Curbside Veggies. In Arkansas?!

This is not a post about frugal living. Nor is it about Oklahoma, although very close to us. This is about accidentally discovering a place that is a gem of a sustainable restaurant model where veggies are vogue. Last weekend we went to a family wedding in Fayetville, Arkansas. And thanks to Urban Spoon, I stumbled upon a little green restaurant called The Greenhouse Grille. The building was actually green and it was very near to the University on one of the busiest streets in town in one of the most modern and chic shopping centers in town. No wasted space here. Even their green islands in their parking lot were overflowing with edibles. (This is also an important type of space cities need to utilize as bioretention sites to prevent waste water runoff in parking lots)

Their front space was not adorned with purposeless plants like Asian bradford pears or azaleas but with strawberries bounding out to greet me, asparagus crowns towering up, fennel fanning out, parsley making a landing pad for sleepy butterflies, and Swiss chard sporting it's rainbow style. Their side space had more veggies and peas dutifully standing at attention and in the back they had several raised beds about fifteen by four inside of a mini hoop house. Let's go back to these gardens of yore because doing so would be really a victory. Wow! Talk about curb appeal, talk about fresh to my plate. This is the kind of thing I have read about at sites like Alice Waters Chez Panisse world famous restaurant and would encounter snippets of when I lived in Santa Barbara, but to see such a restaurant model in the mid-west in an area dominated by businesses making everything bigger and outsourced from as far as possible- one does clucks and one is the biggest retail world within our world-was refreshing.

Additionally Greenhouse Grille sources their meats, veggies, and grains from other local producers. Including the War Eagle Mill, which is an outstanding historical fieldtrip in itself. They also actively work to support local musicians and to abate local hunger in an area that is cursed with simultaneously being the richest and the poorest region in Arkansas. And what better way to abate hunger than to start from the ground up. And yet, many cities outlaw front yards that could contribute to the hunger solution or provide an ecological stopover for native birds and butterflies. Our cousins outside of Joplin told me that their mowing ordinance is to keep their grass at one inch or less- oy!

Does your city allow veggies to be front and center in urban landscapes, yards, and businesses? Do you and your city use your urban land to it's maximum potential, especially as one acre of viable farmland is lost every minute to urban sprawl in this country? What acts of gardening civil disobedience have you or your neighbors performed secretly or overtly? How do we tell our city commissioners and home owner's associations that we deserve the freshest food for our forks and spaces reclaimed from the tyranny of bermuda grass and japanese honeysuckle?

Tell them we need veggies front and center.

Garden Folk

 

A couple of Saturdays ago I got to be on the other side of the table at a Farmer's market event at the Oklahoma City Oklahoma Food Cooperative store. For the first time I was there as a vendor. Wow! What a beautiful day doing business the way it was done for many years at this location in it's prime. Getting to know these farmers and regular variety garden folk was really touching to me. Plants make people happy, pure and simple. And I got to give part of that happiness. I was there selling cards and garden seeds but I got to sit next to the plant people- those who know hospitality, heirlooms, and handshakes.

 

My newly found friends are amazing. My friend Dev Vallencourt and her husband Kip Francis at High Tides and Green Fields grows 147 different varieties of peppers. Pretty sure you will never see a tenth of that many varieties in any grocery store. She also was teaching me about some innovative (or perhaps wise, antiquated ways) she has begun to grow winter crops in hugelkultur method from Germany that creates so much heat by planting on top of old wood that she was able to grow crops all winter long, uncovered.

I met a young farmer, Samantha Lamb who was managing a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) endeavor on her grandparents homestead in the Medicine Park area. I met Michael Ruzycki who is farming and hosting a store in Choctaw, The Veggie Lounge who said he started because he was always amazed at how much leftovers his grandfather always had from his garden. Two other guys have started an event composting and zero waste company, Fertile Ground in Oklahoma City. Others, like Renrick farms are working diligently to provide more drought tolerant, native, and butterfly loving flowers. Double R farms  was there  selling pastured lamb and eggs and Barb was trying to figure out what growing things looks like in Oklahoma after living for years in Alaska. There was experience and there was youth, but above all there was energy. Urban Agrarian hosts an all local market five days a week and their staff was busily working indoors sorting crates of tomatoes and processing local foods from all over into a wide assortment of baked goods while the old dog swatted flies with his tail on the porch. While we sat in our store outdoors community organizers from a "Better Block" project had gathered and were literally painting the town- covering over years of neglect and breaking ground for new beginnings.  

