A sustainability manager and a professor of forest ecology from University of Northern British Columbia talked about their experiences starting up a farmers market in the far north. As can be expected, fresh fruit and vegetables are lacking, and they focus more on dried, canned, or otherwise preserved food. They work hard to make the market not just a place to shop, but to socialize and be entertained, as well. (A definite argument for music at Berklee’s market.) They don’t have the support of their food services contractor, which, as you can imagine, makes it more difficult. We’re lucky to have a food services director, Jessica Mackool from ARAMARK, who is passionate about these issues. She singlehandedly started the farmers market during Green Week this April and quickly expanded it to a monthly event.

Danielle Smyth and Scott Green from the University of Northern British Columbia

The other presentation was much more applicable to our situation. The sustainability coordinator (Rebecca Reining) and the food services director (Katrin Shum) from Arizona State University detailed the planning of their farmers market. This was all initiated by the students, who did a report on a market’s viability and requested it repeatedly. A pilot market was held in September 2009, and monthly markets began in February of 2010 (expanded to twice a month in October). This was a broad collaboration between the sustainability office, wellness program, ARAMARK, health and counseling, Arizona Farmers Markets, and many more. (I feel like I’ve had blinders on that I haven’t even considered involving our wellness program in our own farmers market.) Three offices even transferred $1,000 from their own budgets to support the market, and members of the committee spent 4–5 hours a week working on it.  Their schedule is 9:00–2:00 every other Tuesday, September through November and January through April. Berklee’s runs April through October, and I definitely saw a drop off in attendance this summer. However, I’d hate to ignore the summer students, and with such an urban campus, I have to think we could get more local residents attending in the summer with more marketing. Some other suggestions that we could take to help students actually use the food: selling local and organic prepared lunches and offering microwavable recipes.

It was heartening to see someone struggling with the same issues we have, if on a larger scale, and hear their solutions to them. October 27 is our last farmers market of the season, but I hope that we can build a larger coalition to bring Berklee’s farmers market back better than ever in April.

What a spread!

Ellery Kimball was there with the Blue Heron Organic Farm stand. Jason and I picked up some leeks, butternut squash, and arugala—three things we’re missing in our CSA this year.

Net bags to bring home all the bounty.

I’d never heard of Local Pickins, but it sounds like a great idea. It’s a directory of local farmers markets, bakeries, cheese shops, food trucks, and more. It’s nice to have one place to go for all this stuff.

Neither Pete nor Gerry.

The guys from Pete and Gerry’s were selling custard with applesauce. These are our go-to eggs when we don’t have Stone Soup or Country Hen. I really want to visit their farm in New Hampshire.

Grapes? In Massachusetts?

Bug Hill Farm had the sweetest grapes I’ve ever tasted. Definitely nothing like my old landlord’s.

A cold frame extends the growing season.

Green City Growers installs and maintains gardens in your backyard. It’s perfect for the lazy gardener (me). Do you think they’d do a porch garden for us next year?

A zillion different varieties of flour.

Local flour! I can’t believe Four Star Farms actually grows it in Massachusetts.

This remains my favorite “green” festival (sorry Boston Vegetarian Society!).  The Sustainable Business Network has done a great job with it.

It may not sound all that exciting, but soil testing for home gardens is awesome. This is because a soil analysis tells you exactly what to do to achieve optimal plant happiness in your specific soil. You get instructions about how much of a particular nutrient to add to your yard, you add it, and voilà, you’ve created the best environment possible for that plant’s healthy growth. This knowledge is key for people like me, who are interested in having pretty and edible things surround their houses but struck by a whiny, “do-I-have-to” feeling when gardening time comes around.

Nico taking a soil sample.

Because our house is from the ’20s, in addition to lovely gumwood molding we likely have some lead paint lurking on our shingles, and that’s why we initially decided to test the dirt where we planned to plant our vegetable garden. The website for the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Soil and Plant Tissue Testing Lab gave us nice, clear instructions for collecting and submitting samples. A week and $10 later, they returned three pages of scientific analysis and three more of soil improvement suggestions. Apparently our yard is perfect for growing strawberries and raspberries, but our vegetables need a bit of help. They told us to add manure and dried blood to the garden for the nitrogen, and then there’s the bone meal we should add for phosphorus. Sound appetizing yet?

Before I bought a house and started in my limited way to garden, I had never pictured soil testing as something a homeowner would want to do. It’s not as if it removes all the work of gardening, of course! Only hiring a gardener will do that. But knowing what to give your plants from the outset does greatly increase your likelihood of positive results (less dead plants!), and having a test done takes the guesswork out of deciding where to start. That makes it a win in my book. I may not find gardening to be any more relaxing than I used to, but at least I can enjoy going out to my little plot of tomatoes and zucchini and pulling something off the vine to go with dinner.

Mmmmmm.....

