coincidence: I walked down to the Whole Foods yesterday to buy some pork tenderloin for a dinner party and who do I run into in front of the meat counter but Will Harris, beef farmer extraordinaire.

You might recall Harris from the terrific videoI linked to recently in which a camera crew followed him around the ranch in southern Georgia where Harris’ family has been raising beef since 1866. Harris’ beef forages on natural pasture and is completely grass fed. The video, produced by the Southern Foodways Alliance, captures him in his element, driving around with his dog, holding forth in an utterly charming, Southern manner on the virtues of naturally produced meat.

What I didn’t know was that Harris supplies grassfed beef to all the Whole Foods stores in the Mid-Atlantic region. So there he was in his cowboy hat and cowboy duds, handing out literature and urging people to try a little beef an assistant was preparing to fry in a nearby skillet.

Seeing him there was a bit startling, like bumping into a character from a dream, since I not only posted about his video but this week was closely following the debate over grassfed meat in the wake of Nicolette Kahn Niman’s op-ed piece on the subject in the New York Times, and subsequent exchange, here and here, over the environmental impact of meat in The Atlantic Food Channel.

I explained this to Harris, who said, “I know Nicolette Hahn Niman,” and he handed me a DVD of the film in question. When I remarked that I had no idea it was his beef on display at Whole Foods, he pulled me over to a corner of the display case where, sure enough, there was not only a picture of him way down low, but a row of steaks labeled “grassfed.”

The labels don’t really jump out at you. In fact, they’re on the small side. But that is what you need to look for: “grassfed” in one corner of the meat label. That would be from Harris’ White Oak Pastures, where he has the only on-site meat processing plant east of the Mississippi.

“Look, you can see how much leaner it is,” says Harris, pointing to some of his steaks next to others that are not grassfed. Indeed, Harris’ meat does not have all the fatty streaks, or marbling, that distinguishes corn-fed beef. It looks much more like the lean buffalo meat a little farther down the meat counter.

Stunned as I was to find Harris there, I managed to collect myself and ask a question that has been plaguing me ever since I first saw the film. In it, Harris says that he no longer uses chemical fertilizers on the grass his beef feeds on. That was the first I had ever heard that beef producers used chemicals on their grass. Did he know how many farmers do that?

Harris, who is prominently involved in the American Grassfed Association, said he didn’t have any statistics, but ventured that it is “common practice” for producers of grassfed beef to douse their pastures with chemical fertilizers. So if you’re a purist, be sure to inquire whether your grassfed beef was really raised naturally, or with the aid of chemicals.

I felt a little guilty walking away from this conversation with a bundle of pork. Next time, I’ll be looking for Harris’ naturally raised grassfed beef.

Our favorite soup, now just a walk away

Last night we took ourselves out to a new pho joint here in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of the District of Columbia, then came home and watched a documentaryon public television about D.C. in the ’60s, culminating, of course, with the riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

At first blush, the connection between Vietnamese noodle soup and one of the country’s most tumultuous moments might not be immediately apparent. But I assure you the connection is there. Until recently, the area where the pho restaurant is located was a wasteland remnant of the events of 1968. As former D.C. Council Member Charlene Drew Jarvis notes in the film, it took 30 years for areas of the District devastated by the riots to begin rebuilding.

In many ways, Washington, D.C., is still a fiefdom lorded over by Congress, which was much quicker to rebuild Germany and Japan following World War II. But that’s another story.

When I first moved to the District seven years after the riots, the once bustling commercial zone along 14th Street in Columbia Heights was a scene of vacant lots and rubble surrounded by chain link fences. Commerce consisted mostly of dank liquor stores, drug dealers and a broken down Safeway supermarket. We dreaded ever having to set foot in the post office. It reminded me of a scene from “Fort Apache the Bronx.”

But as the years passed, a vision for developing Columbia Heights began to coalesce and grew increasingly concrete. Construction started on one of the last segments of the city’s subway system, including a centrally located station in Columbia Heights. I remember looking at a house for sale–a classic D.C. row house–within spitting distance of the future subway entrance. The street was closed behind Jersey barriers and mounds of dirt. We could have had that house for a song–alas, we had already purchased something down the road, nothing to complain about.

