edible COLUMBUS | Spring 2012 | Issue No. 9 by Edible Columbus

THE GARDEN ISSUE

THE FACES OF FRESH FOOD. Curds & Whey • The Greener Grocer • The Fish Guys • Bluescreek Farm Meats Market Blooms • Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams • North Market Poultry and Game • Omega Artisan Bakery and 27 more

Supporting local businesses. Nourishing our community. Passionately preserving good taste. SINCE 1876

www.facebook.com/NorthMarket @NorthMarket

www.northmarket.com 59 Spruce Street

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Downtown Columbus

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(614) 463-9664

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open daily

As the owner of Local Roots, I believe everything is better when it comes from the farm. Our goal is to serve our customers with an abundance of locally sourced goods. We are excited to be an Ohio Proud Affiliate serving all-natural Ohio Amish chicken, Ohio pork and all-natural hormone-free beef. Our family farm, not far from downtwn Powell, povides us with fresh produce for the restuarant. When not from the farm, the produce is always purchased from local vendors. We have a small herb garden on the patio that provids us with most of the herbs we use. In order to utilize the freshest seasonal products, we change the menu often, and are always striving to increase the amount of local goods we use at Local Roots. Of the 24 beers on tap, 6 are from Ohio; we also pour 3 wines from local wineries.

I would like to take a moment to thank you for allowing us to be part of your day. --Jessi Iams

CATERING MENU, WOOD-BURNING FIREPLACE ON THE PATIO LIVE MUSIC EVERY TUESDAY & SUNDAY, GLUTEN-FREE PIZZA DOUGH

CONTENTS

2012

Departments 4 6 7 8 10 18 24 28 30 36 63 64

Features

Soil Matters

ultimate natural resource

sustainable city

By Victoria Spencer Illustrations by Lucy Engelman

by Marta Madigan

bees to livestock

Story and Photography by Kit Yoon

By Molly Hays

With a Stick and a String

The Farmer Down the Block Urban farming is growing—veggies to

American Potager

Local and In Season From the Kitchen From the Good Earth Local Foodshed In the Garden Young Palates Notes on Agriculture Advertiser Directory Last Seed

8 Rhubarb Fool 11 Grandma’s Omelet Soufflé with Strawberries

12 Asparagus Vichyssoise 13 Goat Cheese Stuffed Fingerlings

21 Stuffed Trout with Green Garlic and Herbs

23 Spring Peas with Mint Cream

Making Columbus the community garden center of the nation

By Tamara Mann Tweel

It’s a Lifestyle Mayor Coleman’s recipe for a thriving,

Jennifer Bartley and the

Edible Events

RECIPES

Just beneath our feet is the

Beautiful, Useful, Edible

Letter from the Editor

One to One, One to Many In Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland, the power of urban agriculture rises up

23 Dilly Heirloom Potato Salad

23 Creamy Green Goddess Dressing

By Colleen Leonardi

Cultivating the Past Growing, buying heirlooms strengthens a vital connection to history and diversity

By Bill Thorness

ABOUT THE COVER: Will Lehnert is owner of the local garden design firm Outdoor Space Design and was formally trained as a Landscape Architect from the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture. The watercolor he created for our cover was a seed of an idea from us, imagined and executed in the most inspiring way with his fine skills. Learn more about Will and his work at: outdoorspacedesign.net.

PHOTO BY © CAROLE TOPALIAN

Letter from the Publisher

30 Y

ears of remodeling excellence 1982 - 2012

“We’ve done four projects with Dave Fox in three years and their team continues to hit home runs. Our quality of life has improved because of what they bring to the table and our home has become more enjoyable.” ~ John and Betsy S.

www.davefox.com

614.459.7211

Kitchens . Baths . Room Additions . Basements . Outdoor Living

Call today or visit our website to learn more.

Letter from the PUBLISHER

have to admit I don’t have a green thumb. My husband is the gardener in our family. It brings him great pleasure to plant our backyard garden and a larger plot at his family’s farm in Plain City. On our first date, he arrived on my doorstep in German Village with a bag of vegetables in his hand. I thought it was endearing, too, that he had bought his grandmother’s house in Grandview after she passed away and continued to plant a garden in her yard. That first night, as I put his vegetables into a pretty bowl on my counter, I thought this might be the start to a promising relationship.

edible

COLUMBUS Publisher & Editor in Chief

Tricia Wheeler Editor

Colleen Leonardi Copy Editor

Doug Adrianson Editorial Interns

My own great-grandmother, Lelia Clyde Cochran, was an avid gardener. I remember pulling into her driveway on an ordinary street in Akron and being amazed by the beauty and color that filled her backyard. She adored roses. The first 20 rows of her backyard were covered by rows of rose bushes collected and given by loved ones through the years. Behind the roses were the vegetables, and behind the vegetables were the fruit trees. I still remember my great-grandmother looking up at us as we got out of the car saying, “Working in this garden is therapy, it’s better than seeing the doctor.” I think Lelia was very wise; they should name a rose bush after her. This year I am inspired to get my hands dirty and plant my own kitchen garden. I have always said to my husband, “If you grow it, I will cook it.” This year I am looking forward to being more present and connected. I hope in the pages of our special garden issue you will be inspired to feel the dirt between your fingers and to make small investments in your yard, your community or in the pots by your back door. From them, I hope something beautiful will flourish. Happy spring!

Tricia Wheeler P.S. Connect with us between issues at ediblecolumbus.com. We have new stories, recipes and events to share! Also, please ‘like’ and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

We’d love to connect with you each day! Edible Columbus

@ediblecbus

Colleen Arnett Claire Hoppens Culinary Intern

Audra Sedluck Design

Jenna Brucoli Business Development

Shelly Strange Contributors

Colleen Arnett Janine Aquino Jennifer Bartley Bambi Edlund Lucy Engelman Molly Hays Claire Hoppens Hubert Keller Colleen Leonardi Marta Madigan Nancy McKibben Catherine Murray Jessica Opremcak Madeline Scherer Victoria Spencer Kristen Stevens Warren Taylor Bill Thorness Carole Topalian Tamara Mann Tweel Beth Urban Susan Weber Kit Yoon Contact Us

P.O. Box 21-8376 Columbus, Ohio 43221 info@ediblecolumbus.com www.ediblecolumbus.com Advertising Inquiries

tricia@ediblecolumbus.com

spring 2012

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Edible Columbus is published quarterly and distributed throughout Central Ohio. Subscription rate is $25 annually. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used without written permission from the publisher. Every effort is made to avoid errors, misspellings and omissions. If, however, an error comes to your attention, please accept our sincere apologies and notify us. Thank you.

When we say local, we mean it. For us, local is a way of life. It deﬁnes us. Local doesn’t mean bringing grain or pre-made spirits in from another state and treating it here in Ohio. It doesn’t mean settling for a less-expensive ingredient from the next state over. Local means using the world-class resources that are right in our backyard, at all costs. Because local—truly local —supports our communities and creates incredible ﬂavor. Yes, it’s that simple.

Public Tours Weds. & Fri. 6pm For reservations contact tours@middlewestspirits.com 1230 Courtland Ave, Columbus OH 43201. Distilled from grain. 35–40% Alc. by vol. ©2012 Middle West Spirits. Columbus OH.

Letter from the EDITOR “Dream big—and take small steps.” —Anupama Joshi

Many small steps have led to the big dream of Edible Columbus. As we celebrate our second anniversary issue, I’m reminded of the first step I took to be a part of the Edible media movement. I knew I loved everything about the Edible Communities network of nearly 70 locally owned and edited magazines across the United States and Canada (reading an Edible publication always felt like coming home.) Many steps later, some of which were challenging beyond what I had anticipated when I took the first leap, I am so humbled and overjoyed to be dreaming this dream with Ohio—each moment a labor of love. These are gifts we give ourselves when we tell each other our stories. Thank you to all those working to feed us and take care of the land; to our subscribers and advertisers, without whom this publication would not be possible; and to you, dear reader. Thank you for taking these small steps with us each issue to discover the inherent pleasure good food brings to our lives and the lives of others. For our garden issue we asked: What does urban agriculture look like in Columbus? We have always believed there is something beautiful happening in your backyard. Community gardens are popping up in nearly every city in the country. Farmers are growing food on rooftops in some of the largest cities in the world. In short, urban spaces are becoming green spaces where ecology and culture converge.

Subscribe Today! Don’t miss a single issue!

When we started to unravel the story of urban agriculture in Columbus, we happily stumbled upon the story of Bill Dawson of the Franklin Park Conservatory. Dawson is a visionary leader for the way he brings meaning to the act of starting a community garden. Beyond community gardens, we looked at urban farming in our city, and other cities in the region, to learn more about what it means to make a living farming amongst the concrete and glass. And our contributor Marta Madigan had the pleasure of sitting down with Mayor Coleman to discuss his initiatives and vision for making Columbus a sustainable, green place to live.

Support and celebrate our local food community each and every season. Subscribe to Edible Columbus or give a gift subscription to a friend. Subscribe online anytime at ediblecolumbus.com. For more information, email us at info@ediblecolumbus.com or call 614-296-5053. I want to become a subscriber of Edible Columbus. I have filled out the form below and am sending it, along with a check in the amount of $25 (for four quarterly issues) payable to Edible Columbus, to:

But back to your backyard. We write often about how local matters, food matters, soil matters—and they do. But you matter, too. Big dreams are achieved by way of small steps. And your small steps towards finding the beauty in your backyard to grow what you eat and make Columbus a green, thriving, sustainable place to live matter.

With gratitude,

PHOTO BY ©SARAH WARDA, SARAHWARDA.COM

Sometimes it can be hard to see just how much we matter. But after working on this issue, and working on Edible Columbus for two years, I see how much each and every one of you matter, to each other and to the place where we make our nest each season. So my hope with this issue is this: That you too see and feel the power of one change and savor the true stories of people who are dreaming the big dream.

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Spring Cooking Series march

For details and registration, please visit ediblecolumbus.com

All About Salmon Noon–1:30pm, 6–7:30pm Fresh from our annual Edible Institute in Santa Barbara, California, Tricia will share what she learned from the symposium “Women of the Sea: Sustainable Seafood Challenges.” There is a lot of confusion around salmon: wild or farmed? frozen or fresh? She will relay advice from the experts. We will learn how to make gravlax and a spring-inspired poached salmon dish. Both are great recipes to add to your repertoire.

$35 | The MI Homes Demo Kitchen at Easton, 4047 Gramercy St., Columbus april

Baking & Cooking with Jan Kish Noon–1:30pm, 6–7:30pm Jan is a local culinary star (see our story in winter 2011). We are lucky to have her as our guest chef for a special class featuring her treasured recipes and delightful stories. Jan will be making a menu perfect for an Easter celebration: Poulet Dijonaise, homemade Caesar salad and her stand-up bunny cake. She will also demonstrate wonderful techniques for icing beautiful sugar cookies. Don’t miss it!

$35 | The MI Homes Demo Kitchen at Easton, 4047 Gramercy St., Columbus. april

Welcome Spring Noon–1:30pm, 6–7:30pm This vegetarian class will showcase the best ﬂavors of spring. Featuring asparagus, spring peas, baby greens, radishes, herbs and rhubarb. We will be cooking three delicious courses with a special emphasis on pretty presentations.

$35 | The MI Homes Demo Kitchen at Easton, 4047 Gramercy St., Columbus. may

In Celebration of Mothers Noon–1:30pm, 6–7:30pm This is a perfect class for mothers and daughters. I thought the best way to celebrate Mother’s Day in May would be to cook recipes that are elegant, special and unforgettable—just like Mom. Join us for a special salad with edible ﬂowers; puff pastry techniques, including the French Classic Vol-au-vent; a spring vegetable medley and, to ﬁnish, a Pavlova.

$35 | The MI Homes Demo Kitchen at Easton, 4047 Gramercy St., Columbus. may

Culinary Master Class Noon–1:30pm, 6–7:30pm Featuring the recipes of Master Chef Hubert Keller, this class is for those who read cookbooks by America’s best chefs and turn the page because the recipes seem too complex. Our class will leave you feeling conﬁdent and ready to impress with a delightful meal of Shrimp and Coconut Milk Soup with Ginger & Lemongrass; Fillet of Sea Bass in a Golden Potato Crust with Rhubarb Coulis; and, to ﬁnish, a S’More Burger.

$40 | The MI Homes Demo Kitchen at Easton, 4047 Gramercy St., Columbus. may

PHOTO BY © CATHERINE MURRAY, PHOTOKITCHEN.NET

Kitchen Gardens & the Delightful Jennifer Bartley Noon–1:30 & 6– 7:30pm Jennifer Bartley, kitchen garden designer, will be our special guest for this class focused on how-to tips for designing, growing, harvesting and eating from the garden. Tricia will be cooking three courses of spring recipes from Jennifer’s book The Kitchen Garden Handbook while Jennifer shares her knowledge and answers your questions. A copy of Bartley’s book is included in the price.

$55 | The MI Homes Demo Kitchen at Easton, 4047 Gramercy St., Columbus. june

Let’s shop at the farmers market together 10am–12:30pm Worthington Farmers Market has long been one of Tricia's favorite markets in town. Let's meet early and shop together! Tricia will introduce you to some of her favorite vendors and we will end our morning with a special brunch at the Worthington Inn, prepared with seasonal ingredients. Worthington Inn Chef Tom Smith will visit with us to explain how he sources local food and will share a few tales from the farm. Price includes brunch, cocktail and Tricia’s favorite farmers-market-inspired recipe cards.

$50 | The Worthington Farmers Market edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

Local and in SEASON

Vegetables & Herbs Asparagus, Broccoli, Cabbage, Cilantro, Collards, Greens, Kale, Mustard Greens, Radishes, Rhubarb, Spinach, Turnip Greens

Meat & Dairy Cheeses, Eggs, Meats, Milk

Other Products Breads, Honey, Maple Syrup

Rhubarb Fool By Tricia Wheeler I love simple recipes that are delicious and easy to make. Rhubarb fool is one of my favorite spring desserts. My best friend says, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I could eat this every day.

Serves 6 Ingredients 4 large stalks of rhubarb 5 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon reserved 2 cups whipping cream, Snowville heavy whipping cream preferred Couple of drops of vanilla extract

Directions 1 Chop up the rhubarb and put into saucepan with 1 tablespoon water and 4 tablespoons sugar.

2 Cook over medium heat until rhubarb releases its juices and the fruit is soft, approximately 10 minutes. Set the pan aside and let the rhubarb cool.

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3 Whip the heavy cream, the last tablespoon of sugar and the vanilla extract until it forms soft peaks. Pour in rhubarb once it is cool, and fold into the cream gently.

4 Serve in Mason jars or pretty wine glasses. Chill 30

minutes before serving. This recipe can be made ahead and refrigerated until dinner.

Edible Kitchen Notes: This recipe is also great in the summer with fresh berries or peaches instead of rhubarb. I also like to crumble up sugar cookies or meringues and then I pile the fool on top; this adds a little more texture. Garnish with fresh mint from your garden!

M B

WEEKLY FR WEEK FRESH MAR MARKET BA BAG Summer Season

Sourced from an array of local, organic or sustainable producers, the Weekly Fresh Market Bag (WFMB) is truly unique, every week. A portion of your subscription supports community programs by Local Matters.

Learn more at TheGreenerGrocer.com 4QSVDF 4USFFU t t wfmb@thegreenergrocer.com

Cooking with Chef Hubert Keller Columbus: What's your fondest memory Q: Edible from your childhood of cooking in the kitchen with your family?

Hubert Keller: My fondest memory is Grandma’s omelet soufflé with strawberries. Grandma loved to make this recipe for us when my parents went out for dinner. My brother and I looked forward to it for days, and it was a surefire way of keeping us quiet—we dared not misbehave or we knew we might miss out on it. This dessert is also special to me because it’s the first thing I ever made for Chantal; who knows, perhaps it so impressed her that she made a mental note to marry me!

a chef who observes French principles while Q: Asmaintaining a California-style commitment to healthy eating, what have you changed to become a French chef who cooks "healthy."

I did change almost everything, from modifying classic sauces and dishes to playing with spices and textures, using healthier thickener and binders and mostly eliminating fats without compromising FLAVORS!

your favorite spring vegetable to cook Q: What's with and why? A:

Love asparagus, in particular the white ones or the wild asparagus! You can be so creative with it and include them in the wildest creations (natural pairings: morels, truffles, sea urchin and, of course, a light mayonnaise).

My Life. How is this one different from your other books and what is it about?

I am excited about the new book because its not only a recipe book but also a book where I am able to express myself by telling where I come from, the environment I grew up in, about my very unique apprenticeship, [meeting] Chantal, my wife, and the way we took off traveling the world and settling down in San Francisco and Las Vegas. And how we have expanded professionally by opening different restaurant concepts, writings cookbooks, having my own TV show “Secrets of a Chef ” and having participated in “Top Chef,” “Top Chef Master” and “Top Chef Just Dessert, and many other national TV appearances.

PHOTOS BY © CATHERINE MURRAY, PHOTOKITCHEN.NET

We're excited about your forthcoming book, Q: Souvenirs: Memories, Stories and Recipes from

Chef Hubert Keller

is known best for his world-renowned restaurants Fleur de Lys (San Francisco), Fleur by Hubert Keller (Las Vegas) and Burger Bar (San Francisco, Las Vegas and St. Louis). Having delighted the palates of his peers, food writers and restaurant critics alike with his imaginative, modern French cuisine, he has received numerous awards and is regarded as one of America’s most talented chefs. His inﬂuence extends beyond his restaurant kitchens to the millions of people he reaches through his cookbooks The Cuisine of Hubert Keller (Ten Speed Press), Burger Bar: Build Your Own Ultimate Burger (Wiley) and the forthcoming Souvenirs: Memories, Stories and Recipes from My Life (Andrews McMeel, Fall 2012).

