Archive for the ‘Farmers’ Category

Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | November 29th, 2010

While this blog normally covers issues directly related to the District, we have recently discovered that dear friends of ours in Virginia are in trouble and need our help. Just a quick moment of your time can literally help save a farm!

Posted by Andrea Northup | October 12th, 2010

By Andrea Northup

Imagine a D.C. schoolchild travels to a farm in Maryland and harvests green, leafy kale with his classmates. The students take the kale back to their classroom and prepare a delicious dish with the help of a prominent local chef. He tries kale for the first time in his life – and likes it!

And when he sees kale on her cafeteria tray during lunch that week, he eats it and encourages his friends to do the same. He gains a deeper appreciation – through his complete farm-to-table experience – of where food comes from and how it can be prepared in healthy, delicious ways.

During D.C. Farm to School week October 12-15, 2010, nearly 2,000 D.C. schoolchildren will have the chance to harvest seasonal produce on a local farm, and prepare it in the classroom with a professional chef. Additionally, schools across the District (nearly 200 in total) will serve and highlight fresh, local foods in their school meals during the week. The D.C. Farm to School Network is working in partnership with schools, parents, sponsors and community partners to make the week a success. A special thanks to our top-tier sponsors for their support – Whole Foods Georgetown , WGirls DC, and the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington. For more information, including a complete listing of participating schools and events, visit our site.

D.C. Farm to School Week will begin with an exciting kick-off celebration, featuring battling chefs, a local apple taste test, and a school garden work party/dedication ceremony.

When: Tuesday, October 12th; 1:00pm
Where: Thurgood Marshall Academy & Savoy Elementary’s shared Gymnasium
2427 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE
Near the Anacostia metro station and many bus lines; parking available in lot across the street
RSVP to Kacie @ kwarner@washingtonyouthgarden.org

Special guests Dr. Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, and Sam Kass, White House Chef and Senior Policy Adviser for Healthy Food Initiatives will join us, as students judge local chefs competing to create the tastiest dish from a local apple harvest. The images from a city-wide School Garden Photo Contest will be displayed and the winning photographers announced. A brand-new school garden, shared by Thurgood Marshall Academy and neighboring Savoy Elementary School, will be named, dedicated, painted and planted. We’ll also celebrate the passage of the D.C. Healthy Schools Act and the exciting changes in school lunches with Councilmember Mary Cheh. It’s an exciting time for Farm to School here in the nation’s capital – please join us in
celebrating!

Andrea Northup is the Coordinator of the D.C. Farm to School Network, which is a program of the Capital Area Food Bank.

Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | September 14th, 2010

Last month, Northwest Current correspondent Teke Wiggen followed Vince Hill, Jeffery Wankel and 30 volunteers into the heat of the fields of Parker Farms in Colonial Beach, Virginia to learn about our Glean for the City program.

Now in its second year, Glean for the City has become an essential part of our food pantry — enabling us to provide free, fresh produce to nearly 5,000 households each month. In fact, it’s been packing our pantry pretty much to the brim — and yet there’s still acres of food left untouched out there. (See our recent photos here.)

So we’re trying to figure out how to rescue even more. That starts by just giving it away more quickly. So now our NW food pantry is putting out a variety of freshly picked produce for anyone to take home–even if they don’t participate in our food program. Seriously, these bins are just set out there, and people can come and pick their fill. All we ask is that they promise to eat what they take — and enjoy.

Since the Northwest Current is only in PDF form, we’re sharing the full text of the article with you below.

Gleaning Crews Aim to Feed the Hungry
By Teke Wiggin, NW Current, August 11 2010

“Go deep!” yells a girl in a white tank top as she chucks three ears of corn in rapid succession toward a man stooped over a crate behind a row of stalks. The man springs upright, deftly grabbing each ear as it hurtles through the air. Laughing to himself, he snaps off the stalk butts and peels the thick outer husks. He begins to drop the ears into a crate lying at his feet but pauses and turns his head toward the girl. “You’re not checking these, Ashley!” he shouts. Ashley shakes her head and prepares to launch another salvo, scooping up ears from the tilled soil and snapping off others from trimmed stalks. On a sweltering Saturday, the two volunteers, along with about 30 others, are scouring Parker Farms cornfields in Oak Grove, Va., to harvest leftover crops for the food-salvaging program known as Glean for the City.

