A stressed gardener’s weekend

I’m too angry about today’s intended blog topic–farm subsidies & the WTO–to actually blog about it right now. So for the moment, you’ve been spared my ranting and raving about Doha (and I have a LOT on my mind). Instead, though this isn’t a diary-style blog, I’m making a diary-style post about my weekend. Bear with me as I imitate a MySpace blogger, just for today.

Don’t mess with trees…..

According to a recent Reuters article, citizens in some towns are starting to get a little miffed about greedy developers and property owners who want to cut trees down for no good reason.

Festival of the Trees

I’ve been meaning to post a link to Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival that debuted on July 1 at Via Negativa and will be hosted each month by a different blog. A couple of Curt’s photos are included in the initial Festival, as is some of JLB’s work, among many, many others.

Submissions are currently being accepted for the 2nd festival, to be hosted by Roundrock Journal. Deadline is July 29–this Saturday!–for August 1 posting. For more information on Festival of the Trees, including what type of material is appropriate and how to enter your tree-related blog work, click here.

Blueberry farming in Vermont

A reader named Bill, from the Champlain Valley in Vermont, recently asked me for some information about starting a small blueberry farm in that area. For Bill and any other readers who are interested in blueberry farming, I put together a list of resources.

Why eat local?

In my last post, I explained that because Rhode Island farmers had been hit hard by the excessive rain that we’ve had this summer, it was more important than ever to support them. In this post, I’ll elaborate on other economic, environmental, and health-related reasons to eat local food.

Local farmers feeling the effects of too much rain

An interesting article in today’s Providence Journal describes the effects of our rainy spring and summer on local crops. Sorry if the ProJo makes you register; I’ll include the most important snips so you’re not forced to register with them.

Here’s the paper’s succinct description of what’s happened here so far this summer:

With more than 16 inches of rain pelting the state through May and June, popular native crops such as sweet corn and strawberries have suffered. Plowed fields turned into swamps, seedlings were swept away, and many of the plants that did take root were left dwarfed, yellowed and twisted from too much water.