Grandma’s Omelet Soufflé with Strawberries By Chef Hubert Keller This is one of my favorite desserts. It reminds me of home because my grandmother loved to make this recipe for us when our parents went out to eat. My brother and I looked forward to it for days. This dessert is also special to me because it’s the first thing I ever made for my wife. Chef’s Note Allow 15–20 minutes to prepare. This simple and delicate dish can also be served for breakfast or brunch, as well as dessert. Ingredients 2 pints fresh strawberries (about 16–20), hulled and quartered 6 tablespoons granulated sugar 2 tablespoons kirsch, Grand Marnier or Curacao 6 eggs, separated 1 teaspoon grated orange zest 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon confectioner’s sugar, for dusting 8 fresh mint leaves, for garnish

Procedure

1 In a mixing bowl, combine strawberries, 1 tablespoon sugar and 1 tablespoon kirsch. Cover the bowl and set aside at room temperature.

2 In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the egg yolks with the remaining 5 tablespoons of sugar, the remaining 1 tablespoon of kirsch and the orange zest until thick and pale yellow. In another mixing bowl beat the egg whites just until they form peaks (but not stiff peaks or they will not fold in properly). Gently fold half the beaten egg whites into the egg yolk mixture until incorporated, and then fold the remaining egg whites.

3 Heat the butter in a 13-inch nonstick sauté pan over medium heat and quickly pour egg mixture into the pan, spreading it out as you pour. The mixture will brown quickly around the edges, the bulk of the soufflé will puff up after 3–4 minutes. (Alternatively, cover with a lid for 3 to 4 minutes to set).

4 Once the soufflé has begun to set, spoon half of the strawberries in the center and return to low heat for another 1 or 2 minutes.

5 Taking the pan in one hand and a warm serving dish in the other, slide the soufflé out of the dish, folding it in half as you do so. Spoon the remaining strawberries around the soufflé, and dust with the confectioner’s sugar.

6 Divide the soufflé into 4 portions with a dessert spatula and place on warm serving plates. Garnish with mint and serve immediately. Edible Kitchen Notes: Make sure you use a nonstick pan with this recipe.

Wine Pairing: Pair this with a nice, crisp, light-bodied, slightly berry-tasting French rosé bubbly. By Janine Aquino

“This is one of my favorite desserts. It reminds me of home because my grandmother loved to make this recipe for us when our parents went out to eat.” edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

Asparagus Vichyssoise By Chef Hubert Keller

Procedure

1 Heat olive oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add leeks and sauté over medium heat for 5–8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft but not brown.

Serves 4

2 Add broth, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then add the asparagus and reduce heat to a simmer. Cover asparagus and cook for 8 minutes, until tender.

3 Add spinach leaves and cover; keep simmering for 4 minutes.

Ingredients 1½ tablespoons olive oil 2 small leeks, split and thickly sliced 1 quart vegetable broth or water 1¾ pound fresh asparagus, minced (save 20 asparagus tips for garnish; cook them in water and reserve) 3½ ounces spinach leaves, minced 4 teaspoons nonfat yogurt, for garnish 4 edible ﬂowers Salt and freshly ground pepper

4 Transfer soup to a blender and purée until very smooth. Adjust seasoning. Cool off in ice bath (place bowl of soup in a larger bowl filled with ice and a little water).

5 Just before serving, place asparagus tips into rimmed shallow soup plates. Ladle the chilled soup gently over them. Garnish with 1 teaspoon of yogurt in the center and decorate with an edible flower. Edible Kitchen Notes: We enjoyed this soup both warm and cold. It would be a beautiful start to an Easter dinner. We added a few sprigs of fresh mint to the broth while it was cooking, and kept it in while it was puréed; this added another nice flavor to the soup. Wine Pairing Pair this with a Chilean Sauvignon Blanc— green-grassy, citrus fruits and good minerality. —JA

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PHOTO BY © CATHERINE MURRAY, PHOTOKITCHEN.NET

Chef’s Note: Allow 40–45 minutes to prepare. An easy recipe, inexpensive.

Goat Cheese Stuffed Fingerlings By Chef Hubert Keller Yields 20–24 pieces Ingredients 10–12 ﬁngerling potatoes 5 ounces goat cheese, room temperature 2 teaspoons white trufﬂe oil (or hazelnut or walnut oil) ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard 2 teaspoons sherry vinegar 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil Optional: chives and pink peppercorns for garnish 1 quart-size zip-top plastic bag (for piping)

Procedure

1 Wash the potatoes well. Slice the tips off each potato then cut the potatoes into 1-inch sections. You should get approximately 2 pieces from each potato.

2 Using a small melon baller, scoop out the center of each potato section, creating a cavity for the goat cheese filling. Be careful not to go more than ¾ of the way into the potato.

3 Boil a quart of water with 2 tablespoons salt in a medium saucepot.

4 When boiling, drop in the potato sections and cook until tender, approximately 8–10 minutes. While the potatoes are cooking, prepare a large bowl with water and ice. When potatoes are tender, use a colander to scoop them out of the boiling water and drop them immediately into the ice bath to stop cooking.

5 To make dressing, in a small bowl whisk together Dijon mustard and vinegar. Slowly whisk in olive oil until well blended. Set aside.

6 Pull the potatoes from the ice bath and line them up on a tray. Season lightly with salt and pepper, and then lightly drizzle with the dressing.

7 In a small food processor, combine goat cheese with white truffle oil, ½ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon pepper. Pulse until smooth.

8 Using a spatula, scoop the goat cheese mixture into the zip-top bag. Squeeze mixture towards one corner of the bag, then cut off a little bit of that corner to create a piping bag.

9 Squeeze the mixture into the potato sections, so that it completely fills each potato and comes just slightly over the top.

10 For garnish, top each potato with 1 pink peppercorn and 2 chive pieces. Edible Kitchen Notes: This is a delicious appetizer—perfect to make ahead and pull out when friends come over. Wine Pairing: Pair this with a Chilean Chardonnay, aged in light oak. Slightly buttery quality, yet a little spicy with some crispness. —JA

WOSU Public Media Welcomes Chef Hubert Keller to Columbus for 2012 Chefs in the City Event. On May 3, 2012, WOSU Public Media will present Chefs in the City, a live televised event spotlighting celebrity chefs and ﬁne dining establishments in Central Ohio. This year’s event will once again highlight the source and value of quality, local foods and feature an elite group of local chefs along with celebrity guest Chef Hubert Keller demonstrating signature dishes. Guests will be served samples of these dishes in a spectacular multi-course taster meal. A culinary-themed online auction and other events are also a part of Chefs in the City. To learn more visit wosu.org/chefs, check out the Chefs in the City page on Facebook, or call 614-292-4510 for general information or 614-292-4337 to purchase tickets. Chefs in the City 2012 will air on WOSU TV on May 19. All proceeds beneﬁt children’s educational programming on WOSU TV.

edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

Just beneath our feet is the ultimate natural resource By Victoria Spencer Illustrations by Lucy Engelman

o matter how cold and lifeless the ground looks (and feels) in winter, there is activity underfoot. Lee Reich—author, consultant and accomplished gardener from New Paltz, New York, whose graduate degrees include one in soil science—explains, “It’s mostly dormant but never dead.” To illustrate this, he quotes: “In a square yard of ground, the number of bacteria and actinomycetes [an anaerobic bacteria] would be 10 trillion. And that’s not all: In that same yard of soil there are also 10 billion protozoa [another microorganism that has a recycling function].” Even in the middle of winter, healthy soils are teeming with life. Reich says, “If you go down four or five feet, it never goes below 50° F., and many minute organisms thrive there.” In essence, it is a living skin insulating and protecting the terrestrial health of the planet. We often call this stuff “dirt,” but that has negative connotations—as in something to avoid and eradicate from our day-today lives. Scientists usually refer to it as “soil,” though that also has similar negative implications. Biodynamic farmer Hugh Williams of Threshold Farm in Philmont, New York, prefers to call it “earth,” saying “that keeps it positive.” Though there is so much of it and it has been around for so long, we know relatively little about soil. Reich admits it’s “a hard thing to study; it is underground, it is the ground, and it does change with the time of year.” We’re far more removed from the soil than our grandparents were, as much of our daily path is well covered with asphalt, concrete and the like. Williams notes the contemporary cultural obsession with and fear of bacteria, an essential element in soil, effectively drives a wedge between people and earth. Our frantic use of antibacterial soap to rid ourselves of the dreaded bacteria amuses Williams: “I’ve gradually come

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to the idea that oneness is to be completely identified with the earth, completely identified with its bacteria, not be separate from it.”

SKIN DEEP Reich defines “soil” as “a mixture of living and once living things that supports life on Earth.” Williams echoes its importance, saying, “It’s the living membrane of the planet.” It’s a mixture of air, water, minerals and organic material, such as decaying plants, earthworms, bacteria and microorganisms. Soil is highly stratified and certainly not the same six inches down as it is six feet down. It is composed of distinct horizontal layers called “horizons,” which range from rich, organic upper layers (called “humus” and “topsoil”) to underlying rocky layers (subsoil, regolith and bedrock). Healthy soil is crucial to the long-term survival of the planet because it is essential for the production of crops (as well as wild foods) used to sustain humans, our livestock, as well as wild animals. It provides the base that supports plant roots and stores the water and nutrients needed for

plant growth. The bacteria, nematodes and tiny arthropods in soil all cycle nutrients back to plant life. Healthy soils are the foundation for developing sustainable farms and gardens. If the soil is healthy, there’s a better chance plants will be healthy and will produce healthy fruit and vegetables. The Yale Sustainable Food Project reports that plants grown in healthier soil have higher levels of minerals and nutrients. Reich explains soil health is basically a matter of getting the correct combination of air, moisture and the microorganisms that make or keep the soil healthy and in turn keep the plants in the soil healthy. Unfortunately, many things humankind does damage and deplete the soil. Industrial agricultural practices such as mono-crop agriculture systems (the practice of growing one crop year after year without rotation) cause nutrient depletion and wide-scale soil erosion, while over-application of fertilizers and

“We’re far more removed from the soil than our grandparents were, as much of our daily path is well covered with asphalt, concrete and the like.” Fortunately, many farmers are choosing to use simple sustainable agricultural techniques, such as crop rotation and organic fertilization, in order to protect soil resources. “The earth is living, the soil is inherently alive. We need to foster and manage it, to create a strong nutrient cycle,” insists Williams.

pesticides contaminates soils and pollutes waterways. Abused soil can be as lifeless and inert as a sandbox if it is loaded with harmful chemicals. While healthy soil acts as a sponge retaining water and nutrients, and sequesters carbon for hundreds of years, weakened or “dead” soil acts more like a sieve, leaching water and nutrients and releasing carbon back into the atmosphere where it traps heat and warms the planet. Gregg Twehues, director of nutrient management at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York, explains how artificial fertilizers, which often have a high salt content, affect soil health on even a garden scale: “The biological communities present in soil want to live in a low- or no-salt environment. So when petrochemical fertilizers are applied year after year, basically those communities are driven downward and the soil becomes dependent on the application of those fertilizers.” The soil becomes an unsustainable system artificially propped up with industrialized stimulants, akin to a junkie kept alive by the very substances that are slowly killing him.

For Williams and for many other farmers and gardeners, compost, a nutrient-rich mix of decaying organic matter (typically leaves, grass and food waste) is an essential element in creating a strong nutrient cycle and a healthy farm or even backyard garden. Twehues, who farmed conventionally for most of his working life, contrasts inert soils treated with petrochemical fertilizers with those to which compost is added: “When you apply compost, there’s a rejuvenation of soils. On a farm scale, I found I didn’t need to add additional fertilizers. The same is true with a garden: You see the worms come back, fungal communities pop up.” Compost helps soil physically, chemically and biologically. “Physically,” says Reich, “adding compost to the soil aerates the soil and increases its ability to hold moisture.” Chemically, adding compost “has far-reaching benefits. It helps soils to take up certain nutrients they otherwise have difficulty absorbing and adds other nutrients to the soils. And biologically, it promotes microorganisms that help fend off pathogens.”

Instead, when we use it as compost, we are cutting down on waste and improving soils. Twehues says 35%–40% of the materials going to processing landfills and waste-toenergy plants (a way of generating electricity from the burning of municipal waste) are compostable. Compost is a reductive process: If 100 pounds of raw compostable material is composted, it reduces down to 50 pounds of nutrients to add to soil. And as compost is ventilated, it prevents methane creation. As global oil supplies move beyond peak, society needs to consider the best use of the remaining oil. Packaging garbage in trucks and hauling it hours away, as many municipalities do, is assuredly not beneficial to our world. There are also the various carbon costs of our current practice of hauling waste rather than dealing with it at a community level. Composting on a community scale where the waste is created would also increase safety and air quality (fewer trucks on the road), as well as reduce consumption of fuel. As people become more and more divorced from gardening and from growing their own food, more distanced from how their food is grown, there are fewer people aware of how varied and essential soil is to our livelihood. It’s much more than something we walk on, a substrate for plants. Soil is a living organism. Healthy soil breathes and delivers nutrients

SO WASTED In our society, organic matter, which had effectively been the building blocks of compost, has become a cast-off waste product. Reich remarks: “The arborist has to get rid of wood chips; at the landfill people bring their kitchen waste and leaves and grass clippings. This is a social problem.” As well as a significant environmental problem. Such organic matter is bulky to dispose of. Kitchen waste goes to the landfill in plastic bags, and, as Reich points out, the landfills have rubber liners “so think 10,000 years [for the plastic bag to break down], plus the rubber liner.” According to the EPA, decomposing food that is buried and cut off from air releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas greatly impacting climate change.

“I’ve gradually come to the idea that oneness is to be completely identified with the earth, completely identified with its bacteria, not be separate from it.” edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

to plants more effectively, and is less susceptible to wind and water erosion, than damaged soil. Healthy soil and its cohort compost are a vital part of our ecosystem. The health of our soil is as important as the condition of our water supply (as the two are inexorably intertwined). The soil holds and cleans our water while providing a literal grounding for all living things on the planet. Yes, it’s another thing to worry about—but, well, we can’t just treat it like dirt.

Victoria Spencer is a freelance writer and editor focusing on food, cooking and other elemental subjects. She divides her time between New York City and Delaware County. Lucy Engelman is a recent BFA graduate and illustrator living in Northﬁeld, IL. In addition to working with Edible Hudson Valley, Lucy has created works for several magazines and publishing houses listed on her site. To see more of her work, visit lucyengelman.com.

Composting is a relatively easy and very rewarding process. From seeing how much less waste goes into your garbage to having rich “black gold” to add to your ﬂower beds or vegetable plot you’ll get a deep sense of satisfaction from composting. Still, many are discouraged, confused or simply turned off by the prospect of composting in their own backyard, but it is as easy as dirt. Here’s some basic information to get you dirty and on your way to a healthy compost pile. (Note: Starting a compost pile in the winter provides a certain challenge, and you may not see the richness of the decay until well after the ﬁrst thaw):

LOCATION Compost should be in an area that is easy to access, both to add to the compost bin and to get mature compost to add to the garden. A spot adjacent to your garden is ideal. If the garden is fully fenced in, designate a place in the garden for compost. You’ll ﬁnd that biological communities gravitate to that area and will grow around the compost and into the garden.

CONTAINERS A compost system requires three containers, one to collect material into compost, one that is full and composting and one with mature/ ﬁnished compost that can be added to the garden—and which when empty will become the container to add material to. “It’s not necessary to go out and buy containers to compost in,” says Twehues. “Anything that is able to hold material becomes your ‘bin.’” He suggests square bins constructed of pallets (that have not been in contact with chemicals), with hardware cloth on the inside so that plenty of oxygen gets in but potential pests like raccoons and squirrels cannot. An alternative compost structure can be made from fence posts wrapped with wire. The size of the container depends on the amount of food waste your family creates. Twehues says a three-by-three-foot container about four feet high generally suits a family of four.

INGREDIENTS Not all biodegradable materials are appropriate for at-home composting. Most backyard systems will not reach temperatures high enough to kill pathogens, so meat or dairy products should not be composted; leave them out of your compost bin. Twehues advises cutting citrus and watermelon, both of which add a lot of moisture, into small pieces for composting. Shells (eggshells as well as mussel, clam and oyster shells) are good additions, as they add minerals to compost. Unbleached paper towels are a ﬁne addition, but Twehues counsels against adding other paper or cardboard unless you know its source and how it was produced.

RECIPE To create a light and ﬂuffy compost, add a ratio of 1:1—one 5-gallon bucket of leaves to one 5-gallon bucket of food waste. Add food waste in the center, not at the sides, as the temperature is higher in the middle, and it’s the heat that “cooks” the compost, speeding its decomposition. Grasses can be added at the sides. Twehues suggests adding sticks about 1½ inches in diameter, laid across the compost. They will add oxygen to the pile and reduce the need to turn the compost. When that bin is ready, the sticks can be removed and added to another bin. By then they’ll be hosting various biological communities that will beneﬁt your compost.