We followed the development via our neighborhood listserv, which often contained objections to plans for big box stores such as Target. Too much like suburbia, the commenters ranted. They wanted a main street lined with locally owned, mom-and-pop businesses, more like the old days.

Newcomers to the area of course know none of this. Years later, Columbia Heights is a happening place, anchored by that subway station and a shopping strip surrounding that very same Target. Where once we would have feared to tread is jammed with foot traffic and shoppers. There are restaurants of every sort–a British gastro pub, a hamburger joint, a Pot Belly’s, a Ruby Tuesday, a Panda Express–as well as sidewalk cafes, multiple ice cream shops, shoe stores, office supply, FedEx, Vitamin Shoppe, wine store….You get the picture. We’ve even been promised a supermarket focused on local produce. The neighborhood, in other words, has been completely transformed.

We are not enamored of runaway capitalism. But there is something to be said for smart development. For us, the benefits have been enormous. We no longer have to drive to the suburbs to do our shopping. And now, we no longer have to drive to the suburbs to sit down to a meal of one of our favorite foods–Vietnamese pho. The car stays in the driveway, which has to be good for the planet as well.

In fact, thanks to those visionaries who redesigned a neighborhood torn apart by violence, we now have a thriving community in which we can pick our daughter up from school, walk to a restaurant for Vietnamese pho and find three stores on the same block-each catering to a different income demographic–to shop for her winter coat.

Watching those old black-and-white images of the city in flames, I can’t help thinking that what’s happened all these years later is pretty cool. I have to think Dr. King would approve.

A great way to introduce kids to eggplant

Here’s further proof that great food doesn’t have to be complicated. This delicious dip relies on just three ingredients. It’s a great way to introduce kids to eggplant, a vegetable that even some adults find difficult to get used to.

The preparation is reminiscent of Middle Eastern baba ganoush, except that here the eggplant is fried rather than roasted and bound with peanut butter rather than tahini (sesame paste). We served it with freshly made sweet potato chips, an immediate hit with the kids in my food appreciation classes. But you could also use corn chips, root vegetable chips or fresh crudite.

Here’s another secret: there’s hardly anything kids love better than cutting vegetables or pounding things with a potato masher.

Start by peeling a tomato–20 seconds in boiling water, then transferred to a bowl of cool water to stop the cooking. The skin should remove easily. Cut the tomato in half and squeeze out the seeds, then remove the stem end and chop into small pieces. (Or substitute fresh tomato with 1 cup diced or crushed tomato from a can.)

Peel 1 medium eggplant. I normally do this with a serrated bread knife, first cutting away the ends. Stand the eggplant on a cutting board and slice the skin away lengthwise. Cut the eggplant into 3/4-inch rounds and, in a heavy skillet, fry in oil over moderately high heat until nicely browned on both sides. (Or, cut the eggplant into 1-inch cubes and fry in a deep-fryer.) Drain on paper towels.

Place the cooked eggplant and tomato in a mixing bowl, season with 1/2 teaspoon salt and smash thoroughly with a potato masher. Mix in 1 tablespoon smooth, unsweetened peanut butter. We use a brand without additives from Whole Foods. A wooden spoon works well to whip the peanut butter into the eggplant-tomato mix.

And that’s all there is to it. Yet this dip could hardly be more healthful as a snack or an easy hors d-oeuvres.

Read more great stories about how we are taking back our food system at Fight Back Friday.

Do monster pods hold next year's okra crop?

Saving okra seeds should be easy, right? You can’t hardly miss the seed pods. But the ones I saved from last year resulted in zero germination. What did I do wrong?

The only thing I can think of is I didn’t leave them on the plant long enough. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I let our biggest, most impressive Clemson Spinelsss plant take all the time it needed to produce these giant pods. The plant itself grew to eight and a half feet tall, with a stem like a young oak.

I will find a safe place for these pods. They will dry and hopefully produce a bumper crop next year.

We do love our okra. And from the way okra thrives here in the District of Columbia, I think it loves us, too.

I remember using a rake

It’s that time of year when scenes like this unfold in our neighborhood here in the nation’s capitol: a National Park Service employee pushing leaves around the sidewalk with the most polluting device known to man–a gas-powered leaf blower.