Posted by Liz Whitehurst | September 13th, 2010

“One of the goals of the Neighborhood Farm Initiative is to provide an educational resource for gardening and small scale organic food production for DC-area residents. It is in this same vein that we’re sponsoring this skillshare with some local home brewers,” said NFI Co-Founder and Program Director, Bea Trickett.

NFI and Mamie D. Lee Community Garden are teaming up to host a home brew contest and how-to workshop on Saturday, September 18th at La Casa Community Center in Mount Pleasant from 7-10pm.

Posted by shannonbshea | September 10th, 2010

Ecolocity DC, a local Transition Towns and community sustainability group, is hosting a “Building a Tumbling Composter” workshop next Saturday, September 18. The workshop will be held at 3 PM at the Emergence Community Arts Collective, 733 Euclid Street Northwest, Washington, DC. Composting is a great way to ensure that the nutrients in organic waste from food preparation are not lost and instead are returned to the soil to grow more food.

This workshop will focusing on learning by doing, as we will be building a tumbling composter for use in the Emergence Community Arts Center’s teaching garden. Tumbling composters are perfect for people with limited space or limited compostable goods, as they can create compost more quickly than traditional composting bins. They can also be put on a patio or balcony where traditional bins just aren’t practical. Although many tumbling composters are expensive, we’ll be building ours with mostly recycled materials. We’ll distribute instructions so that you can then take what you’ve learned and bring it home. If you’re a complete beginner, we’ll also have a bit of an introduction to composting.

This is the second in a series of composting workshops sponsored by Washington Parks and People. For information on this workshops or any of Ecolocity DC’s events, please email us at ecolocitydc@gmail.com or check out our events calendar.

Shannon Brescher Shea is an outreach organizer for Ecolocity DC.

Posted by Vince Hill | July 20th, 2010

[Cross-posted from Beyond Bread.]

Aaaand we’re gleaning again!

On Saturday, more than a dozen Bread for the City volunteers drove down to Parker Farms in Colonial Beach, VA. Some of our volunteers were BFC donors; others found out about the project from an NPR story about it last year; and still others learned about it from the DC Food For All. All of them were ready to roll up their sleeves and come to the rescue of the farm’s surplus sweet corn.

There was more out there than we’d expected. We gleaned just one acre out of 100s that were available to us, and left at the end with more than 1,700lbs of corn in tow. Farmer Rod Parker met us in the fields, and at the end of the day he told me, “my only complaint is that you didn’t bring enough bins.”

Why is so much corn left in the farm’s field? Here are some reasons:

1) Human error: laborers inevitably miss a certain amount of corn that is market-ready and perfect. Farmers often opt not to pay for a second pass through the fields, but are happy for volunteers to come do it.

2) Undersized/under ripe: corn that is too small to sell is left behind, even if it is edible. Shoppers are so picky that almost every type of produce has size minimums and shape requirements. Under-ripe corn is also left behind. It’s not as tasty or filling, but still edible — and often ripened by the time we get to it.

Posted by Andrea Northup | July 15th, 2010

This is the story of a rising D.C. high school senior’s experience volunteering with the D.C. Farm to School Network, a program of the Capital Area Food Bank that works to get more healthy, local foods into D.C. schools.  Bella Herold volunteered during a special event – Strawberries & Salad Greens – when the Network [...]

Posted by Andrea Northup | June 23rd, 2010

Local lettuce and berries for school lunch being prepared at CentroNIA If you walked into a D.C. school cafeteria on June 3rd 2010, you may have been surprised at what you saw on students’ trays!  Over 150 schools in DC featured fresh, locally-grown strawberries and salad greens as a part of their school lunches.  This [...]