And then there were the customers. The lady who got a "pet" fern. The radiant Reverand who had been healed from a stroke. Everybody who marveled over how strawberries grow. Those whose garden was an epic fail last year, but they were trying again because they were determined to get their eight year old to like vegetables. And then the lovliest of my day, a young girl who had just come from a workshop where she had made a planter box a few inches wide by about three inches deep. She was absolutely bursting to find a way to plant things. No one had showed her the dirt in her own yard. She was so enthusiastic she could have made seeds sprout just by sheer wish. "I just want to grow something I can eat she told me." So we made a deal and I sold her two packets of lettuce and peas... And, hopefully, a share of the garden.

Simplicity in Snow Soup: Crockpot Beans with Pumpkin

It's sopping outside and icicles are beginning to push through, stinging like an emerging child. Snow will follow to quickly drop on us. And for a short time all things will be hushed in newness covered in a clean slate. Covered will be the molding leaves, crisped branches, and dormant seed heads from last year. Covered also are the new growth and the daffodils will still poke out their heads to see this new world. The birds will be shielded in their nests and maybe the moisture will bring us a little closer to normal water levels.  All these hidden seeds will be on an equal playing field before some emerge greedy pushing their way over the others, taking a large share of the water and nutrients.

Yesterdays Quince blooms that may be covered by tomorrow's snow

For those of you who celebrate Lent, it's a good time to simplify your meals a bit and reflect on the ecological impacts of your food chain. During a season of lent or reflection and to address that question of why some of these disciplines may prove fruitful I love Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline. For me, I try to focus a little more on whether my food abundance, and yes, excesses, are overtly or covertly impoverishing others or their land. If you are interested in seeking some communal resources that have many external sources to explore some of these issues I would recommend the curricula Just Eating? Finding Faith at the Table. Sometimes we try to eat more simply, in hopes that others may simply eat. I know this is idealistic, but still collectively could be very powerful.  I often think about those one billion around the world living on less than a dollar a day. Once I heard a challenge: To think about solidarity with the poor, have your family have one meal or one day a week when you try to eat just rice and beans and then to donate what you would have spent on a meal towards a hunger charity.

I love this concept. So I think that throughout lent I will try and bring in some meatless recipes that feature legumes with or without a grain. A great source of inspiration for this kind of bare cooking is Francis Moore Lapel's Diet for a Small Planet which has grown into this book and also Mennonite cookbooks.

So it's snowing, and everyone I know seems to be cooking up a pot of beans. So here is my contribution to that trend. Tasty, simple, and savory.

• 3 cups of 10 bean mix $2.28
• 12 cups of homemade vegetable broth (for this one I think it tastes best with minimum onions (sweet onions are okay) and tomatoes). Carrots tops and mild greens and celery tops. ~$2 of leftover vegetables
• 2 cups of pumpkin puree $1

Total: $5.28
Cost per person $0.88

Set your beans out to soak for a solid eight hours.

We still had a medium pie pumpkin left over from Halloween so I cut and scraped it. Then I cut it into large chunks. Put in the microwave covered with water for about 12 minutes on high. This makes the skins just peel away and it can be mashed with a fork to used for any pumpkin recipe. Put it in the crock pot on lowest setting along with the beans and broth. I cooked mine for 10 hours and then just left it warming all day, barely cooking till dinner.


Now make a cozy drink and go watch the snow!

A Trip to the Urban Harvest Program on National Day of Service

Happy Martin Luther King day and Happy Inauguration day! (For a post I wrote paraphrasing MLK's I have a dream speech go here).

I thought President Obama's National Day of Service and continuing service projects are a really important potentially unifying step and wanted to be a part of it.

Official image from the inauguration weekend.