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From the GOOD EARTH

With a Cow Horn and the Moon An introduction to Biodynamics By Claire Hoppens, Photography by Jessica Opremcak

Magdiale Wolmark, head chef and owner of TILL, as he talks to us outside in his kitchen garden

The celestial calendar by which Wolmark plans his season

“From one aspect or another, all interests of human life belong to Agriculture.” —Rudolph Steiner, lecture growing movement in agriculture has farmers abandoning pesticides and picking up a celestial calendar. Biodynamic farming, though founded almost a century ago, is finding a foothold amongst natural, holistically sound growing operations today. The methods are often associated with wine growers, who embrace Biodynamics for the purity of the process, lack of fertilizers and decreased water waste. Some organic farms are also making the transition to Biodynamic, embracing both the biological and spiritual processes at work in our soil and the fruit it bears.

At its very core, the goal of Biodynamic agriculture is to make the farm an independent, self-sustaining entity. The idea is simple: Plant, grow and harvest that which can sustain every creature on the farm. It is a form of agriculture born out of the same issues that spawned our modern organic movement: concern for deteriorating soil quality and increased reliance on chemical fertilizers. Biodynamic farming emphasizes an understanding of cosmic forces and pairs them with guidelines for optimal soil health, food quality and farm management. The methods marry biological understanding with dynamic principles like strengthening plant life forces with specialized sprays or compost preparations. Austrian scientist Rudolph Steiner, founder of Biodynamic farming, enlisted equal parts scientific and spiritual knowledge to build his

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The location where Wolmark plants his cow horn for the winter

philosophy. A prolific speaker and author, a series of Steiner’s agricultural lectures in 1924 jump-started the Biodynamic movement, taking hold in his native Europe before finding American recognition. His suggestions on land usage, pest control, planting schedules and animal welfare were officially codified in Europe in 1928 through the Demeter Biodynamic Farm Standard. As with certified organics, Biodynamically grown products are stamped with a seal to prove authenticity and are becoming more widely available in natural and health food stores.

Biodynamics in Ohio and Beyond The first known Biodynamic farm in the United States appeared in 1926 in upstate New York. Threefold Farm was founded by young followers of Steiner who wished to create a retreat center and inclusive community dedicated to spiritual and social enlightenment. Members planted and tended to Biodynamic gardens on the property, funneling produce to the popular Threefold vegetarian restaurant in New York City. Eventually, Threefold Farm transformed into the Pfeiffer Center, a Biodynamic institute that offers internships, workshops and yearlong training programs. Here in Columbus, an inspired, passionate chef is channeling Biodynamic techniques he learned at the Pfeiffer Center into his garden and eclectic menu. Magdiale Wolmark, James Beard Foundation Award nominee for the Great Lakes region, served for 11 years as head chef and owner of the beloved vegan restaurant Dragonfly.

Then the time came for reinvention. This January, Magdiale transformed his space and updated his culinary concept, opening TILL Dynamic Fare. Now, there’s meat on the menu and wine on tap. Magdiale personally visits the farms from which he sources ingredients and produce, choosing some Demetercertified Biodynamic, others organic or locally sourced. At TILL Biodynamic principles thrive. So much so that in the spring, Magdiale can sufficiently provide all greens needed in the restaurant. “That’s why I love Biodynamics. It’s the spirit of my garden that would be taken into consideration. I do the Biodynamic preps. I can do the cow horn,” said Wolmark, who follows a celestial calendar for much of his planting, but not rigidly. “The Biodynamic preps” refers to nine preparations devised by Steiner and numbered 500–508, intended to improve fertility of fields and compost. Best known is preparation 500, in which fresh manure is packed into a cow horn that is then buried through the winter and then dug up and the aged manure is stirred into water in a particular way and used to fertilize crops. Preparations 500 and 501 are field preparations, meant to naturally fertilize and bolster soil, while preparations 502 through 508 are made for compost, designed to assist decomposition. Consider the preparations to be homeopathic aids, made according to a celestial calendar for best results and used in small quantities around the farm. Wolmark rummages for a moment before presenting us with last year’s cow horn, one he buried outside his restaurant for the winter. The horn is left to decompose until the spring equinox, a ritual meant to increase soil structure and allow manure packed inside the horn to ferment, which will find future use when sprayed on young plants. The horn is thin and smooth, tinted slightly by the time spend underground. “Steiner says that in winter the earth is most inwardly alive. You can see that through the crystallization process; it’s like a sucking in of the life process,” he adds. Next we open a glass Ball jar filled with dark, heavy earth. Wolmark encourages us to smell the contents, which began as raw green manure stuffed inside the horn. Indeed, it smells earthy and sweet, nothing like the expectation. The manure will be mixed with water and sprayed on the coming spring’s crops. Wolmark hopes in coming years to introduce additional preparations to his garden, particularly compost inoculants. “These,” he says, “in addition to harnessing certain kinds of energy, can act as accelerators.”

Beekeeping is commonplace on Biodynamic farms as bees are considered paramount to pollination patterns and the general idea of the farm as self-sustaining. Crops are to be rotated and land is frequently rested. No crop can be planted in the same space for more than two years in a row on a Biodynamic farm. The welfare of animals on a Biodynamic farm is taken very seriously. Shelters must be roomy and cages are prohibited. Every animal must have access to roam outdoors and to lie down in clean, safe space, and no alterations to beaks, wings or horns are permitted. Animals being raised for their meat must have at least half their feed originate from the farm itself. Just north of Dayton in Tipp City, Harmony Farm operates its gardens, retreats, spa services and classes with one core mission—nurture. According to Rich Dinsmore, Harmony Farm’s director of business development and farm operations, Biodynamic farming best forges this nurturing connection between land and body. “By implementing Biodynamic farming we hope to provide a sustainable and productive farm for many generations.” For over 20 years on 120 acres, Harmony Farm has served as a destination for health and healing. Harmony Farm currently cultivates a certified Biodynamic vegetable and herb garden, providing food for area restaurants and a co-op. Dinsmore, echoing likeminded enthusiasts, agreed one of the largest hurdles Biodynamic farming will need to overcome is consumer education and accessibility. Along with Harmony Farm, there are only a handful of biodynamic operations in Central Ohio. Dawn and Carson Combs of Mockingbird Meadows, a honey and herb farm on the outskirts of Marysville, have enlisted biodynamic farming methods since acquiring the 3.5 acres in 2002, making it a core mission of their lives and land to eliminate synthetic substances altogether. Back at TILL, Wolmark shared his ideas for the possibility of wider embrace of the methods.

“I think a lot of the Biodynamic impulse is reconnecting with agriculture in a way that’s not just food-related but integrated.”

TILL Dynamic Fare 247 King Ave., Columbus, Ohio, 43201 614-298-9986; tillfare.com

Farming and Gardening Biodynamically So what does it mean to run a Biodynamic farm? Demeter standards state that at least 10% of total acreage on a farm must be allotted to open, wild space. In many regions, this is likely to be a patch of forest. In others, swampland or marsh. Biodynamic pest control runs the gamut, and solutions for weeds must come from the farm itself, eliminating most artificial and imported ingredients.

Raised in a family of corporate gypsies, Claire Hoppens has called eight states home and visited countless others. She recently earned her degree in magazine journalism from the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. When she isn’t writing, Claire keeps up social media for local business The Swanky Abode, acts as a Snowville Creamery representative and works for Northstar Café. Claire is inspired by the city of Columbus and hopes to put down some sturdier roots here. For a while, at least!

edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

Beautiful, Useful, Edible Jennifer Bartley and the American Potager By Molly Hays

“Potager” means “kitchen garden” and food is central to Jennifer Bartley’s work: the growing of it, the eating of it, the community that springs from it. But more than that, food is literally central: planted right alongside the flowers and shrubs. Herbs and vegetables, she argues, aren’t second-class citizens, suited only to far-off beds, but exquisite plants in their own right, entirely worthy of front-row seats. They bring their own aesthetic, rich and varied, not to mention scents, flavors and sustenance. Which is what put me in the mind of one William Morris. Morris, of course, was the 19th century Arts and Crafts designer-philosopher who famously said, “Have nothing in your homes which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Reacting to the overstuffed interiors of his day, he championed neither stark utility nor pure ornament but a joyful balance between the two. Lose the doily-draped parlor, he lobbied: a well-designed armchair is beauty enough, and eminently comfortable, besides. Gardens, landscape designers often remind us, are extensions of our home—true living rooms. And when planted along Bartley’s potager lines, they are outdoor incarnations of Morris’ ideal: useful, beautiful, deliciously edible.

A Bit of History The mixed-use garden is nothing new. Enclosed gardens incorporating food and flower alike date back to Babylon, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Bartley cites ancient Persia’s pairidaeza, or garden wall, then traces its evolution as it becomes the Greek paradeisos, the biblical Eden and eventually the medieval cloistered gardens, which provided both nourishment and security. It was a small step from Western Europe’s self-sufficient monasteries to the potagers of early modern France, whose trademark look was the artful mingle of culinary and aesthetic, and whose signature purpose was to provide herbs and vegetables for the daily soup pot (potage). But what does 17th century France have to do with 21st century Ohio? Everything, as it turns out.

The Potager: Then and Now Americans have long cultivated kitchen gardens—planting, tending and eating from them for centuries. But as Bartley astutely points out, our classic approach is of a unique ilk. Established by our farming forefathers, the traditional American kitchen garden is “a seasonally used space defined separately from the residential garden—the ornamental plants and lawn areas. And, in fact, most suburban vegetable gardens are still miniature versions of grandmother’s farm plot. They are rectangular areas consisting of regular, mounded, mulched rows [of vegetables]. Annual flowers may be in another bed … and blooming perennials on the other side of the house, where the neighbors can see them.” Sound familiar? Not that there’s anything wrong with this often-strict separation of food and flower. Indeed, if you’ve got carrots growing out back, I’d argue you’re already several steps ahead. (I find carrots awfully difficult.) Bartley’s point is, rather, how much right there is to be had in mixing it up.

The New American Potager At the heart of Bartley’s design philosophy is this: A garden is at its best when of one piece. When the zinnias and zucchini kick it up in one bed, all kinds of interesting consequences ensue. We expand possibilities for color and form, with the full catalog of edibles and ornamentals at our disposal. Are those low-growing marigolds in need of some vertical? Place a tepee, rife with scarlet runners, right behind. Or pivot—flowers up, veggies down—and plant meandering squash beneath charming (inedible) sweet peas. Or think about texture, the ways we might play. Giant melon leaves become bold modern strokes, nestled into a flurry of blue pimpernel. Rhubarb’s big, blowsy foliage and bright scarlet stalks are dapper backdrop to aster and echinacea. Or consider simple utility, all that added vocabulary for defining our plots. Viewed through the potager lens, familiar stalwarts step into new roles. We eliminate dead zones, those barren winter vegetable beds, when boxwoods hold down the fort where cucumbers once thrived. Parsley and chives, planted in repetition, become top-notch edgers in annual beds. Their jolly frills, gentle sway and three seasons of green qualify them on aesthetic grounds alone. That they’re also a goldmine of culinary bling is icing on the cake.

Right: A view of a potager garden with both ﬂowers and edibles

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PHOTOS BY © JENNIFER BARTLEY

ennifer Bartley is no ordinary garden designer. Granville resident Bartley is the founder of landscape design firm American Potager, and author of Designing the New Kitchen Garden and The Kitchen Gardener’s Handbook. With a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Ohio State, she is fluent in horizontal forms, isometric designs and espaliers. Yet the language and mechanics of landscape design are, for Bartley, just the beginning.

Stuffed Trout with Green Garlic and Herbs Recipe courtesy of Jennifer Bartley Serves 2

Ingredients 2 whole trout, gutted and cleaned Salt and freshly ground pepper 2 stalks green garlic, sliced lengthwise in strips 1 small sweet onion, sliced, then halved 1 bunch fresh tarragon leaves, stems and all 1 bunch fresh dill, leaves and stems 3 tablespoons butter, cut into pieces, divided Juice of half a lemon Lemon slices (optional)

Procedure 1 Preheat the broiler to 450Â°. 2 Wash the fresh trout under cold running water and gently scrape the skin with a knife to clean; pat dry. Place each fish on its own piece of aluminum foil, making sure the foil is large enough to wrap the fish. Salt and pepper the inside of the fish.

3 Prepare the stuffing. Mix together the green garlic, onion and sprigs of tarragon and dill. Add in some of the butter. Divide the mixture in half, stuffing each fish with half of the mixture.

4 Divide the remaining butter between the two fish and lay it on the outside of each fish. Squeeze some lemon on the fish. Wrap each fish tightly with the aluminum foil and seal the edges.

5 Place the foil packets of fish on a shallow roasting pan, in case the packets leak. Broil on the top rack of a hot oven for 7 minutes. Turn the packets over and cook them on the other side for 7 to 8 minutes.

6 Carefully unseal the foil and serve immediately with lemon slices. You can also cook the fish this way on a hot grill outside if you prefer.

Jennifer Bartleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Stuffed Trout with Green Garlic and Herbs

Right: Jennifer Bartley’s Spring Peas with Mint Cream

Peas love cool weather so plant them outdoors as early as you can work the soil from mid March to early April. Climbing varieties need to be trellised and all peas beneﬁt from branches inserted nearby for additional support. Plant a surplus so you can pick pea shoots and blossoms early for salads and stir-fries yet still have enough peas left to ripen to their perfect plump sweetness.

Green garlic Garlic cloves are planted in the fall when you plant daffodil bulbs; each clove matures to a full swollen bulb by the Fourth of July. If you planted last fall, this spring you will enjoy a gourmet delicacy not found at your local grocery store: green garlic. Harvest the slender, immature bulbs in March and April and use like you would green onions. The ﬂavor is mild, garlicky and unique; green garlic is wonderful sautéed in good olive oil and tossed over pasta.

Flat-leaf Italian parsley Flat-leaf Italian parsley is indispensible for the cook and gardener. If you left some plants in the garden through the winter bright new growth appears in the spring. Harvest these young leaves until you set new plants out in early summer. Parsley is easy to grow indoors under lights, and although it is a biennial I treat it like an annual and plant a new crop every year. Sprinkle seeds over seed-starting soil mix, cover lightly with soil, water, cover with clear plastic and place under lights. Parsley is notoriously slow to start from seed, but be patient. In about eight weeks tiny plants can be placed in the garden.

Mint Young, tender, flavorful mint leaves begin to emerge in the spring. (All over the garden, if you didn’t plant in pots to keep it contained.) There are so many fragrant, tasty flavors of mint from chocolate to pineapple. Two of my favorites are Kentucky Colonel (the official mint for juleps at the Kentucky Derby) and lemon balm. New plants can be planted outdoors in late spring or early summer when the soil warms.

Dill and cilantro Dill and cilantro are annual herbs that reseed and will come back for years of enjoyment. Find a well-tilled, permanent spot in full sun that won’t be disturbed. Sprinkle seeds in warm soil and keep moist until seedlings emerge. Reseed every two weeks throughout the growing season for a continual harvest. Continue the reseeding process every year until the patch is established. The leaves of dill and cilantro can be used fresh. The seeds of both can also be used for cooking—dill seed is wonderful for pickles and cilantro seed is known as coriander.

Peppers, basil, tomatoes, eggplant, tomatillos The heat-loving, warm-season herbs and vegetables will not tolerate cool temperatures or cool soil. Wait until after the frost-free date to plant these outdoors. (Here in Central Ohio, that date is May 15.) These can be started now from seed indoors and grown under lights. Start indoors about 6–8 weeks before you plant in the garden.

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So you want a potager: Where to begin? The quick-flipping browser might mistakenly assume the answer is a backhoe and a crew of 12. After all, Bartley’s books are lavish with exquisite châteaux, established American properties and the author’s own multi-layered, mature backyard. They’re also chock-a-block with reality, yours and mine. Because Bartley is nothing if not pragmatic. (Did I mention she’s a mother to five?) “Join the growing journey at any scale,” she encourages, “from a pot to your entire landscape.” And then, she offers tips, lists, plans, guides and strategies for doing exactly that. She covers the rudiments—accurate maps, sun and shade—and invaluable design basics like “go vertical” and plant for “design and sequence.” But to these fundamentals, Bartley brings a new sensibility, a distinct set of potager-inflected considerations. She shares, for example, lessons learned the hard way: that edibles and ornamentals co-exist peacefully—but within limits. “I used to have a romantic notion about planting perennials with the vegetables or tucking vegetables in amongst the flowers. However….” Turns out, all that digging to set the vegetables proved terribly disruptive to the perennials’ roots. Better, then, to plant like kinds together, all annuals—edible and ornamental—in one bed, and all perennials in another. Or consider this gem: “Maximize the kitchen-garden relationship” by planting as close to the house as possible. Proximity equals accessibility and accessibility equals ease, rain or shine, for harvesting or weeding. “Maintenance,” Bartley told me, “is a design issue.” Of course we neglect our lettuces, banished to the back 40; out of sight, out of mind. In Bartley’s worldview, we’re neither bad weeders nor failed vegetable farmers, merely adherents to outdated landscape ideals.

How We Plant, How We Live And this, in the end, seems to me Bartley’s gift: re-imagining our yards as ecumenical spaces—inclusive, beautiful, deeply functional, delicious. The potager is not about overhaul, necessarily, but about re-thinking how we garden, and why. When time, or space, or energy is limited—or, if you’re me, all of the above— edging sunflowers with beets makes all kinds of sense. Maintenance eases, beauty increases, yields tick up: win-win-win. “How do we want to eat?” Bartley asks, deep within the pages of The New Kitchen Garden. “The answer to this question eventually adds up to the way we live our lives.” This is the grow-your-own chorus, of course: Plant a seed, grow a radish, reap and relish what you sow. But the well-designed kitchen garden fills not only our soup pots, but also our vases, our senses, our souls. How we plant what we want to eat matters, also. Maybe as much, possibly more. Come to think of it, I’d like to amend my analogy: Bartley’s Morris, yes, but also a touch Proust. It was Marcel Proust, after all, who suggested, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” By making the age-old potager new again, Jennifer Bartley has given us new eyes—all we really need to re-discover our own landscapes.