Does anybody else remember when we did this with a broom and rake?

How do we expect nations to come together on global warming if we can’t even get a grip on the simplest, everyday acts of polluting?

Since the man in the photo is an employee of the federal government, I have a proposal for our president, Barack Obama. It’s time to establish a federal bureau of sustainability. I see this as a cabinet-level agency that would review every activity of the federal government and evaluate it on the basis of whether it is sustainable or not, then make recommendations on how the vast federal machine can reduce its carbon footprint.

First to go, obviously, would be the ridiculous federal subsidies of the corn ethanol industry. Ethanol production not only spews huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, but drives up worldwide food prices. Really, do people need to starve so that Americans can pour corn into their gas tanks and contribute to the melting of the polar ice caps?

You laugh. But jurisdictions all over the country have been creating their own sustainability offices, looking for ways they can trim waste, cut energy use, treat the planet more kindly. It’s high time our federal government followed their example and appointed a sustainability czar.

Don’t you think that would be the perfect job for Al Gore? I can see him now, finally putting an end to the silly wrangling over which mode of agriculture–organics, or the kind that relies on chemical fertilizers and pesticides–is best for the planet in the long run. Care to wager where he’d come out on that one?

He could also require that Dick Cheney’s files of classified documents be shredded and turned into free compost for gardners.

Think of all the savings to be made in the military budget by simply declaring warfare “unsustainable.”

And he could finally put a stop to the infernal noise generated by all those leaf blowers.

Say yes to a sustainability czar, Mr. President, and make it brooms and rakes for everyone!

October yields a green tomato bonanza

Here we are turning the page on October and still we’re cleaning up the garden from summer. Down comes the cucumber trellis. Out go the okra plants.

But what have we here? A Roma tomato plant covered in green tomatoes? And over here–green cherry tomatoes, dozens of them.

Should I regret the tomatoes never ripened, or rejoice over another opportunity to pickle green tomatoes?

We already have a pantry full of our favorite sweet pickled green tomatoes as well as the green tomato and apple chutney we like so much. Lately I’ve been on the prowl for a savory pickled green tomato, especially after tasting a really good one at the pickle festival in New York. I can’t say I’ve done all the necessary homework, but then up popped this recipe on the Atlantic Food Channel. I thought I’d give it a try.

The recipe comes via Greek food writer Aglaia Kremezi who calls for two or three pounds of green tomatoes and is a bit vague on which kind of jars to can them in and precisely how to process the jars. The photo accompanying the story shows a storage jar with a clamped lid, not the kind you normally process. But since I had several such jars lying around, I pickled some of my tomatoes in those, and the rest in conventional Ball jars that got processed and sealed in boiling water.

The recipe also calls for onions and various kinds of peppers and I was happy to oblige with the odds and ends I gleaned from the garden. We just happened to have peppers still on the vine, as well as onions from our summer harvest in storage. Don’t be afraid to make your own substitutions.

• 2-3 pounds firm green tomatoes, large or small
    • 1 large or 2 medium onions, quartered or cut into 8 pieces
    • 4 cloves garlic, halved lengthwise
    • 3-4 bell peppers, red or green, seeded and each cut into 6 long pieces
    • 3-4 fresh or dried chilies, halved lengthwise with scissors but left attached at the stem
    • 4 bay leaves
    • 2-3 tablespoons coarsely crushed coriander seeds

The Brine:

    • 1 quart white vinegar 

    • 1/2 cup water
    • 2 tablespoons honey 

    • 3 tablespoons salt
    • 2 cinnamon sticks

Cut the tomatoes, onions, peppers and garlic and layer them in clean jars with the chilies, bay leaves and coriander seeds. Mix all of the brine ingredients in a pot and bring to a boil. Cook, stirring, until the honey and salt are completely dissolved. Pour the brine into the jars covering the vegetables, leaving 1/2 inch head space. Seal the jars and process according to manufacturer’s instructions.

Storage jars make attractive containers for pickles. Since they haven’t been processed, I plan to keep them in the fridge. Kremezi recommends waiting 10 days before eating these pickled green tomatoes.  We’ll do that and give another report later.