Fox Point Community Garden

Here are a few more pictures of Fox Point Community Garden. You can see it’s a pretty funky little garden. This is a picture of the “garden shed”–a misnomer that conjures up images of small wooden shacks–when this is actually a big concrete building with plenty of storage space.

Update on plot 94!

Finally, I’m back home and able to blog. But not before going to the Southside Community Land Trust’s plant sale and loading up on organically grown vegetables to plant at my garden plot at Fox Point Community garden.

I was so excited to be back home, with beautiful weather that was perfect for plant shopping and planting. SCLT has a great, two-day annual plant sale and we saw lots of people we knew. It was a great feeling to be planting again.

Plot 94

I’m so excited because over the weekend I was offered a plot in a local community garden. I was waitlisted at three gardens and had pretty much given up hope of getting a plot this late in the game. But it turned out there were some openings at Foxpoint Community Garden, so I showed up this morning, plunked down $25 and claimed Plot 94, the most beautiful 8 ‘ x 4’ -ish patch of dirt that you ever did see.

Why not plant some native fruits?

Fruit trees and shrubs are a great way to expand your backyard food production beyond the vegetable garden. When I was growing up, we had a peach tree, a persimmon tree, blackberries, and wild plums to graze on, and my grandmother kept us supplied us with raspberries, Concord grapes, and apples. For a while, I lived on the West coast, where I had Meyer lemons, oranges, and apples in my yard. I’ll never forget the taste of the first glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice made from oranges picked that morning in my own back yard.

Tugging on an ear of (American) corn

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

–John Muir, U.S. environmentalist, preservationist, author, & founder of the Sierra Club

Environmental News Network (ENN) has a great article about what happens when you tug on an ear of American corn. A scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has shown that U.S. corn subsidies lead to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. (Bear with me, I haven’t ranted about corn in a really, really long time. I promise to keep this short and not foamy.)

Cranberry production: the journey from farm to juice bottle

With approximately 15,000 acres of cranberry bogs, Massachusetts is the second largest cranberry-producing state. (Wisconsin is the first.) I recently spent an afternoon driving around southeastern Mass. looking at cranberry bogs and learning about cranberry farming.