Molly Hays graduated from the University of Washington with two degrees, one Mellon Fellowship, and no idea when to buy a melon. Since moving to Ohio in early 2009, Molly and her family of ﬁve have been getting to know Columbus one ice cream scoop at a time. Molly writes about food and life at remedialeating.com.

By Jennifer Bartley 22

Implementing the Potager

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PHOTO BY © JENNIFER BARTLEY

Peas

And we’ve not even touched on the ancillary benefits, on how mixed-use beds make less work and more sense. The way nasturtiums, seeded beneath the beans, attract beneficial insects that eat the aphid nasties. Or how twinkling sweet alyssum, tucked alongside our tomatoes, helps to keep the weeds down and the spirits up. Or how coneflower seeds draw birds by the flock, which may also make a snack of whatever’s eating our kale. Of course, echinacea doubles as lovely cut flowers. And the birds, ready entertainment. And the kale, a fine lunch. And… well, you can see where this is headed: possibilities ad infinitum.

PHOTO BY © CAROLE TOPALIAN

Favorite Herbs and Edibles from the Spring Potager

Spring Peas with Mint Cream Recipe courtesy of Jennifer Bartley Serves 4

Ingredients 1 tablespoon butter 2–3 small shallots, chopped ½ cup cream 3–5 fresh mint leaves, plus more for garnish 2 cups fresh English peas, shelled just before cooking

Procedure Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the shallots and sauté until they are soft. Add the cream and mint leaves. Heat the mixture to the boiling stage, but don’t boil the cream. Crush the mint leaves with a wooden spoon as you heat the mixture. Add the peas and heat through. Remove the mint leaves before serving. Serve immediately, or chill and serve cold. Garnish with fresh mint leaves.

Dilly Heirloom Potato Salad Recipe courtesy of Jennifer Bartley Serves 8–10

Ingredients 3 dozen small early potatoes with skins (5–6 cups) Salt to taste ½ cup sour cream ½ cup real mayonnaise 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar 3 tablespoons fresh dill, chopped 2 tablespoons fresh ﬂat-leaf parsley, chopped ½ teaspoon celery seed 3–4 green onions, ﬁnely chopped Freshly ground pepper to taste

Procedure Wash the potatoes but don’t peel them. If they are small enough, leave whole; otherwise cut them in half or quarters. Place the cut potatoes in a pot and just cover with water. Boil until the potatoes are soft (but not mushy) when poked with a fork. Drain the water and set the potatoes aside to cool. In a separate small bowl, combine the remaining ingredients to make the dressing. While the potatoes are still warm, cut them into bite-size cubes, place them in a serving bowl and sprinkle with salt. Pour the dressing on the potatoes and stir well before storing the potato salad in the refrigerator. Serve cold. Make this salad the day before you serve it; it always tastes better for some reason.

Creamy Green Goddess Dressing Recipe courtesy of Jennifer Bartley Makes about a cup

Ingredients 3 tablespoons fresh ﬂat-leaf parsley, chopped 1 garlic clove, chopped 1 green onion, chopped ½ avocado 1 cup Greek yogurt 1 tablespoon fresh tarragon leaves, chopped (optional) 1 tablespoon fresh cilantro, chopped (optional)

Peel and mash the avocado with a fork until creamy. Add the chopped flat-leaf parsley, garlic, green onion and yogurt. Stir until smooth. Serve immediately over greens or chill and serve within a week. Try variations of this by adding a tablespoon of fresh tarragon or fresh cilantro.

edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

Local FOODSHED

The Sustainable

Kitchen A concise guide to greening your kitchen, and a challenge to ‘make one change’ By Nancy McKibben sustainable kitchen is one that uses durable products made from readily renewable materials that are not harmful when produced or recycled. To explore the sustainable kitchen, Edible Columbus enlisted the help of two couples who have not only done the research, but lived it: Steve and Heather Johnson of the store Generation Green in Columbus, and Teresa Peters and Mike Bauer of Going Green in Granville.

“Make One Change” The Johnsons created their store to make it easier for people to find green products locally. “We’re just a normal suburban family with kids,” says Heather. “We test our products at home before they ever go into our store, and they have to work.” Teresa and Mike began Going Green for similar reasons, but chiefly because Teresa “grapples,” as she puts it, with breast cancer. The store is a way to share the good nutritional choices and lifestyle changes that help her manage her disease and its treatment. “I encourage people to make one change,” Teresa says. “Sometimes people see a green lifestyle as expensive and elitist, something for rich people to do. But consumers drive change.” A case in point is the number of food stores that now feature a local produce section and offer recycling of their plastic bags. As Teresa says, “To send the clearest message, vote with your wallet.”

The Plastic Kitchen Plastic is a ubiquitous, inescapable fact of modern life. Here are some facts to consider about sharing your kitchen with plastic:

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Plastic is made from petroleum. It requires energy to produce, and energy to recycle.

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Three liters of water go into the production of a single one-liter water bottle. Fill that bottle one quarter full with oil. This is the amount of petroleum that goes into the process.

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Despite our efforts to recycle, 80% of plastic ends up in landﬁlls or incinerators.

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Research has shown that chemicals from some plastics can leach into food, especially fatty or hot foods.

National Geographic’s Green Guide recommends avoiding #3 plastic (used in containers and cling wrap) because it leaches the toxin DEHA. The Conscious Kitchen notes that many consider #2, #4 and #5 to be safe, but recommends against heating food in any plastic. Research published in 2011 in

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the journal Environmental Health Perspectives concludes that all plastics leach estrogen-mimicking chemicals. Given these concerns, prudence dictates that we at least not heat plastics in the microwave, nor dishwasher, nor use them to serve hot food. And because plastic is so environmentally unfriendly, we should reduce the plastics in the kitchen wherever possible.

Pots and Pans and Other Things that Live in Your Kitchen Cast iron, enamel-coated cast iron, glass and stainless steel are the materials of choice for the sustainable kitchen. They are durable (cast-iron skillets and pots are often available at the thrift store, still in great condition), recyclable and safe for heating food. A seasoned cast-iron skillet is more nonstick than you might expect, as is its enamel-coated cousin. Silicone, made of sand and oxygen, can be recycled and is safe when heated to specified temperatures. Look for responsibly grown bamboo, which is quick-growing and therefore more renewable than wood, for cutting boards and spoons. For cutting raw meats, however, Alexandra Zissu, author of The Conscious Kitchen, recommends hardwood: “Hardwoods have inherently anti-bacterial properties, and minor cuts in the surface tend to close up, leaving bacteria with no place to live, which is not the case with plastic.”

Appliances and Energy Energy Star appliances are rated by the government for energy efficiency, and can save up to 20% in energy costs, so look for these when replacing a large appliance. In the meantime, maintain your appliances so that they run efficiently.

Best appliance and energy options:

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Maintain your kitchen. Vacuum the coils of your refrigerator; ﬁx leaky faucets.

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Buy Energy Star when replacing appliances.

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Choose your dishwasher over washing by hand; research shows it is more energy efﬁcient.

Cook once, eat twice. (Bulk cooking takes less energy.) Use a toaster oven or microwave when possible, instead of a large oven.

Waste and Recycling You can use kitchen scraps to make nutrient-rich broths to feed your family, or nutrient-rich compost to feed your soil. To compost food scraps (except for meat and dairy, which may draw animals), collect them in a bowl on the counter, or use a lidded compost bucket—made of stainless steel, ceramic or bamboo—equipped with inexpensive charcoal filters to eliminate odors. Outside, composting can be as simple a pile for food scraps and leaves, or as elaborate as a store-bought compost tumbler. (See page 16 on how to compost.) You can also banish paper towels and napkins. Cloth napkins are small and easily tossed in with a load of laundry. Use clean rags to replace paper towels—it worked for our grandparents.

PHOTO BY © CATHERINE MURRAY, PHOTOKITCHEN.NET

Best options for waste and recycling:

Best cooking and storage options:

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Replace worn-out cookware with cast iron, enamel-coated cast iron or stainless steel.

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Use glass or stainless steel storage containers.

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Eliminate paper towels and paper napkins.

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Eliminate, reduce or recycle plastics.

Cleaners Cooks like their kitchens to be clean and sparkling, which is a good thing unless you’re wiping down your counters with an anti-bacterial soap that may actually encourage the growth of super-bacteria. Reach instead for natural cleaners. Popular brands carried in both stores include Dr. Bronner’s and Vermont soaps, as well as kits for making your own cleaners. And microfiber cloths make any cleaner work better.

Discard your nonstick cookware. Scratched (and toxic) surfaces ﬂake off into your food.

Carry a homemade, sustainable lunch. Japanese bento boxes, made of #5 plastic, have removable trays that nest cunningly together. Also available are tifﬁn boxes— stacks of stainless steel boxes that click together—or cloth sandwich bags, neopropylene or cloth lunch bags (colorful, highly reusable and washable) and bamboo utensils rather than disposable plastic. You can even ﬁnd stainless steel straws.

Best options for cleaners:

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Shop locally to ﬁnd a green cleaner that suits your needs. Look for biodegradable, all-natural and nontoxic. Avoid anti-bacterial.

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Make your own cleaners from borax, essential oils, washing soda, vinegar and baking soda.

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Use natural loofahs, microﬁber cloths and stainless steel scrubbers for dishwashing.

Best options for lunches at school and work:

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Avoid disposable anything.

Compost your nonmeat and nondairy kitchen scraps, teabags and other biodegradables.

SWACO and Rumpke Recycling post helpful lists on their websites. Both Teresa and Mike and the Johnsons collect some recyclables in their stores.

Aim to reduce or eliminate plastic containers and cookware. If you use plastic storage, make sure that it is #5 plastic. Never heat food in plastic, or put hot food in it. (For example, use a stainless steel, not a plastic, colander to drain spaghetti.)

Lunch at the Ofﬁce, Lunch at School

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Use vegetable and meat scraps to make broth.

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SPRING 2012

Old Kitchens as Opportunity Dave Fox Remodeling offers a new home for your old kitchen by partnering with Habitat for Humanity. Using scrap materials, old cabinets and more from their remodeling projects, Dave Fox donates all the materials to Habitat. Habitat never has enough for their home projects, plus it’s a tax write-off for the homeowner. Visit davefox.com to learn more.

Social Sustainability Both the Johnsons and Teresa and Mike make it a point to stock their stores with products from companies that are socially responsible. Going Green pledges 5% of its net proceeds to local nonprofits and engages the community by providing classes in green cooking. Generation Green also educates its customers, providing literature in their store about local green initiatives. Their business card lists the “dirty dozen” and “clean 15” fruits and vegetables to remind consumers of the best choices in the grocery aisle.

Best options for social sustainability:

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Support local businesses.

look good. (But it doesn’t hurt.)

Planet-friendly. Health-conscious. Affordable. Information. Products. Services.

Support organic and fair trade. Get to know your neighbors. Share recipes, expertise and kitchen appliances.

“Make One Change” Sustainability can be a complex subject, but simple changes in behavior make a difference. Challenge yourself to “Make One Change” toward a sustainable kitchen, and share your change with us at our website, or email me. I am going to make a change to green cleaners. I’ll let you know how it goes! Generation Green 6351 Sawmill Rd., Intersection of Sawmill & 161, next to Trader Joe’s, Dublin, OH 43017; 614-761-2222; generationgreen.com. Heather and Steve carry a wide variety of the green products mentioned in this article, as well as many others for the entire home. Going Green 909 River Rd., Granville, OH 43023; 740-963-9644; thegoinggreenstore.com. Theresa and Mike carry many products mentioned in this article as well as local whole foods. They also offer green cooking classes, a residential green audit and green office and paper supplies for small businesses. Visit our website for a complete list of resources and recipes mentioned here: ediblecolumbus.com.

Nancy McKibben has been writing and eating for years, and is happy to combine those loves with the opportunity to advocate for local food in the pages of Edible Columbus. Her novel The Chaos Protocol was a ﬁnalist for the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction in 2000, and she was the winner of the Thurber House Essay Contest in 2003. She is also a lyricist and journalist, the mother of six and the wife of one. View her work at leader. com/nancymckibben; contact her at nmckibben@leader.com.

We know you’re not saving the planet just to

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909 River Rd Granville Ohio 43023 740.963.9644 www.TheGoingGreenStore.com

Garden Notes

The American Community Gardening Association Have you ever wondered how to start a community garden? Or felt like you were the only one promoting community gardens in your area. The American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was founded in 1979 to help gardening programs share their limited resources and benefit from each other’s experience and expertise. Directly serving over 1,000 individuals and organizations, ACGA is the leader in promoting community gardening as a tool for community development, food production, food security, nutrition and health and environmental education. As a nonprofit membership organization of community garden organizers, horticultural professionals and supporters of community gardening and greening, ACGA enables networking, information sharing and training among groups and individuals in the community gardening movement. ACGA shares the experience and expertise of programs and individuals who have been working in the community gardening field for more than 30 years. We like to say that community gardening is 10% gardening and 90% community. ACGA’s work is innovative because it focuses on the community organizing needs of developing and sustaining community gardens and not just the physical aspects needed to build a garden. This promotes the sustainability of the gardens and teaches leadership skills for community residents to continue to address needs in their communities. Our vision is a sustainable community in every garden. ACGA recognizes that community gardening improves people’s quality of life by providing a catalyst for neighborhood and community development, stimulating social interaction, encouraging self-reliance, beautifying neighborhoods, producing nutritious food, reducing family food budgets, conserving resources and creating opportunities for recreation, exercise, therapy and education, gardening, urban forestry and the preservation and management of open space.

Rustic • Urban • Food

“Seasonal Driven, Farm to Fork Comfort Classics with an Urban Edge”

For more information about community gardening and how to become a member of ACGA, please visit communitygarden.org.

By Beth Urban

CREATIVE, RESPECTFUL PLANNING AND DESIGN SERVICES FOR: Urban Farms Edible School Gardens Natural Outdoor Play Spaces Pocket Parks and more!

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410 E. Whittier St. • Columbus, OH 43206 • 614-443-2266 www.integritysustainableplanning.com 614-402-1188

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SPRING 2012

In the GARDEN

A Gardener’s Journal Winter’s work is best done from a warm, comfy chair Story and Illustrations by Susan Weber

look at my small Clintonville backyard in late winter does not reveal a magazine-spread vision of loveliness. A huge dark-green clump of invasive bamboo dusted with yesterday’s light snowfall bears mute evidence of garden battles fought and lost, yet to be fought again. Mother Nature’s windy spring gusts downed a beautiful pink flowering dogwood last year, leaving an unpleasant new exposure to my neighbor’s garage security light. Two wroughtiron lawn chairs left to fend for themselves show signs of impending rust. The deck still needs to be refinished…

And yet, a closer look reveals unseen treasures. A peek under a row cover hastily thrown over a bed after Thanksgiving reveals a bounty of herbs and greens miraculously ready for harvest. A great boon to busy gardeners (like me!). Row covers are inexpensive lengths of material available at most garden centers that allow light to penetrate while providing some protection from brisk winter temperatures. I love using them as a last-minute strategy in the fall to extend the growing season of cold-tolerant crops by weeks and even months, providing a fresh dash of flavor and nutritional value to winter meals. Menu ideas for a family “comfort food” dinner this weekend are now inspired by my garden treasures: chicken roasted with fresh rosemary, mushroom risotto garnished with chopped chives, Lacinato kale sautéed in a bit of olive oil and a simple salad of greens tossed with walnuts, dried cranberries, goat cheese and a homemade parsley vinaigrette dressing. The garden sage, still amazingly fresh under its row cover blanket, tempts me to try a new recipe for a rustic sage-scented butter cake. A motley crew of empty pots, urns and tubs in the potting shed encourages a cozy sit by the fire with a mug of mint tea and a stack of seed catalogs to dream up new edible plant combinations for

containers. Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog, an old favorite for its diverse selection and wonderfully detailed cultural information, provides great ideas for my large vintage galvanized tub. I’ll start with a few plants of De Cicco, an Italian heirloom broccoli that produces small top and side heads over a long harvest time. It’s an open-pollinated variety, meaning the seeds can be saved at the end of the season, and they will “come true,” or produce the same variety when planted next year. This practice is not only cost-saving, but helps to maintain valuable heirloom seed strains for future generations. Both people and plants prosper when given optimum growing conditions and friendly, supportive neighbors. Companion planting is the practice of selecting plants that support each other’s good health. I’ll add friendly rosemary and dill to the broccoli in my tub. Fernleaf is a good dill selection for containers, as it is slower to bolt, or go to seed. At about two feet tall, it’s shorter than most dill varieties, but it will still add a nice vertical element. I’m also going to put in a peppermint plant, a notorious garden thug that rapidly takes over garden beds but plays well with others when confined in pots. The addition of a handful of onion starts, small bulbs seen in stores in the spring that quickly produce flavorful green onions, and a thyme plant to repel cabbage butterfly, a common broccoli pest, should give me an attractive, pest-free, flavorful showing in my vintage tub this summer. I like the idea of planting a brigade of my old buckets and garage-sale vintage French flower tins with single plants of some of the more space-hogging vegetables. Butternut squash and cucumbers are easily planted by seed directly in containers after late spring frosts. I want to try Butterbush, a space-saving variety of Butternut squash offered by another old favorite, W. Atlee Burpee and Co. Butternut squash’s hard rind and dense stems give its fruits a long shelf life and a natural resistance to the devastating squash borer pest. Spacemaster, another Burpee offering, looks like a good candidate for growing cukes in containers. It bears full-sized fruit on extremely compact, disease-resistant plants. I’m planning on adding a few pots planted with showy Alaska Mix nasturtiums to the grouping as well. Nasturtiums repel squash bugs, and I love the peppery flavor of both their leaves and flowers. Alaska Mix has attractive green and white variegated foliage highlighted by brilliant yellow, crimson and orange tubular flowers. I’m going to take the time and resources to select good-quality organic potting mixes for my container plantings this year. Organic potting mixes are a good green choice: They contain microbiotic agents derived from recycled natural materials that help to contribute to overall plant health. This makes them slower to lose their fertility, so they can be reused for several seasons.