Almond Date Balls
(adapted from Cheap Healthy Good)

1 cup whole almonds
1 cup date pieces
3/4 cup sweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp cinnamon
pinch of salt

1. Soak the dates and almonds in cold water for a few hours. Drain.
2. Blend the almonds and dates together until crumbly.
3. In a medium bowl, combine date mix, vanilla, cinnamon, salt, chocolate chips, and 1/2 cup coconut.
4. Put remaining 1/4 cup coconut in a separate bowl. Roll dough into 1-inch balls and coat with coconut.
5. Set balls onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Chill in freezer until firm.

I was really gratified when they went so fast at class last week!

Brenda’s CSA this year comes from Smith Farm in Hudson, New Hampshire, and I’ve been given the honor of introducing it because I was born there. My parents, Tom and Tina Smith, own and operate the farm, and this is their second year running a CSA in the Boston area.

Pa doubles as Santa Claus in the winter.

In the 1920s, my great-grandparents moved to the edge of Hudson, where they ran a dairy farm. When my grandparents got married, they built a small house next door. My father, Tom Smith, and his brothers and sisters grew up there, where they grew up milking cows every morning and evening (even on Christmas, as he’s fond of pointing out).

When Pa (yes, I call him Pa—I’m told it’s very Laura Ingalls Wilder) was about 12, he started a small roadside vegetable stand, and before long, it was a thriving enterprise. It grew and expanded, and in the late 1960s, the Smiths got out of the dairy business and into vegetables. The sign on the barn still reads H.E. Smith & Sons for Henry Elmer, my grandfather.

By now it’s more than vegetables: the nursery and garden center are a big part of the business. Shrubs, vegetable plants, hanging baskets, annuals, and perennials are a big part of the stock, and the greenhouses open up in February to prepare for the spring. By the time the stand opens up in late April—usually right around Easter—the greenhouses are ready to burst, and you have to put the pansies out in the yard, since pansies can stand a cold night, and there’s just no more room at the inn.

Since it’s New England, the field crops are just starting to come up now. The first CSA shipment will probably be this week, though it will be scant: lettuce, scallions, radishes, beet greens. But by July 4, you won’t be able to get out from under the vegetables: peppers, cucumbers, peas, summer squash, eggplant, onions, carrots, beets, spinach. Corn and tomatoes usually appear a little later, but they’re worth the wait; I have honestly, unbiasedly never tasted corn better than Smith Farm corn.

My brother Dylan works with my father now, in the field and in the farm stand where most of the produce is sold. He’s 27 and is very good at the job. However much they both like to complain, Pa and Dylan work really well together, and Dylan has quickly developed an anxiety about the weather that rivals our father’s.

The farm stand

My mother Tina’s domain is the greenhouse, which is a huge job in the spring and early summer, but trails off toward the end of the summer as the last of the plants are moved out to the stand yard and sold. The only other full-time employee is my aunt, Charli Cohen, who has worked with my parents for as long as I can remember, and who runs the farmstand on weekdays when everyone else is in the field, and works in the greenhouse with Mom the rest of the time. All the rest of the fieldwork is done by part-time high school students who work for the farm in the summer—kids who don’t mind working in the hot summer sun starting at 7:00 a.m. if it means they can be out just after lunch and have their summer afternoons and evenings all to themselves.

The farm isn’t organic; organic certification is a complicated process, and the transition can be risky and expensive. But their use of pesticides and commercial fertilizers remains as low as they can keep it, and they’ve been looking for an affordable source of natural fertilizer—compost or manure—that can come anywhere near the volume they’d need.

Most of the business Smith Farm does is through the farm stand—people on their way home stopping in for fresh ingredients for dinner—but they do have a few local restaurants who buy produce there, like Cobblestones of Lowell. Last year we decided that they should try to run a small CSA, so we did a trial run with just five subscribers, all friends of mine who were willing to deal with the growing pains as we figured out how to make the system work. It went really well, but we decided to keep it small. This year we’ll have seven shares, and next year we may go up to ten. Pa wants to make sure that he can still keep the stand stocked. I can understand that; the whole farm is about 40 acres, run by a very small group of people, and quality is always the first priority.

Of course, I’m not counting my share. Every time I see my parents in the summer, I come away with huge bags and boxes of fruit and vegetables. It can be overwhelming, especially since I’ve only recently figured out how to cook well enough to make good use of most of it. Still, I couldn’t live without it. I spent my entire childhood eating raw vegetables straight out of the picking basket. I remember the shock, going to a farmer’s market in college, of realizing that I couldn’t just grab a green bean and munch, or eat a cucumber as I wandered by. But even living 40 miles away, I manage to recreate that bounty thanks to my parents, Tom and Tina, and my brother Dylan. I’m pretty thrilled that now my friends can, too.

Ellery with her brand-new sign.

I didn’t have space to get into it over there, but it was interesting to hear exactly what goes into farming organically. These are probably common practices at organic farms, but hers is the first I’ve seen.

• She plants a cover crop of rye each fall and plows it under in the spring to add nitrogen to the soil.
• She rotates crops to keep nutrients in the soil and mislead pests accustomed to certain plants. (She actually picks off larger bugs by hand.)
• She composts manure from a nearby farm to use as fertilizer.
• She uses an electric fence to keep the deer away. (Although when I was there the fence wasn’t up yet and the deer had gotten to some of the pea shoots. I guess they like them as much as I do.)