To be honest when I watched the first inauguration in 2008 I cried. It was beautiful and touching for many reasons. One thing I realized was just how much we are guilty of first thinking about people's differences rather than their humanity. After growing up in a very ethnically diverse area of California it is amazing how easy and trivial it is to pass judgements initially by physical appearances. Of differences related to political party, skin tones, sexual orientation, economic status, age, gender, etc. How myopic we are. And I was, and continue to be moved, by the President's ability to reach out his hand across the table and sincerely engage with all kinds of people, even when they respond with snarls and lies, and his desire to fight hard against injustices. I have to ask myself how often I am like that. And while race is only one part of his identity, I was struck down by just how much having an African American president made me look at people I passed on the street in a whole different light. Now when I pass a black youth on the street I say a prayer for him to hold his head high and I think, and want to shout to my children, and anyone else standing nearby, "Hey respect that guy- he could be President someday. As a mother, Mr. and Mrs. Obama remain the kind of people that I want my children to imitate.       

This is a blog about good and sustainable food, but one cannot talk about that without also talking about poverty. Abundance and poverty can be two sides of the very same coin. I commend Michelle Obama for her recognition of the food injustices occurring in this country and love her so much for making gardens a posh front yard staple.

For some astounding poverty statistics and connections to where you can donate your own excess garden produce check out Ample Harvest. Here in Oklahoma over 675,000 people may go hungry every night, some of these children. We have outrageous obesity rates, and a very high percentage of our schools qualify for free or reduced lunch, and for the Weekend Snack Backpack program from the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma.

Here in Oklahoma, if you do not know about the Regional Food Bank and the work that they do with their Urban Harvest program, I would definitely encourage you to consider taking a tour. Or even better, donate! If you want your donation to go to the garden- make sure to delineate Urban Harvest program!

When I moved back to Oklahoma eight years I got to visit and participate a few times then. The Urban Harvest Program is the most revolutionary, sustainable, and enabling part of the program. They compost, deliver and donate thousands of seeds and seedlings, teach gardening classes, and teach kids what fresh and healthy can taste like. It was these initial visits that made me decide that I wanted to do my grad school research about school gardens (it evolved from that to also include outdoor classrooms). But recently they have added some additional projects that I have wanted to see for some time. Finally I got to go and take the boys there again!

Compost tumbler

Inside their two large hoop houses (For the difference between a hoop house and a green house, and many other kinds of harvest extenders go here) they have undertaken three very cool projects. Two of which they may have been the first to do on any sort of commercial scale in Oklahoma.

Peas please!

First they have installed an aquaponics system that raises tilapia in large drums and then cycles their waste water as fertilizer for plants growing only in a water-based soilless medium. See below to see what beautiful swiss chard they are growing in January. Their tanks are holding about 200 fish each. Currently they sale their fish to some local restaurants . Some advantages of this kind of system are that 1) it makes a super efficient way to raise protein, 2)it isn't dependent on commercial fertilizers and pesticides,  3) it puts waste products into use on the spot, rather than either leaving them dormant, letting them leech into local water sources (a gargantuan global problem), or utilizing enormous amounts of energy to truck them off-site, and 4)It also doesn't deplete soil or make the need for it to be either trucked in or built over long periods of time.

Swiss chard growing in waters fertilized by Tilapia refuse

Checking out the tilapia

Second they have installed some strawberry stackers. These make it easier to 1)prevent some of the rust and fungal diseases so common in these plants, 2)utilize much less water, 3)keep them sheltered from some of the extreme Oklahoma temperature swings, which can be very difficult on perennial (those that come back year after year without being replanted) plants, and 4)make them less labor intensive for harvesting.

Oh, and they also make irresistible places to play hide and seek when you are three feet tall.

Thirdly they have installed worm (vermiculture) bins that are about three cubic feet on one whole side of one of their green houses. Our job for the morning was joining some lovely new friends to hand sort baby worms. This is like the Vera Wang of compost- enabling super nutrient rich worm teas and castings which they can also sell at premium prices. Elemental Coffee Roasting Company of Oklahoma City donates all of their old coffee grounds.

 

Out in the distance there is an apple orchard and berries, larger compost bins, and many more projects on the horizon. Especially if you believe a paraphrase of the Chinese adage: Give a man food and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to make his own food and he will eat for a lifetime.