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Ultralight soil mixes (often labeled for use in hanging baskets) don’t work well in containers, as they dry out too quickly to satisfy the moisture needs of most edibles. I don’t often use regular garden soil for my containers, as it may harbor harmful insects or diseases or lack needed fertility for heavy-feeding food crops. A new member of my edible garden family is a three-tiered Liberty espaliered apple tree planted on the west wall of my garage. A real beauty purchased from River Road Farms in Tennessee, it makes a great architectural focal point in my garden. Espaliering is an ancient space-saving technique used to train fruiting plants into a flat, upright form. They’re often planted next to a wall to take advantage of early-season reflected heat. I selected the variety Liberty not only for its crisp, flavorful red fruit, but for its high disease resistance, allowing me to enjoy a good crop of its mid-fall fruits without using harmful chemicals. I’m toying with the idea of a border planting of chives under the tree; a fine companion plant for fruit trees, chives’ mild onionflavored leaves are a key culinary herb, and its lavender globeshaped blooms make a showy garnish. I spotted two pricey wrought-iron tuteurs at a local garden store last spring, and was delighted to see them still available when the store had its end-of-season fall sale. Tuteurs are upright trellis structures designed to train climbing plants, and are usually seen as tall four-sided pyramids or obelisks. I love the four-season architectural interest they add to my edible garden. I’m going to plant my tuteurs with Painted Lady runner beans, a spectacular English heirloom climber that produces large quantities of red and white flowers and beans useable at the fresh snap stage, shelled, or dried for later use.

I’m tempted to plant a few seeds of Red Malabar Spinach with the beans. Not a true spinach, Malabar Spinach has lovely red vining stems and mild-flavored leaves that can be steamed or eaten fresh. Like the beans, it loves summer heat, and can sometimes survive mild winters. A few Gem marigold plants around the base will provide brightly colored edible flowers and natural resistance to Mexican bean beetles. I’ll plant summer savory nearby, an annual culinary herb that also deters bean beetles and is a wonderful herbal seasoning for cooked green beans. Perhaps the family dinner, redolent with the rich scents and seasonings of last summer, will elicit an ambitious work plan to finally tame the bamboo, paint the wrought iron chairs and refinish the deck. Or perhaps we’ll just enjoy our meal, free of work and worry for a few quiet moments together. Regardless, I’ll find my way back to the fire and that stack of seed catalogs to dream just a few more dreams of spring.

Susan Weber, principal of Integrity Sustainable Planning and Design, has two decades of experience in sustainable design, business ownership, project development, oversight and management. Susan loves to cook with family and friends and has a special knack for preparing dishes using fresh-from-the-garden ingredients. She is known for her passion for using unique salvaged materials in projects throughout her home, and she still has a deep and abiding love affair with her hometown: Columbus, Ohio!

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SPRING 2012

Young PALATES

Starting with a Seed The rewards of growing your own garden with your family By Madeline Scherer

I was 5. My mom and I were at the grocery store and I saw tiny little sprouts of a tomato plant and decided, “I want to grow tomatoes!” I had to beg my mom to buy it because this was back when every time my mom would buy a plant it would die (she’s a lot better now!). Finally, I convinced her, and that day we brought home our first-ever vegetable plant. Her only rule that first year: “It has to be organic.” I was fine with her rule as long as we could keep gardening every year. I was hooked! Now I’ll tell you how you can start your own garden. First you need a place for your garden site. We asked my Uncle Tom and Aunt Beth if we could use their farm. They liked the idea so much they decided to share a garden with us. We keep making it bigger each year! I love going to the farm to garden; I feel elated to be out in the country where everything is tranquil. The chirping of the crickets is my favorite sound. Next you need to purchase seeds. We wanted organic seeds, so we had to visit a few local stores and buy some on the internet. I would recommend starting out with a few vegetables that are easier to grow like tomatoes, peppers, green beans and lettuce. Don’t start with things like corn, potatoes or asparagus or you’ll get really frustrated like I did—all of ours died the first year. Oh, and one more thing: If you plant strawberries, plan on them being a snack as you weed or harvest. We’ve never taken a single one home! Once you have your seeds, you’re ready to move to the next step: deciding where everything needs to be planted. You’re going to need a good gardening book for this. We went to the library. You will learn things like how broccoli does not like to be planted near tomatoes but it loves to be near lettuce. You will also learn how far apart to plant your plants and how many days it will take until you can harvest them. We made a big blueprint of all of our plants and where they would be planted. One of our favorite gardening books is, The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food by Tanya L. K. Denckla. Now you are ready for planting. You can plant your seeds indoors and transplant them as little plants, or you can wait until late spring when all the frost is gone and plant the seeds outdoors. I enjoy planting seeds indoors in April so I can check on them every day and watch them grow. We keep 30

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them up high ever since my baby brother dug into them and we had to start over! We purchase a greenhouse starter kit to plant the seeds in. Label your seeds with popsicle sticks. If you think you will remember what all the plants are when they start to grow, you won’t. I would know. In late May, or when all the frost is gone, you are ready to plant outside. Take your plants outside a few hours a day to get them used to the weather so they won’t die when you put them into their new soil. We set ours outside on the patio, first in the shade and a few days later in the sun to get them ready. Take your blueprint and your plants to the place you have chosen for your garden site. Make sure you are very gentle and follow the blueprint. Your plants are fragile. I enjoy planting day because we go out as a family and we drag every tool out of the silo, lay everything out and go for it! Now you have some waiting to do. You’ll need to make sure your plants get plenty of water and weed them every few days. I am always so eager to watch everything grow! If you have any trouble with animals or bugs, there are lots of natural things you can do. We sprinkle soap shavings around our garden to keep the deer away. Finally, we’re at the best part: harvesting! We love to pack a big picnic, spread a blanket on the lawn and pick our veggies. Then we sit and munch on everything. Sometimes we’ll walk back through the garden after we eat. One time, my sister and I were catching butterflies and as we ran by the zucchini plants we found a zucchini that was as long as my arm and as thick as my head! It was enormous! We couldn’t believe we had missed it under all the leaves of the plant. There’s nothing more amazing than starting with a seed and ending with something you can pick and eat and share with people. This will be our fourth year with a garden, and I can’t wait to get started!

My name is Madeline Scherer and I am almost 10½ years old. I have a big family—seven of us. Mommy, Daddy, me and I have two sisters and two brothers—all younger than me. I am homeschooled—or alternatively schooled, as my mom likes to say. I take classes all over the city! My favorite things to do are practice the piano and violin, read books and go to my Uncle Tom’s farm. I absolutely love to cook and started cooking as soon as I could read recipes, at least that’s what I remember. I make a great guacamole and a pretty good hummus, too. Someday I want to become a farmer and cook all foods from my farm.

PHOTO COURTESY OF KRISTEN SCHERER

ant to grow a vegetable garden? It might seem overwhelming at first. I’m going to share what my family and I did when we grew our first garden in 2009. But before I do, I have to tell you how it all started.

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Making Columbus the community garden center of the nation By Tamara Mann Tweel

etha Roblero’s classroom in Hilltop flaunts its backyard theme. Bilingual 10-year-olds offer broad smiles as they discuss the life cycles of insects, wolf spiders and butterflies. Between teeming displays of wide-leafed plants, they reminisce about last week’s gardening adventure.

“We didn’t know that we were actually going to put plants under the ground,” pipes Brian from El Salvador. Juan, Mario, Jasmine and Mohammed concur and shout out the names of fruits and vegetables they grew at the Highland Youth Garden across the street. “Watermelon, tomatoes, peppers, corn, cabbage … and I like broccoli.” “Do you need a tree,” croons neighbor John Hayes on my first winter visit to the Highland Garden. Peggy Murphy, the garden’s unstoppable coordinator, greets me with a hug and a yelp: “Strader’s! Look at this, there is no greater giver than Strader’s … they just dropped off $4,000 worth of Christmas trees for our community.” Seeing an elderly woman holding on to her son’s shoulder, Peggy calls out, “Would you like a Christmas tree?” “Oh yes, yes, yes,” she responds, “’cause I have grandbabies.”

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The good deeds keep coming. After the trees, Nick and Neil Nilhelm, a father-and-son team arrive unexpectedly from Zanesville to drop off a wooden box they built to house the garden’s water supply. Then the neighborhood volunteers start coming. Between pit stops to pick up litter, Peggy greets each one, tells me what they built, what they grew and how they have contributed to the remarkable success of a once-neglected street. “It’s not just about growing vegetables,” says Peggy. “It’s about growing people.” Peggy speaks from personal experience. When her family moved to Columbus from Kentucky, they survived on what they could grow. All five children worked daily in a small plot of land offered to the family by a nearby farmer. In 1972, when she was only 13, hardship befell the family. Her young mother died and soon after Peggy and many of her siblings fell into lives of addiction. Twenty years later, in a low-income housing development off Broad Street, Peggy rebuilt her life. “I started to think about planting seeds— seeds of kindness, seeds of hope, of forgiveness,” she says. She opened her first communal garden in 1992 in a small plot of land outside the

Left: Children of the Highland Youth Garden picking vegetables

housing development, using gardening as a way to educate the neighborhood.

PHOTO BY © KRISTEN STEVENS, KRISTEN-STEVENS.COM

“You don’t need to stay where there is no hope,” she would tell local teens. “Anyone can grow out of his or her circumstances.” She used the metaphor of fresh, healthy vegetables as a way of curbing addiction: “Put good things in your body. If you put bad things in, you won’t grow.” “When those kids grow something from a dead seed, a plant that can grow three feet tall,” she says with palpable emotion, “they realize they can do that. That they can be valuable.” Peggy turned that garden into a community center with its own 501c3 status, took a job helping teenage mothers at Children’s Hospital and purchased her own home. Wherever she went, Peggy used gardening as a way to heal and inspire. “When I visit Peggy, I always bring two shirts,” says Franklin Park Conservatory’s Bill Dawson, “because if she needs the shirt off my back, she is going to get it!” Today, the Highland Youth Garden serves over 200 students, ages 5 to 18. Not only does the garden help organize their education—from animal and plant development to nutrition—but the extra produce the students harvest feeds their families. Equally important, the garden has become a neighborhood hub for anyone eager to plant, build or improve the community. Every inch of the space—from the land to the outdoor learning center to the seeds—is the product of generosity: Peggy’s thank-you list, which ranges from large corporations like Home Depot to all the area churches, could fill this magazine. Helping and gardening, Hilltop residents have seen, can be contagious. Community gardens have popped up across the street and around the corner from the Highland Youth Garden, making once-abandoned lots green. For these reasons and more, Dawson and his staff at the Franklin Park Conservatory handpicked the Highland Youth Garden to serve as one of 12 model gardens in their new 12 by 2012 Initiative. This April, 12 community gardens chosen for their excellence in feeding the hungry; youth and nutrition education; celebrating culture; and job training will become neighborhood gardening education hubs (see sidebar for a complete list of gardens). “Instead of making the communities come to us,” says Jeff Lyttle, of J. P. Morgan Chase & Co, sponsor of 12 by 2012, “we said ‘Let’s go to the communities.’” This innovative program is only the latest effort by Franklin Park Conservatory and its partners to green Columbus and make the city a national model for community gardening.

From 12 to 200 In 1992, a shaggy-haired Bill Dawson chopped off his ponytail and left his job as a commercial landscape foreman to work for one of Columbus’ storied financial misadventures, the international horticulture exhibition AmeriFlora ’92. Despite its monetary failings, AmeriFlora brought renewed attention to a local gem, the Franklin Park Conservatory, and inspired Dawson to stay in Columbus: “I felt a real responsibility to this neighborhood and to this community.” At the close of the exhibition, Dawson had a mission: “AmeriFlora fenced and priced out a number of nearby residents,” he says. “They lived across the street and they couldn’t even come. I wanted to give the park back to the community.”

Dawson started small. With the aid of neighborhood kids, he planted flowers throughout the 88-acre park that housed the Conservatory. “The community loved it,” he recalls, “because they had never seen anyone out here on the weekends. They never saw anyone go across the street to pick up trash.” Those kids, he says, “gave me my first taste of community gardening.” While Bill started his beautification efforts, the Conservatory launched an innovative strategic plan. They went directly to the community and asked: How can we be better community members? Local leaders had an unconventional response: Bring your expertise beyond the Conservatory’s walls. Thus the community garden campaign was born. It began with the Growing to Green Initiative in 2000. At that time there were only a dozen community gardens in Columbus. Dawson focused on getting community gardeners all of the resources they needed to start, renovate and plan for a sustainable garden. As much emphasis was placed on harnessing local resources and working with others as there was on testing soil and figuring out an irrigation plan. From the outset, Dawson had a longterm strategy: “For years, I have been networking gardens together to share resources. I expect everyone I teach to then teach someone else.” The Conservatory would be an information and resource hub where those resources would be replicated and shared throughout the greater Columbus community. In 2010, with the opening of the four-acre Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Garden Campus, the hub concept became official. In addition to its teaching gardens, the campus, located on the east side of the Conservatory, is home to the Growing to Green program, the Chase Community Gardening Center and—as a sign of Columbus’ growing stature in the community gardening world—the national American Community Gardening Association (ACGA). According to Su Lok at Scotts Miracle-Gro and Betsy Johnson, a board member of the ACGA, the campus is truly “a national model” for community gardening. 2010 was also the year that one of Dawson’s Growing to Green alums, Kwodwo Ababio and his garden, Ama Vera’s Garden in Linden, inspired Mayor Coleman to officially get behind Columbus’ community garden movement.

A City of Partnerships Kwodwo’s New Harvest Café is more than a physical space: It is a way of life. The cozy tables, smoldering scent of soul food, performance space and stacked bookshelves beckon one to sit down and participate. Behind the café, amidst dilapidated rows of boarded up houses, sits a beautifully designed outdoor performance space and community garden. As an artist, Kwodwo conceptualizes every part of the café as interconnected. It is all a part of his canvas— his community. “Creating beauty is all art and beauty changes community,” he says. Before opening the café, Kwodwo spent nine years as a medic in the Navy. From the military, he learned the fundamental values of teamwork and discipline. “When you work in a fragmented community those fundamentals aren’t there.” The café and the garden help teach these values. “Feeding yourself,” he says, “is where you have to start.” edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

Top: New Harvest Café and the Ama Vera’s Garden, named for a neighbor killed in a drive-by shooting, before they broke ground and started the garden

Ama Vera’s Garden, named for a neighbor killed in a drive-by shooting, began as a tiny sliver of land on the side of the café. Then, on a sweltering June day in 2010, over 70 volunteers arrived on Cleveland Avenue to transform the garden. The city generously tore down an abandoned building adjacent to the café and Fiskars’ Project Orange Thumb donated all of the supplies and support needed to landscape the land. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Mayor Coleman, according to the city’s Assistant Environmental Steward Leslie Strader, “realized that we needed to be doing more from our office.” Strader became the city’s community gardening liaison and started pulling together representatives from every relevant city department to meet monthly with Dawson. Meanwhile, Mayor Coleman got so inspired that he even planted a vegetable garden at City Hall (see page 48). In 2011, the city joined forces with the County Commissioners, the Franklin Park Conservatory, Scotts Miracle-Gro and the Columbus Foundation to offer their own garden start-up grants. “This is bigger than just community gardening,” says Strader. “It brings entire neighborhoods together, it has a health and fitness component. These gardens are providing food and some are even making sustainable business models.” Kate Matheny, a grants coordinator in the Franklin County Commissioners office, agrees, “Community gardening is a core opportunity.” It helps to alleviate the problems of “diabetes, obesity and food deserts.” Simply put, “It makes vacant land productive land.” Columbus gardens are so productive that Dawson estimates they produce over 200,000 pounds of food annually. The community gardening movement in Columbus is a collaborative venture, reliant on the hard work of neighborhood volunteers, nonprofits, government officials and businesses. According to Lisa Courtice of the Columbus Foundation, the city excels at these types of collaborations: “It is in the DNA of our culture. We are smart and we are open.” They make Columbus, in Matheny’s words, “cutting edge in ways people don’t know and don’t think of.” People are starting to take notice. Leaders from across the gardening world are buzzing that Columbus has more community gardens per capita than anywhere else in the country (official data is currently being collected by ACGA). That a city could be so radically transformed in 12 years is an extraordinary achievement. Civic and industry leaders credit the Conservatory and Dawson. Says Jeff Lyttle from J. P. Morgan Chase, “There are lots of botanical gardens but there is only one Franklin Park Conservatory and there is only one Bill Dawson.” Dawson credits simple tools and committed people: “My motto is a stick and a string, I think everything is possible with a stick and a string.” This spring, visit all 12 by 2012 gardens to see what is possible with a stick, a string and committed community leaders. Tamara Mann Tweel is a freelance writer and PhD candidate in American history at Columbia University. Born and raised in New York City, Tamara comes from a boisterous clan of exploratory eaters with two passions: family and food. She is excited to bring this spirit to Columbus and discover the many world traditions that are being recreated within our city. Her culinary writing has appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, Icons of American Cooking and Museum. Center: The Franklin Park Conservatory Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Garden Campus Bottom: Fresh vegetables from the Highland Youth Garden

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edible COLUMBUS

PHOTO COURTESY OF FRANKLIN PARK CONSERVATORY

The following gardens represent some of the most innovative and effective community gardens in Columbus. Each has been handpicked to be a 12 by 2012 hub garden. On July 8, 2012, Franklin Park Conservatory hosts the Growing to Green Community Gardens Open Garden Tour. Over 60 American Botanical Society conference attendees will be volunteering in these gardens on that morning.