…and I’m sure much more, but this was all we got into. If you ever see her or her vegetables around, the farm’s well worth supporting.

She also sent me instructions on how to make a homemade Earthbox, which is a self-watering planter. You fill the reservoir on bottom once a week or so and the soil wicks up the water continuously. Just the thing for a truly lazy gardener.

It's a pretty simple design, really.

Of course, I’m so lazy that I couldn’t bring myself to actually make one, so I bought it (two, actually). I’m glad I did, because they came with instructions as to what soil and fertilizer to use, as well as placement suggestions for different kinds of plants. I’m sure this was all info I could find elsewhere with a little research, but it was all right in front of me. In fact, I kind of wish I’d bought the kit with all the soil, fertilizer, etc. already included, to make it even easier.

I definitely need to make it as easy as possible. I thought I’d finally grown a green thumb last year, when my herbs took off like crazy, until the day I saw my landlady watering them when she watered her flowers. Apparently I had some help.

So what am I planting this year? Lettuce, cherry tomatoes, basil, chives, and sage (my new favorite herb). This is far more ambitious than I have been in the past, so I hope it turns out well.

When we first planted them.

They perked up overnight.

I specifically planted the tomatoes and basil together, because this piece on companion gardening suggested that it enhances their flavors.

Since I ended up with more tomato and basil plants than will fit in the Earthboxes (they came six to a container), I put the extras in the pots I used last year, as a bonus little experiment. I’ll be interested to see if the Earthbox plants turn out better than the regular pots, and if the front porch or the back porch is a better location. I’ll keep you posted.

I do consider myself an environmentalist, but I eat too much meat, drive too big a car, and am far too lazy to call myself a good one. I want to be a good steward of the earth, but more in the way I want to go to the gym than the way that I want an ice cream cone—an individually wrapped in non-recyclable packaging, preservative- and chemical-laden Nutty Buddy. Oh yeah.

Adam helps with the recycling.

So in the little moments I snatch in my busy schedule of working, raising a kid, and not going to the gym, what’s the minimum I can do to be part of the solution? What are my tricks for making things a tiny bit easier—just enough to tip them over into “doable”?

1. Enlist an expert. Seriously, there’s a ton of information out there, and how in the world is a person supposed to decide whether it’s more Earth-friendly to drive five extra miles to buy organic from Whole Foods or go the nearby Johnnie’s Foodmaster, save the gas, and just wash off the pesticides? Luckily, I have a good friend whose blog you are coincidentally reading right now. I am a mediocre researcher, and Brenda often knows the answers to my questions off the top of her head, or knows where to look for the best info. If you don’t have a friend like this, you can borrow mine. I’ve been trying to talk her into adding an “Ask the Pragmatic Environmentalist” feature for a little while now. If you think this is a good idea, send her questions.
2. Raid your neighbor’s garden. If you have friends and neighbors who garden, chances are they’re offering you tomatoes and zucchini in the summertime. And you know what? They mean it. They’re not just being polite—or rather, they are just being polite, inasmuch as they are not begging and pleading with you to get all this zucchini out of their house, for the love of God.
3. Get a cherry tomato plant. I say this as an incredibly lazy person who rarely remembered to water hers—that one plant must have given me almost half a bushel of tomatoes last summer, at a rate of 5-15 per day. As someone who hates getting dirty and considers gardening to be significantly less fun than getting blood drawn, I can truly say I love my cherry tomatoes.
4. Keep a recycling bin in the bathroom. I’m enough of a slacker that by “bin” I mean “paper bag,” but if you care about aesthetics, you could get a more attractive vessel. Do you know how many toilet paper rolls were getting thrown away because I couldn’t bother to bring them downstairs in the middle of the night? How many pill bottles and the boxes they come in, slips of paper that I emptied out of my pockets at the end of the day, cardboard that the new sheets came wrapped in? Most of our recycling lives in the kitchen, but since our only bathroom is upstairs, it never made it in. Now at least 1/3 of our paper recycling comes from upstairs.
5. Eat the foods you love (that are vegetarian). When I think, “Oh, I should eat more vegetarian meals,” and then try to decide what to make, it goes poorly. I’m too old fashioned—I was raised on meat and potatoes. Veggies were a side dish. But when I find a vegetarian dish that I love, I add it to the rotation, and that can add up. Mushroom and leek gougère, falafel and hummus, cheese lasagna… Non-meat meals are generally cheaper, healthier (even with my, shall we say, liberal use of cheese), and much better for the world.

I have other laziness-related tips, like how you use less harsh chemicals when you just don’t clean your house at all and save water by not showering for a few days in a row. Don’t get me wrong—there are things I do that involve going out of my way—but mostly I’m looking for the path of least resistance in bringing my concerns about the environment into practice in my life, and you’d be surprised how possible that is.