…EAT LOCAL! Week begins with publication of the Fall Edition of Boulder County’s EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide and Directory (30,000 copies to be distributed; online edition at www.EatLocalGuide.com), featuring the 10% Local Food Shift Challenge and Pledge, and continues for a full eight days of fun activities aimed at raising awareness about the benefits of eating locally: including food film screenings, restaurant specials, outstanding speakers, chef demonstrations, cooking classes, farm and garden tours, and potlucks.
At the moment we’re spending about $700 million a year on food. From all that we can tell from the limited data that’s available, less than 1% of that is being spent on food being grown in Boulder County. That’s a tiny, tiny amount. So currently, our foodshed, which is kind of like a watershed, stretches across the globe. We’re bringing in food from China, South America, Europe, and as the industrial agricultural system begins to fail, we have no choice but to shrink our foodshed to be much, much more local. And it looks like we don’t have much time to do that…
The Transition movement in Colorado was the focus of an hour-long prime time PBS show in Denver on Aug. 18, in a program titled “Transition Cities” on the weekly Studio 12, featuring Transition Colorado co-founder Michael Brownlee, Dave Greenwald of Transition Louisville, Ann Cooper (“The Renegade Lunch Lady”) of Boulder Valley School District, and Shannon Francis, Indigenous Permaculturist from Woodbine Ecology Center.
…Farming by hand can be a meditative occupation. If I allow it, my mind and body begin to synchronize with sun and earth time. Ordinarily, the wavelength of change in maturing plants is imperceptible to modern people raised on restlessness. In a garden, nothing discernable to human senses happens in an hour or a day, much less within our ever shrinking attention span. That’s a shame, because the amplitude of this slow moving, verdant wave—that is, its capacity to carry creative energy and information—is enormous, practically limitless.
…The market has been around since the 1980s. The past five years have brought explosive growth to the market, but the growth has been thoughtful and measured so far. The nonprofit Boulder County Farmers’ Market, which runs the Boulder and Longmont markets, has for years added prepared food vendors and meat sellers and special events.
…Last fall we expanded our backyard food garden by about a fourth with a sheet mulch method of putting down cardboard directly on the lawn, then layering cow manure, horse manure, straw, amendments (powdered sea kelp, ground rock) and dead leaves into a foot-thick pile that slowly decomposed over the winter to form very nitrogen-rich soil. Before learning this method from Sandy Cruz, a permaculture teacher in the Boulder area, in past years we would purchase and haul in bags of potting soil and compost from the local nursery or Home Depot to expand our garden. No more of that!
Backyard farming seems a bit counter-intuitive. Why take time out of our daily routine to grow food at home when we can just buy it at the grocery store? Isn’t saving our time and effort part of the reason we work long hours and strive to make money? These questions seem to be ingrained in our culture’s DNA. Convenience is important, but so is preserving the environment, teaching children how to grow food, and building community resiliency. Yet there is an easy way to balance these values: practical and enjoyable design.
This year, the nonprofit Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) will support the construction of its 100th community garden. We only had time to visit four of them in the two days we were in town, but we got a kaleidoscope of ages, ethnicities, socio-economic strata, and motivations: the suburbanites in formerly rural Aurora, African and Asian refugees in East Colfax, school students all over the place, and upper-middle-class professionals in Rosedale.
Committing to buying locally used to mean eating at restaurants was a no-go. However, an increasing number of Boulder-area establishments are seeing the benefit in offering food grown within the county’s limits. Some restaurants, such as the famous breakfast spot, Lucile’s, has taken it even one step further by planting their own extensive garden in Niwot. While this home-grown produce is only available seasonally, long-time Chef Mickey Samuels says customers really notice the difference. “What better local stuff can you get than growing it yourself?” he says.
On March 19, Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin spoke before a crowd of more than 700 people in Ft. Collins, CO, a seminal regional event put together by the newly-formed Front Range Permaculture Institute. The impressive turnout and very enthusiastic audience response is a signal that a true revolution in local food and farming is underway—and that people in the Ft. Collins area are right at its forefront. Below is a video of Salatin’s rousing presentation.