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Visit Franklin Park Conservatory’s Growing to Green Website at fpconservatory.org/g2glinks.htm for more information on upcoming garden tours.

Franklinton Community Garden 290 Avondale Ave.

Stoddart Avenue Community Garden (SACG) 445–451 Stoddart Ave.

4 Seasons City Farm: Garden of Communion Community Garden

PHOTO COURTESY OF FRANKLIN PARK CONSERVATORY

at Bryden and Ohio Avenue, behind Old First Presbyterian Church

Highland Community Garden at Highland and Floral Avenue

St. Vincent de Paul Pantry Garden 2875 E. Livingston Ave.

Upper Arlington Lutheran Church Community Garden 3500 Mill Run Dr.

Gantz Road Community Garden south of the intersection of Gantz and Frank Roads

Franklin County Juvenile Court Garden

PHOTO BY © KRISTEN STEVENS, KRISTEN-STEVENS.COM

490 S. Champion Ave.

Weinland Park Community Garden Godman Guild, 303 S. Sixth St.

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New Harvest Café Alma Vera’s garden 1675 Arlington Ave.

Epworth United Methodist Church 5100 Karl Rd.

1777 East Broad Street

Native American Indian Center Community Garden

Columbus, Ohio 43203

72 E. Innis Ave.

To register: 614.645.5943 www.fpconservatory.org

ramed glass greenhouses produced year-round vegetables for Ohioans half a Notes on AGRICULTURE entury ago. In the last 20 years, small Ohio sustainable and traditional growers, articularly plain people, have resurrected the craft and an increasingg number of HDU URXQG IDUPHUV PDUNHWV DQG &6$V EHQHĂ&#x;W IURP WKH LQFUHDVLQJ YROXPHV RI resh local winter produce. A call to create more high tunnels in Central Ohio in 2012 ontrolling and optimizing plant growingByenvironments year round is more sustainable, Warren Taylor ntrepreneurial, and decentralized than outdoor ggrowing. We food have so much This is the model g of industrial away. Without huge diesel tractors, crop Ohio has decadesdiverse of winter greenhouse distribution with which we are trying to dusters, chemicals and an underclass of growing history. Thousands of metal-framed o learn glass that it staggers the imagination. Winter greenhouses, or â&#x20AC;&#x153;high tunnels,â&#x20AC;? compete. 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If you a consumer, has locally grown fresh produce in the We must rise to the top of the food chain by imagination. Winter greenhouses, or â&#x20AC;&#x153;high ou could loan farmer come up $1,000 and nine friends to do winter. or It will take a decade to catch with up with producing outstanding produce. The freshest, tunnels,â&#x20AC;? require a greater expertise than$10,000 unmetvisit demand. every week tothe enjoy most perishable, the most difficult and open monocultures. They o. Takecreativity, anfieldinterest inreward a farm theand and understand your tender, the most complicated and risk laden, risk-taking and new production the mostit.CSA impractical andsubscribers even declared challengeof to be it. Share methods, business structures and art in the revolution. CelebratePerhaps it. the Begreatest proud have improbable or impossible is the magic that surmounted is to get growers to risk the relationships inside the farm and outward lready learned profoundly fresh food.capacity. They are prepared forward we must achieve. I have noto doubtfund that we investment in greens-growing through to theabout consumer. Change is good. will do this, but that confidence leaves no They need to have faith that the product seasonWeof growing, willing to capitalize the minimal $10,000 per 30-foot-byroom for hesitation. Every season we miss, they grow will receive a fair value in the have the opportunity to redefine every meal we eat from outsourced food, worth of marketplace when they bring food freshness, nutritional density and 6-foot the greenhouse structure necessary toit toproduce $6,000â&#x20AC;&#x201C;$8,000 must galvanize us to work more intently and retailers and ask for a fair wholesale price. efficiency possible with year-round winter vegetables in four months. insistently towards local self-sufficiency and This requires trust. That trust requires a growing. Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s emerging and

A YEAR-ROUND GREENHOUSE REVOLUTION

tomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s burgeoning greenhouse movement can surpass the supposed advantages of industrial agriculture and be capitalized by ourselves. Really.

relationship growers must cultivate with food retailers. That trust and sharing of risk can only happen when each understands the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s business. This is a new paradigm for both.

a consumer, you could loan a farmer $10,000 or come up with $1,000 and nine friends to do so. Take an interest in a farm and visit every week to enjoy and understand your part in the revolution. Celebrate it. Be proud of it. Share it.

highly functional distribution system for perishable food. We need a perishable food hub. Perishable foods have the distinct advantage for local producers of being noticeably more fresh and of higher quality than anything that can be shipped in from out of state.

year-round food production.

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in four months.

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FALL 2011

Garden Notes

Plants of Ohio: What’s Native and What’s Not? Ohio has a great diversity of native plants, including many that thrive under adverse conditions. According to Bulletin 865: Native Plants of Ohio, provided by the Ohio State University Extension Office, “When used correctly, native plants may be better adapted to local environmental conditions; be used to solve landscape problems like shady or wet areas; be of increased value to wildlife; require less maintenance; provide four-season interest; be a good choice for an informal landscape; preserve native species and biodiversity; and add a local accent to the landscape.” The key to using native plants successfully is to carefully choose plants that will suit your site conditions. “While some native plants are tremendously adaptable to a wide range of environmental conditions, many are quite habitat-specific. Before you start selecting plant materials, know your site, including the exposure, soil texture, pH, fertility, moisture conditions, weed problems and the history of use.” However, invasive species are threatening native plants and landscapes. These species can reduce biological diversity, change food webs and displace wildlife. According to the Ohio Invasive Plants Council, some of the worst invasive plant species in Ohio’s natural areas include Amur, Morrow & Tatarian Honeysuckle; Japanese Honeysuckle & Asian Bittersweet; Common Reed Grass and Reed Canary Grass; Garlic Mustard; Multiflora Rose; Narrow-leaved and Hybrid Cattail; Canada Thistle; and White & Yellow Sweet-Clover. One way you can help stop the introduction and spread of invasive species and protect native plants is by verifying that the plants you are buying for your yard or garden are not invasive, and replacing invasive plants in your garden with noninvasive alternatives. Also, make sure to ask your local nursery staff for help in identifying invasive plants. —Colleen Arnett

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The Land Bank Gardens of Columbus

Chadwick Arboretum & Learning Gardens 2012 Spring Plant Sale, Auction and Gardening Fair

The Columbus Land Bank Program addresses vacant and abandoned properties by pursuing ownership and transforming the property into a developable asset. It acquires property through tax foreclosure, purchases and donations, and holds and maintains the property until an outside entity can be found to redevelop the property. Land Bank properties are available for use as a community garden for $10 per year. Some of the current community gardens on Land Bank properties are Ganthers Place Garden, ganthersplace.com; Franklinton Gardens on Avondale, franklintongardens.org; CHP’s Garden at 156 N. 21st; Highland West Garden at 29 Wheatland Ave.; and several four-seasons garden sites on the east side. The submittal of an application is required for any purchase or lease. For more information contact the Department of Development/ Land Redevelopment Office by phone at 614-645-LAND (5263), or by email at landredevelopmentoffice@columbus.gov. Information provided by John Turner, Columbus’ land development office administrator. —CA

Friday, May 11, 7am–7pm Saturday, May 12, 8am–3pm Tree and shrub auction will be held both days at 11am.

NW corner of Lane Avenue and Fred Taylor Drive on The Ohio State University campus (Just East of Route 315) More information at http://chadwickarboretum.osu.edu

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5TH ANNUAL

Garden Notes Fruit Trees for Your Backyard The notion of having a peach tree outside your backdoor seems awfully romantic, doesn’t it? Taken a step further, one needs to consider which type of peach tree grows best in your area. The Franklin Park Conservatory Resource Center and Horticulture staff is a great place to start as a variety of fruit trees, espalier, brambles and shrubs are planted right on the grounds for demonstration at FPC. Backyard orchard trees like the Anjou pear, Red Gold nectarine, Seckel pear and Lapin cherry do well. So do dwarf orchard trees like the Moorman apricot, Montmorency cherry and Blushing Star peach. The Fruit Tree Planting Association offers additional resources. Learn more at ftpf.org, or visit fpconservatory.org and schedule a visit. —Colleen Leonardi

Lasagna the Way Mother Earth Intended It When we learned about lasagna gardening we were smitten. It’s an easy, low-cost layering system for growing your own food that doesn’t require you have a yard or a plot of land on which to grow, meaning no digging, tilling and weeding. By mimicking Mother Nature’s process of “converting organic waste into food for plants” your lasagna garden yields healthy herbs and vegetables all growing-season long. It also maximizes recycling efforts as what’s required to build a lasagna bed is newspaper and a selection of natural ingredients including compost, leaves, grass clippings and peat moss. With a layer of wet newspaper on the bottom, you build your layers of natural materials creating a fertile environment for earthworms to thrive and do their thing—till the soil naturally! To make some lasagna for your garden, pick up the book Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces by Patricia Lanza. —CL

A Square-Foot Slice of Heaven Another easy gardening method for beginning gardeners and those with smaller spaces is square-foot gardening. With the plot divided into an easily accessible 4-feetby-4-feet 16-square-foot grid, gardeners can reap the many benefits of small-scale gardening including saving water; using less pesticide, because companion planting is recommended; doing less weeding and less work; and easily installing a small cover or cage to protect the bed from pests, the cold and excess sun. To learn more, pick up Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening. Tip: gardeners.com offers a free online tool where you can plan your square-foot garden by selecting vegetables and herbs and plotting them into an online grid. It’s a great way to see what your garden will look like while making sure everything will fit and live in harmony. Visit gardeners.com and click on “Kitchen Garden Planner” for the resource. —CL

Keep a Garden Journal All the experts agree—when you’re starting your garden for the first, second or fifth year, keep a garden journal to track weather patterns, pest management techniques, what works and what doesn’t, and more. Think of it as your own personal Farmer’s Almanac, a valuable resource to gather and collect information about how to take care of the small swath of land where you grow your own food for your family. —CL

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Grow Your Food for Free There were so many books we came across when putting together this issue, but this one won our hearts. Written by Dave Hamilton, published by Green Books, Grow Your Food for Free offers sage advice on how to save money, resources and more when thinking about your garden. He emphasizes a DIY approach to gathering materials (use what you have!), a practical perspective on the impermanence of place (if you might move in a year, how do you make the garden sustainable?), great tips for growing indoors and plenty of fun projects for the whole family, like how to make a sunflower feeding perch for the birds come fall. Inventive, creative and inspiring for the 21st century gardener, consider this one an essential manual for your gardening library. —CL

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Cultivating the Past Growing, buying heirlooms strengthens a vital connection to history and diversity By Bill Thorness, Photography by Carole Topalian When you sit down to dinner with the folks at the family homestead, a dish may circulate that sparks discussion. Not about the food, but about the vessel: an antique passed down through generations, carefully stored and brought out on special occasions. It often comes with a story about where the original owner got it, or how it has traveled to be in your hands. What if the food inside that dish carried such a heritage? In some cases, it does. Our nation of immigrants and migrating native peoples is not too many generations removed from agrarian roots. Many travelers have carried their histories in their hands, tucked into a cigar box or sewn into the lining of their coats. In some cases, those valuable histories included seeds of the very food that nourished their ancestors. Today we call them heirlooms: vegetables or fruit that come to us from another time, sprouted from seeds adapted to a new climate, just as their human carriers did. “Heirlooms are true survivors,” wrote entrepreneur Kenny Ausubel in his book Seeds of Change, which

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charted the beginnings of the seed company of the same name that he founded. “These are plants with true breeding, the ‘greatest hits of the gene pool.’” We can grow and eat food that is substantially the same as what was grown by our great-great-grandparents, or by Thomas Jefferson, or by the Aztecs or ancient Greeks. How do we know? Etchings of peppers can be seen on pre-Columbian ceramics created 7,000 years ago. Plant varieties are named in historical writings. You will find references to chard in the writings of Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Defining an Heirloom A common definition for today’s heirloom seed is one that has been passed down from generation to generation, is at least a half-century old (many are much more ancient) and is being singled out for preservation because of some danger of extinction. A few heirloom vegetables and fruits can be found in commercial production, and you will find more in today’s burgeoning farmers

markets, but the vast majority of our food consists of recent hybrids. Heirlooms amount to a few handfuls of seed being cherished and grown on small plots of land and stored in “seed banks” scattered around the world, like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, drilled into the permafrost beneath a small Norwegian island. In an unfortunate comment on the state of seed diversity, it has been called the Doomsday Vault. Compared to the few heirloom varieties saved, a vast majority of our vegetable heritage has been lost or discarded, through a combination of neglect, commercial seed company consolidation and changing lifestyles. As our country has developed, most of us have lost our roots in agriculture, what Jefferson called “a science of the very first order” when he urged higher education to grant more respect to farming. That suggestion never became a trend. In the course of the 20th century, farming as an occupation went from 38% in 1900 to less than 1% today. We also have turned our backs on vegetable diversity. A study of the U.S. Department of Agriculture listings of 75 vegetable and fruit species being grown on the farm between 1903 and 1983 showed that the number of varieties shrank by 93%. In some cases, the remaining varieties were to be found at only one source. As farms got larger and seed sources were concentrated into fewer hands, heirloom varieties were replaced by industrially suited hybrids, many of which are now proprietary to their sellers. Clearly, the food of our ancestors is not widely available to us today.

“Because of consolidation and concentration in the seed industry, there has been loss of variety and loss of heirloom varieties,” explains Matthew Dillon, a founder of the Organic Seed Alliance of Port Townsend, Washington. “But the real concern from our perspective was the skills of working with seed are being lost even more than the seed themselves. The [work of ] farmers and gardeners who created the diversity we have today is no longer being regenerated—selecting varieties, seeing anomalies you like and saving it.” Counteracting these trends are committed small farmers, seed-saving activists and home gardeners determined to perpetuate and enjoy heirloom varieties. Jefferson, who wrote in 1785 that “[c]ultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” would be overjoyed at this trend.

Garden Umami Preservationists who value heirlooms also are driven by the desire to retain culturally significant foods. This effort builds on the work of Russian botanist Nikolay Vavilov who, in the first decades of the 20th century, charted the “center of origin” for most of our domesticated food crops. The recent “Ark of Taste” program has shined a light on foods that are important in different regions of the United States. Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange was begun 30 years ago after one of its founders was given cherished seeds grown by her dying grandfather; SSE has since saved many varieties and even reintroduced some that had been thought extinct.

edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

Right: Scarlet runner beans

Perhaps the greatest incentive to grow heirlooms comes from people who seek the flavors, aromas and uniqueness of the foods they remember from the past: the tangy sweetness of a vine-ripened heirloom tomato or delicate nuttiness of a unique potato. The search for that special sensory experience—“garden umami,” as writer Felder Rushing called it in a 2008 talk at Jefferson’s home Monticello—can be a powerful force for the quest by gardeners and eaters to uncover unique, old food treasures.

Growing Our Heritage Whenever immigrants have introduced their heritage varieties that adapt to our growing conditions, they have added history and character to our horticultural landscape as well as their lineage to our gene pool. Take, for example, the Soldaki tomato. Seed Savers Exchange now offers this heirloom, which it says was brought from Krakow, Poland, to Cleveland in about 1900. A co-worker gave seeds of the tomato to Carolyn Male, an SSE stalwart and voracious tomato grower in upstate New York. She grew the dark pink beefsteak tomato and reintroduced it to the seed savers’ world, and now you can grow the old Krakow-via-Cleveland variety too. Columbus had its own tomato expert in the form of a plant breeder and “seedsman,” Alexander W. Livingston, who was responsible for “fine-tun[ing] the tomato into the fruit we know today,” according to the seed company’s history. Livingston (1821–98) sought out the perfect tomato at a time when the fruit was not “reliable,” and in fact many people considered it poisonous. Through much crossbreeding and trials, he came up with the Paragon tomato, which he introduced for sale in 1870. Over the years, he brought 31 tomato varieties to market, including the Buckeye State tomato and Livingston’s Golden Queen, which, by his own account, he was given by a grower at a county fair. He preserved and improved it, and introduced it to the market in 1882. The Livingston Seed Co. was operated by the family for three generations, mostly offering bulk seed. Under current ownership, it has expanded to offer a plethora of seeds to gardeners, marketed with the company’s familiar blue oval logo in racks at nurseries. You can also buy a dozen of Livingston’s tomato varieties and a copy of the book he wrote about tomatoes from the preservationists Victory Seed Co. (www.victoryseed.com). Mike Dehlendorf, who operates Ohio Heirloom Seeds in Gahanna, says Buckeye State gardeners love to grow the old tomatoes, and two strains of Brandywine (pink and yellow) are his biggest sellers. “Giant Belgium also does very well here,” he says. “It came out of Ohio and Pennsylvania.” He cites Cherokee Purple, which was given from the Cherokee people to settlers in Tennessee more than a century ago, as another local favorite. But heirloom vegetables do not begin and end with tomatoes. Livingston also introduced Winter Luxury squash in 1984, for instance. And you might run across the Mostoller’s Wild Goose bean, which carries the story of being found in the crop of a goose in Western

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Pennsylvania, according to writer Ben Watson’s “Taylor’s Guide to Heirloom Vegetables.” Introduced in 1865, it was maintained by the Mostoller family for 117 years, and is now being preserved by SSE. By the way, Watson says, it’s a tall climber that produces heavy quantities of mostly white beans great for baking and soups. An old variety of potato that evokes seasonal folk wisdom is the Peach Blow Potato, said to have been grown by Native Americans in the Rockies and brought east by trappers into Ohio and nearby states in the 19th century. It was sold under the names of Long Red and Merino, according to Pennsylvania chef and heirloom historian William Woys Weaver. He says the name reflects its cultivation: Plant when the peach blossoms blow, and begin to harvest at the same time as peaches come into season. Preserving and growing old seed can have a powerful effect, says Ronda Clark of Blackberry Sage Farm in Athens, Ohio, who grows a dozen old bean varieties and sells at the Athens Farmers Market, itself a historic wonder that has been serving up fresh local produce for 30 years and is perhaps the oldest such market in Ohio. Although her father and uncle were growers, they did not pass down seeds. Even so, “it’s giving me a connection to them. The seeds I grew go back into the ground and they become like children,” she says. “It’s like a cyclical sense, it connects me to my ancestors.” The old varieties also give her a link to her Native American heritage. “I find that I’m drawn to beans that are from Native American tribes,” she says. Cherokee Trail of Tears bean (see sidebar) is one of her favorites, as is the Pinto bean. She grows them in the Native “Three Sisters” style, with corn and squash.

Active Preservation The flavors and stories of our vegetable heritage have inspired gardeners and eaters, and their zeal has led to many preservation efforts. By seeking out and growing heirlooms, we can solidify their availability. Seed Savers Exchange is supported by 13,000 members, many of whom list their own seeds for exchange in SSE’s thick, annual yearbook. Heirlooms have become a growing segment of sales for many seed companies that cater to home gardeners. With the popularity of farmers markets has come the directmarketing opportunity for farmers to try out smaller crops of unique, old varieties, so today shoppers will see “Heirloom!” on many of their signs. Buying from these farmers, and engaging them on the topic of heirlooms, is another path to heirloom cultivation. When you sit down to your table with a dish of heirloom vegetables from your local farmer or your own garden, you will be nourished by a lot more than a healthy dose of vitamins: The bowl will overflow with history that is literally the stuff of which civilization was made.

Bill Thorness is the author of Edible Heirlooms: Heritage Vegetables for the Maritime Garden (Skipstone Press, 2009).

Stirring Diversity into the Bean Pot To get started with your own heirloom garden, you need look no further than the plentiful, versatile bean. You will have no trouble finding heirloom beans, as the ease of saving and long shelf life have made them the stars of the heirloom world. New Englander John Withee was so enamored with beans that he grew a thousand heirloom varieties, which he willed to Seed Savers Exchange upon his death. The colorful, hard-shelled wonders also scream history. Cherokee Trail of Tears, a small black bean, has a heartbreaking provenance. It was a staple carried by the Cherokee people when they were driven from their land in the Southeast to Oklahoma by the U.S. Army during the bitter winter of 1838. Four thousand Cherokees died on the path, forever known as the Trail of Tears. Greeks used Fava beans as voting tokens. Native Americans string Scarlet Runner beans as jewelry. Names like Lazy Housewife, Dragon’s Tongue and Wren’s Egg speak to use, shape and color. Oregon Giant sports eight-inch, maroon-mottled pods. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan told one writer that his favorite seed name comes from a bean he was given by Southwest Indians that translates roughly as “little bitty kittie titties.” As versatile as they are in the kitchen, beans also are adaptable to many garden environments. They like full sun, but will climb to find it. Some varieties are prolific on tidy, two-foot-tall bushes grown in rows. Many are forgiving of the inattentive gardener, and can be left to dry on the vine rather than eaten fresh and green.

Take action: Join Seed Savers Exchange and buy their heirloom varieties seedsavers.org Buy heirloom seeds and plants from Cooley’s Greenhouse cooleysgreenhouse.net Buy heirloom seeds from Ohio Heirloom Seeds ohioheirloomseeds.com Buy Livingston seeds, available at local nurseries livingstonseeds.com Shop the Livingston’s tomato seed collection, and his book on tomatoes, victoryseeds.com/tomato_livingston.html Support the agricultural seed stewardship efforts of Organic Seed Alliance, seedalliance.org Buy heirloom vegetables at your local farmers market.

—Bill Thorness

Mayor Coleman’s recipe for a thriving, sustainable city By Marta Madigan

hat makes a city sustainable? Mayor Michael B. Coleman began addressing this urgent question over a decade ago. Now serving his fourth term as mayor of Columbus, he has created several award-winning green initiatives focusing on clean air and water as well as building energy-efficient housing and exploring alternative sources of fuel.

Reviving downtown Columbus by adding new bikeways, pedestrian paths and parks like the Sioto Mile, Mayor Coleman sets the pace for urban living. His goal: Ohio’s capital on two wheels. As Columbus is celebrating 200 years of its past, the mayor and his Green Team—an advisory group of City staff and environmental experts—keep working on the city’s greener future. Bringing curbside recycling is one of the programs that will reach Columbus’ residents this year. Expanding GreenSpot to schools is another notable effort. By planting new community gardens, increasing access to fresh produce and promoting a healthy lifestyle, Mayor Coleman completes the list of ingredients for an eco-city. Now, it is up to us to spice it up.

Madigan: Living in Central Ohio, do you think it is Q: Marta possible to go on the “50-mile diet,” or eat only foods that were grown and raised within 50 miles from us? Mayor Coleman: Yes. But it has to be more than a diet. It has to be a lifestyle. We have a lot of farms in Central Ohio outside of the city. We reach out within 50 miles from the city for fresh fruits and vegetables. We promote buying local. We have farmers markets. But it takes more than that. It takes grocery stores that will buy from the locals, and that our consumers demand local food.

Over the last few years there has been growing Q: interest in strengthening local food systems, partly as a response to the economic downturn. How do you support the idea of local food?

Mayor Coleman watering the community garden outside City ofﬁces

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I’ve asked representatives from each of the City departments to discuss these issues and how the City can proactively respond and leverage our resources to help the cause. They do so every month. Additionally, the Institute for Active Living promotes the farmers markets in the city, among other things like active living lifestyle, bicycling safety, walking, as well as water conservation and community gardens. In all those things, we especially promote community gardens and farmers markets.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CITY OF COLUMBUS, OFFICE OF MAYOR MICHAEL B. COLEMAN

Columbus is a city of new immigrants, myself included. understand that phase one of bringing curbside Q: Irecycling Q: What is your favorite ethnic cuisine? to all Columbus homes is happening as we speak. In addition to not wanting to waste, what are the incentives to recycle? A: A: I think my favorite is ethnic cuisine itself. I like spices, lots of vegetables, and I like the way countries represented in our city prepare foods. I eat it often—from all kinds of ethnic communities: from Somali to other parts of Africa, Europe, Mediterranean, South America, Central America, Asia.

Recycling is first and foremost the right thing to do to be responsible stewards of the environment. Residents have shared with me that they feel a moral obligation to take action to protect the environment, and I believe it is the City’s duty to provide the tools for them to do so. That’s one of the reasons why I made the decision to add recycling to our portfolio of basic City services just like trash and yard waste collection.

Variety is important to me, but it's got to be a healthy variety.

Plastic, paper or reusable bag? Which one do you use? Q: And what’s your personal GreenSpot resolution for 2012? A: does the City of Columbus encourage businesses Q: How and individuals to make green choices? A:

I am going to begin using a reusable bag. That is a new resolution. Actually, I do pretty well on most everything else.

The GreenSpot program is the number one effort. We have over 3,000 members. It seems to be working and we are proud of that effort. This network of members has been especially useful in getting the word out about incentives like the Green Columbus Fund.

Q: What is the Green Columbus Fund? A:

The Green Columbus Fund is an incentive program offering reimbursements for costs associated with LEED certification, among other things. All of our City buildings are LEED certified. Every building we build in the city is now LEED certified. That wasn’t the case 12 years ago.

Starting this spring, recycling service will be implemented in the first of five phases. Informational materials regarding acceptable materials, collection dates and more will be provided to each household eligible for service along with a blue recycling cart. Shortly thereafter, service will begin alternating between recycling and yard waste collection each week. Just like any other City service, beyond what is paid in taxes there will be no additional fee for this program.

are a big supporter of 2 BY 2012—Columbus’ Q: You bicycle commuting program. Do you bike to work? A: I actually live close enough to work that I can walk. I bike as a hobby and I bike a lot. I just enjoy it. Again, it is a lifestyle thing. We strongly encourage people to ride bikes as much as they can as a daily practice and for recreational purposes.

CONNECTING THE GREEN DOTS GreenSpot for children What makes you green? GreenSpot Kids—a new Columbus GreenSpot project for ﬁrst graders—instructs, entertains and encourages young readers to take an active approach toward the question of sustainability. GreenSpot the mascot and his friends are lively characters from the new children’s book GreenSpot and the Dots. They help students learn about recycling, conserving water and growing local food. GreenSpot Kids, however, is much more than theory taught in a classroom. Education and fun continues in the real world through take-home activities involving entire families and in Green Walks led by teachers. This spring, Columbus GreenSpot invites everybody to the Whetstone Park. Grab a map and follow one of two brand new Columbus Green Walks routes. Spend an active hour chasing clues, hunting treasure and learning about the environment along the way. When you are done, remember to recycle your map. That will certainly help make you green. To ﬁnd out more about GreenSpot for Kids, visit greenkids.columbus.gov. Background courtesy of Anita Musser, manager of Columbus GreenSpot, Department of Public Utilities

Columbus City Schools curriculum just Q: included a new GreenSpot book for children. (See sidebar for details.) Why do you think is it important to teach a sustainability program at early age?

Young people are trendsetters. They absorb information and pass it on to each other, and also to adults. My hope is that by emphasizing sustainable living at a young age, it will become an engrained way of life— just like sharing or any of the other basic skills you learn when you are young. Kids will then take those lessons home to share with their family.

your brave decision to tear down Q: Itheadmire City Center mall and create a green

We will be truly a city that has changed its culture fully. One of my goals is that we will be the number one bike city in the country.

I’ve been extremely pleased with the success The Commons has seen in its first season. As further improvements are made to the site, including a stage, you can look forward to an increase in the entertainment options available in the park.

Everybody in the city will recycle, business and residential.

The Scioto Mile is proof of the economic engine open space can provide. The park was a magnet, overflowing with people coming downtown to spend the weekend enjoying our restaurants, entertainment venues and of course the beautiful fountain on the riverfront. All of our neighborhoods are going to be celebrated in 2012, our bicentennial year. Of course, Franklinton has special significance this year as our first neighborhood and we will continue our planning and efforts to revive this area. I have a vision for an arts district there that has already started to take shape with artists making use of studio space within the neighborhood.

you installed a small rain garden on Q: InGay2007 Street as a part of the Get Green Columbus program. What other eco-projects is the City involved in and can we expect more ecosystem restoration undertakings in the future?

is your vision of a sustainable city? How will Q: What Columbus look like a decade from now? A:

We will have mass transit that will be reflective of the needs of the people. That will be on our way to really looking at real options in all of the forms of transportation in 10 years.

What other neighborhoods do you have planned for revitalization in the near future?

Our Department of Recreation and Parks almost always has a restoration project underway—taking streams that have been severely impacted by development and restoring them to a natural meander. They have been and will continue to be aggressive in pursuing grant funding for this purpose.

space in the middle of the business district. What should we anticipate at the Columbus Commons this year?

Scioto Mile riverside park is another Q: The successful effort to bring people downtown.

Protecting our streams and rivers is the first step in a process we take very seriously at the City to ensure the water we all use to drink, cook with, and more remains high quality and is clean and safe.

The Gay Street rain garden is actually just one of many rain gardens we have in the city. In fact, last year we invested in protecting our sources of drinking water by installing a series of large natural storm water filtration systems, much like rain gardens, along the banks of our reservoirs. The O’Shaughnessy Reservoir overlook even offers interpretive signage so residents can learn about the best management practices they are looking at while they visit.

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Every part of our community—the business sector, private sector, the government, nonprofit community—will take concrete efforts and action on sustainability issues. We will be environmentally efficient. New homes will be built in a way that makes them sustainable buildings. Energy is another element. I would love to see our communities move more towards different alternative fuel source energy for transportation. Electric vehicles become a very integral part of our community with electric stations as opposed to gas stations in the city.

Q: Do you have a sustainable vision related to food? A:

Support local farmers! I’ve always believed in eating healthy. That’s a major part of my life. As we each eat healthy and locally, the incidents of obesity and diabetes and other incidents of health problems will decline in our community substantially. It is a big health benefit.

To find out more about the City of Columbus’ green initiatives visit: mayor.columbus.gov getgreencolumbus.org columbusgreenspot.org getactivecolumbus.com keepcolumbusbeautiful.org 200columbus.com/initiatives/green-community publichealth.columbus.gov/institute-for-active-living.aspx

Marta Madigan is a Polish freelance travel and food writer who, as an editor and contributor, helped begin the Polish edition of National Geographic magazine. Among her many NG stories she covered a variety of food-related topics such as Spanish tapas, French cuisine, Polish Christmas traditions and Sonoma and Napa Valley wines. After she moved from Warsaw to Atlanta, she wrote a chapter on Southern cooking for a collective book on international cuisines published in 2008 in Poland. She has contributed to Edible Columbus since the winter issue of 2010, walking or biking to her interviews.

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Urban agriculture is growing—veggies to bees to livestock Story and photography by Kit Yoon

From Shanghai to Havana, New York to San Francisco, urban agriculture is feeding city dwellers locally grown foods from vacant lots, rooftops, backyards and school grounds. Though it is hardly a new concept, growing food in urban areas in the United States is regaining momentum. Thanks, in part, to an increased interest in the local food movement, more consumers are looking for fresh produce and meats grown or raised close to home.

farmer. Nearly a dozen earthy entrepreneurs make their living as urban farmers in Columbus. They are growing vegetables, raising chickens, keeping bees at least one of them is breeding crawly critters that can turn any kitchen scraps into gardeners’ gold, and all of them are making money. They all want to take part in feeding healthy foods to their community and promoting the city’s sustainable food system.

Central Ohio still maintains large areas of farmland, but more people now live in the city and its close environs than ever before: close to 800,000 and counting. And the demand for fresh food continues to grow as well. To meet this demand, many nonprofit community and backyard gardens have started growing food for the needs of their community. Columbus alone boasts over 200 community gardens; an impressive figure for any city its size.

For the most part, these urban farmers did not typically plan on becoming farmers. It’s more as if they stumbled on it as a hobby, discovered that they loved it and were propelled forward by passion. A lot of them had no farming skills prior to operating their current businesses; they had other professions, some of which left them uninspired.

On the other end of the urban agriculture spectrum is urban farming, different from gardening with its emphasis on creating a viable commercial business that generates an income for the 52

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Take Joseph Swain. A few years ago, he was building roads and bridges in the San Francisco Bay Area. The work was hard, but the job was secure. Then life transitions brought him back to his native Midwest.

Left: Wayne Shingler of Frijolito Farm Top: Joseph Swain of Swainway Urban Farm Bottom: Worm compost from Urban Worm Farm One20

“I left my job with the union and came to Columbus without a plan.” Joseph recalled his early days in the city. “I was looking for something else to do, not really knowing what that was.” Meanwhile, he had some space in his Clintonville backyard. He started to grow vegetables for himself and his partner, who both enjoyed eating fresh, organic produce. “I grew all kinds of vegetables. First year, second year, third year … it was pretty clear that I have got quite a green thumb. We had more than enough food to feed ourselves,” Joseph recalled. With one third of an acre and a newfound talent, Joseph saw a potential. He decided to study the farmers market in his Clintonville neighborhood. One day, he steeled himself and approached the market manager with the suggestion that he could bring in products that he saw were lacking at the market, namely mushrooms and micro-greens. “I had no idea how to grow any of those at that point… but I worked hard and learned fast. That first market day, I had plenty to sell.” The patrons, in turn, quickly embraced this new farmer. Just like that, Joseph had started a new career, one he didn’t quite fathom. His endeavor, Swainway Urban Farm, has become an invaluable resource for the community, not just for food but also for education. He gives frequent farm tours and teaches children about urban farming right on his tiny plot. “Space is my biggest challenge,” said Joseph, whose third of an acre is becoming a limitation as the demand for his products increases. The more he is able to produce, the more financially viable his farm could be. “I would love more space to grow more food so that I can keep this as my livelihood. For now it’s OK. I am forced to think outside the box.” A few miles east of Swainway farm, another urban farmer traded a career in law enforcement for poultry farming. “When I was a teenager, I wanted to live off the land; I was very interested in homesteading and producing my own food,” said Wayne Shingler of Frijolito Farm. His five-acre property is in Mifflin Township, a subdivision of Columbus that allows him to raise livestock, according to Wayne, as long as you have more than one acre. Walking through his farm property one afternoon when the trees were bare and the ground was crackling with ice and snow, Wayne reflected: “There are times when I wish we were living in the country so that we could have more land, and I don’t have to worry about the neighbors.” There is a reason for his pensiveness. In the past year or so, Wayne has had to weather a few grievances from neighbors about his poultry farming operations. Being in close proximity to neighbors is a real challenge for urban farmers who live and operate their farms literally just over the fence. Having 50-plus chickens in the backyard is far from being an ordinary neighbor, and certain sights and smells can generate discontent. Some of

his neighbors made complaints to the city and some approached the media to raise concerns. It has not been pleasant, to say the least, but there are plenty of Frijolito farm supporters to keep Wayne optimistic. During the growing season, Wayne sells his chicken and eggs at two farmers markets—Easton Town Center and Clintonville Farmers Markets—each of them just about three miles away from his urban farm. He enjoys the proximity to his customers and believes that what he does can help “reconnect urban dwellers with the origin of their food.” He hopes to eventually open a storefront to sell his products and create a sort of community food hub where his customers can purchase food directly from the farm. Perhaps the greatest benefit of being an urban farmer is the accessibility to their customers. Educating people about where food comes from and emphasizing the sustainable component of small, organic farming practices are tasks which they consider part of the job. Both Wayne and Joseph get frequent calls from people in the community seeking advice about how to grow produce or raise chickens. They are more than willing to help out. Joseph explained: “What we are trying to do is not just grow food for profit. We are trying to restore traditional foodways. We care about how things are grown. We are growing in a sustainable manner because we care about nutrient density, how people are eating in our community and impact on the environment. Nine times of out 10, farmers like myself are more interested in showing people how to grow their own food.” Wayne agreed: “My dream is to inspire others by my example. I encourage people to grow gardens and raise livestock in their yards. I’m working with the Franklin County Local Food Council to break down policy barriers and offer support to people who want to grow food here.” Zoning laws do differ from neighborhood to neighborhood. Growing vegetables is one thing; raising livestock is another. Keeping backyard bees is in a different category altogether. Thankfully, within Columbus city limits, beekeeping is legal. Coming from Brooklyn, New York, Nina Bagley is an artistturned-beekeeper. She and her husband chose to live in the middle of German Village, a neighborhood that makes her feel at home. In her small urban backyard, she keeps two beehives (the city’s maximum allowance per household). It’s a practice that started out as a hobby: “I was worried about our bee population and the effects of pesticides,” said Nina. In the past two years, she started breeding queen bees for sale as part of the Queen Project, spearheaded by Central Ohio Beekeepers Association. The project has taken off and she is working on it full-time. Each of the beehives is not more than 3 feet by 5 feet in dimension. Space is not an issue here; if it were a good honey-

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To learn more about Joseph, Wayne, Nina or Jeremy and their farms, visit their websites: Swainway Urban Farm swainway.com

Frijolito Farm frijolitofarm.com

Nina Bagley

producing year, she would add more boxes vertically to increase room for the busy workers. Neighbors, on the other hand, must be agreeable. The key to raising bees successfully while remaining neighborly in the city is finding the right spot for the bees’ pathways. “My hives face the alleyway, so the bees fly in and out that way, and they don’t disturb anybody. I also make sure that they have plenty of water so they won’t go to my neighbor’s bird baths to replenish,” she said. “My neighbors are all really happy that I keep bees. They are good for pollinating fruits and vegetables, and they keep the ecosystem in check.”

ohioqueenbee.com

One20 Worm Farm one20farm.blogspot.com

Some good reads for those interested in urban farming: Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

Urban Farming by Thomas Fox

The Essential Urban Farmer

Another unique urban farmer helping keep the ecosystem in check is Jeremy Gedert. His urban worm farm, One20, raises composting worms and sells worm bins (made by Jeremy) and worm castings (excellent nutrients for the soil). He also teaches workshops on worm composting. Chef by day, Jeremy started One20 farm somewhat by accident. He and his family have a backyard garden where they grow vegetables for themselves. Wanting the best soil possible to grow the food that feeds his family, Jeremy looked for ways to improve the garden’s soil chemistry. A friend recommended worm composting as a way to achieve this. Before he knew it, he was crafting worm bins in his garage, growing worms and collecting castings for customers with similar aspirations. The business is growing, but Jeremy must keep his day job for the family’s financial security.

by Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal

Growing Cities: A Documentary In production and projected to release at the end of 2012, Growing Cities is a documentary ﬁlm about urban farming in America. Dan Susman and Andrew Monbouquette take a road trip and meet the men and women who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food, one vacant city lot, rooftop garden and backyard chicken coop at a time.

growingcitiesmovie.com

It may sound novel and nostalgic to make a living by growing vegetables, raising worms or bees or chickens right in the backyard. The benefit of working close to home, and the independence of being self-employed might be enviable to some. But urban farmers will tell you that their job is far from being glamorous, or even profitable. The challenges of limited space, neighbors and financial security can all be troubling. Why do they do it? They believe in the impact they can make in the local food system. They do it because they value the close connection they have with a community that appreciates them for what they do. Their job also allows them to be themselves and pursue their dreams. Even if it’s a struggle, none of them seems to want to look back. Said Joseph Swain, “This is my calling. I was meant to do this. I am ecstatic that here I am, at 33 years old, and I know 100% that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing.”

Kit Yoon was born and raised in Thailand. She came to the United States in the late ’80s and has since lived in Boston, Northern California and now Columbus. She is a freelance photographer and writer as well as a trained acupuncturist and reﬂexologist. She enjoys exploring the unique gems that Central Ohio has to offer and blogs about it at coolcolumbus.blogspot.com. Kit lives in Bexley with her husband and two children. Left: Swainway Urban Farm during the growing season

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In Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland, the power of urban agriculture rises up By Colleen Leonardi

“R

ound the world, no food culture is more important than another. Every single one expresses a profound identity and its language precisely through food. We have to respect these diversities. We have to be grateful to the art and skill of women and men capable of producing foods as simple as they are outstanding...”

—Carlo Petrini, founder, Slow Food

When we asked what urban agriculture looks like in Columbus, we also asked: What does urban agriculture look like in the Midwest? We fell in love with stories from people in other communities in other cities working to grow their own food in an urban landscape. We share their amazing stories here to add to ideas of what’s possible. 56

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10% Garden, 90% Community: The Yarden and the Peterson Garden Project “I love it,” sings LaManda Joy as we talk about the Yarden and the Peterson Garden based in Chicago. “They’re my happy place.” Joy’s involvement in her two projects began honestly enough. In 2006, she and her husband bought “a yard with a house attached to it” and grew their own food. Joy started “The Yarden” blog to journal about her time in the garden, all the while working a full-time job as a project manager for a large company. Day after day she noticed the large vacant lot next to her house, eerily similar to a photo in her local butcher shop of the 1942 Peterson Victory Garden. The garden had been an initiative by local families to grow their own food in response to food

shortages during World War II. Then one day in 2010 it came to her: That empty lot next to her house was, in fact, the land on which that victory garden had thrived. After a conversation with her alderman, Patrick O’Conner, and the owners of the land, Joy had both a “yarden” and a community garden.

“I’d never done a community garden before,” says Joy. “And then it just took off.” The Yarden blog acted as a sort of vehicle for the project. As Joy wrote about the 12 types of heirloom radishes she was growing, she started to see how people wanted to learn how to grow their own food. When Joy put the call out for volunteers in 2010, she had 50 people sign up within five days. And when her company was downsized and she lost her job in 2011, Joy was kind of overjoyed. “It’s great because now I have time to do even more. We have a lot of plans this year, so it’s a good thing.” Today, roughly 400 people garden at the Peterson Garden, a 1,200-square foot Chicago city lot with 157 raised beds. It serves as a kitchen garden for some while 10% is devoted to refugee gardeners and 5% of the produce is donated to a local food bank. The gardeners fund their own plots at a rate determined by Joy and the gardener. Joy also works with six to eight professionals who volunteer their time to help with marketing, educational programs, grant writing and more. “I thought if 20 people wanted to do it, it would be great. But I couldn’t do it by myself,” Joy clarifies when we talk about the origins of Peterson. “It very quickly became their garden. I might have been the flame, but everyone else was the kindling.” Joy attributes the quick success of Peterson to two factors: people’s pride in the story of victory gardens in Chicago, and how easy Joy and her volunteers have made it for beginning gardeners to grow their own food. Joy researched and wrote about victory gardens on her blog as a way to get people invested in the history of the place, detailing facts like: In 1943 roughly 172,000 gardens sprang up in Chicago, and 90% of the people who gardened during the boom between 1942 and 1945 had never gardened before. These facts helped draw folks into the significance of the property but also see the agency people have to make a difference during hard times. In a

2011 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Joy emphasized: “People feel out of control, like they don’t have any way to deal with food problems or health safety issues or the cost of food or the way it is transported. [Victory gardens are] a way to take control.” Peterson Garden utilizes square-foot gardening, allowing gardeners to grow on a four- by six-foot raised bed. When Joy started in 2010, over 50% of the gardeners had never gardened before. “So we had to teach them something that was easy to grasp,” says Joy. “It worked to our benefit. By teaching everyone a similar method, people were quickly able to learn from their neighbors. So if they missed a class, they could look at their neighbor’s plot and ask for help.” The method also allows gardeners the freedom to grow what they want, without having to communally decide what variety, say, of tomato they’d like to grow each season. It’s a one-to-one model, where growers grow for themselves or a specific organization, different from what Joy calls a “one-tomany” model where food is farmed in an urban setting for many people, or distributed through many channels. In 2012, Joy and her team hope to teach 7,500 new home gardeners how to grow their own food and establish five new community gardens the size, if not larger, of the Peterson Garden, developed primarily on private land not owned by the city. The Peterson Garden is considered by most the largest edible community garden in Chicago, and Joy’s efforts have spawned one of the largest community garden efforts the city has seen in a while. And it all started with a “yarden.”

An Urban Farm Incubator: Ohio City Farm In the heart of Cleveland in one of America’s “10 great public spaces” is a farm. And it’s not just any farm. It’s one of the country’s “largest contiguous urban farms at nearly six acres.” It’s a farm with some of the richest-quality soil in the area, soil that gave rise to over 100 varieties of heirloom vegetables ranging from beans to pumpkins in 2010, all within the bustle of downtown Cleveland. It’s a farm that supplies a farm stand, supports a community food incubator and CSA programs, aims to increase local food integration for

“People feel out of control, like they don’t have any way to deal with food problems or health safety issues or the cost of food or the way it is transported. [Victory gardens are] a way to take control.” Cleveland’s historic West Side Market and offers an educational curriculum focused on sharing the story of the region and its food traditions. It’s the Ohio City Farm (OCF) established in 2010 in the historic district of Ohio City, established in 1836. The six acres on which it resides was vacant for 10 years after low-rise residential buildings were demolished to make room for new developments. There had always been community discussions about how to make use of the land, but as local food awareness ascended in Cleveland, so did the demand to turn it into a community garden or an urban farm. A nonprofit known as The Refugee Response (TRR) and the Great Lakes Brewing Co. (GLBC) stepped in. In partnership with the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) (which still owns the property) and Ohio City Inc., the refugees began farming the land. These new Americans were some of the first to truly bear witness to the land’s potential. Now, a portion of the acreage at OFC on which the refugee program grows, called Refugee Empowerment Agriculture Program (REAP), supplies the Great Lakes Brewery restaurant. “There’s wonderful momentum and partners here,” says Amanda Dempsey, the Market District Director at Ohio City Inc. “It’s nice that we all work together as a community.” As we discuss all aspects of Ohio City Farm, the sheer magnitude of what they’ve been able to accomplish on a collaborative level in two years is inspiring. OCF provides urban farmers with low-cost shared land. Along with REAP and GLBC, the farm currently shares plots with three other farm groups: CMHA Green Teams, Cleveland Crops and Central Roots, a for-profit one-acre market farm that grows a mix of produce, and will install a edible COLUMBUS.com

SPRING 2012

high-tunnel hoop house, allowing them to extend their growing season. And it doesn’t stop there. All of these urban farms and the people who run them have different channels through which they distribute fresh, locally grown produce to local markets (including the famous West Side Market), restaurants and food producers in Ohio City, and throughout Cleveland. The model values a regard for farming and equal distribution of fresh food to help drive local economic growth, and exemplifies a true sense of entrepreneurship. OCF sees itself as an incubator for the continued development of local food businesses and start-ups, all right within the heart of downtown. The refugees who farm at OCF (resettled from a number of countries, including Burma, Bhutan, Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda and Burundi), for instance, now have access to additional programs to learn English and eventually start a career in farming or the food industry, continuing the goodwill of knowledge sharing and diversity. The role of the Cleveland government has been key. As Dempsey recollects, years before OFC broke ground, agriculture wasn’t permitted in residential districts. With the help of Councilman Joe Cimperman and a big, sustained push from Cleveland’s Mayor Frank G. Jackson, all of that changed. “When I worked at the City, a lot of urban farmers would come to us. We would guide people through the permitting process for chickens, or bees, or to start a community garden. As an urban farmer having to do that for the

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first time, it can be pretty intimidating,” says Dempsey. “But now the City is so supportive. The Mayor really advocates for this through all of the City departments so that they are working together with the community for urban agriculture to be successful in Cleveland.” Goals for the future of OCF start with the farm’s infrastructure. After a feasibility study conducted in partnership with Leslie Schaller of ACEnet in Athens, Dempsey cites real practicalities that need to be accomplished, including cold storage for root crops, a water infrastructure and signage to help people navigate the farm as both a public and private space. “Because it is a working farm it can be somewhat disruptive to continuously bring groups through. We love to host groups on the farm, but we also have to be sensitive to the farmers who need to be working.” With such an emphasis on infrastructure and doing things right from the beginning, one thing is clear: Ohio City Farm is here to stay.

100% Food Sovereignty: The Greening of Detroit “The world is changing and the way we live has got to change,” explains Ashley Atkinson, urban agriculture and open space director of The Greening of Detroit (TGD). “While that’s becoming more and more evident to Americans as a whole, it’s been real evident to communities like Detroit who are disproportionately feeling the burden of the economy failing communities and institutions failing communities.”

The history of Detroit as a boomtown gone bust in the last century is a familiar story to most. Atkinson, originally from Flint, Michigan, explained in an interview with Grist.org in 2010: “If you’re here in the city, you cannot hide from poverty and suffering. It’s right in your face. You can either embrace humanity and try to live every moment to try to make everyone’s life easier, or you leave… if you have the option to.” TGD and, most notably Atkinson’s work with their urban ag programs, is trying to do just that—make everyone’s life easier. TGD is a nonprofit founded in 1989 to improve reforestation efforts. In 2006, TGD broadened their mission to create a “greener” city by way of growing food and providing educational programs centered on leadership and community engagement. Atkinson has been working with TGD for nearly a decade. What is it about growing your own food that makes everyone’s life easier? “It has a stabilizing effect, especially for people who feel as though they’re on a downward trajectory. It turns vacant land into tended, policed, purposeful, beautiful spaces. So physically it has that transformative quality,” Atkinson explains. “And with relationships, too. As neighborhoods are experiencing this downward trajectory, people kind of internalize the fear and the despair that they feel, and when they turn inward they feel like that’s what they can control, and that gives them something to hold onto. But what we miss is the relationships. When people have relationships that they draw joy from and resources from, they feel most safe and most happy.” Atkinson and her colleagues at TGD share the remarkable goal of not only making

communities happier and safer through food, but educating the next generation of farmers and growers in Detroit to one day make it a 100% food sovereign city. Studies have been conducted, and while it sounds lofty, according to Atkinson and the research it’s 100% possible. Detroit has 40 square miles of vacant land on which they could grow the majority of their fruits and vegetables. In 2011, TGD had 1,351 registered vegetable gardens with about 16,000 growers. Together, they produced 2% of all of Detroit’s fruits and vegetable crop. And in 2012, they expect a 20% increase. Two percent is nowhere near where Atkinson wants to be. She believes that by incubating these small businesses and growers and providing people in the community with jobs and reasons to invest in Detroit, food sovereignty is possible. Their market program is a big piece of the equation. It allows growers to sell communally at farmers markets. At the front of the house it’s The Greening of Detroit market. At the back of the house, it’s a myriad of growers from all over the city. Growers receive 100% of their sales. No money goes to TGD. If the grower has a bad crop, or falls short, Ashley and her team consistently work with the grower to bring the standards of their product up to meet the standards of the co-op. They don’t turn them away. They don’t ask for a better crop next time. They mentor and raise them up as a part of the larger co-op model.

“When people are motivated to get to market, they’re motivated to produce more,” Atkinson confirms. “By motivating people and supporting people, particularly those that don’t have the same playing field that other more traditional growers have to get to market, it really helps us expand our production abilities and get more of our fruits and vegetables raised in the city. We help to incubate these small businesses. We see the services we provide through growing Detroit as essential to building that next generation of growers in Detroit.” In 2012, Atkinson aims to get even more food to market. She has been working for the last five years to get the Detroit Market Garden, a 2.5-acre small-scale farm in downtown Detroit, at Eastern Market up and running. She has two other small-scale production-focused markets in development now. The hope is that these model-markets become a steering rod for another 100 to 200 market gardens on the horizon in the city. The mission to grow and sell the majority of their produce is shared by the city, the Detroit food policy council and many members of government. Atkinson explains how the community is trying to build a common language to discuss these issues, and how that language starts with asking questions. Detroiters want to know how new legislation will impact them in the

long-run, how it will bring wealth to their communities and they want to make sure it’s not extracting resources from the community. And this drive to safeguard and take pride in their city is rooted in a history, as Atkinson describes, of extraction. “We’re trying to make sure opportunities exist for Detroiters.” Marrying history to the present moment in Detroit seems particularly poetic when you look at the intergenerational aspect of urban farming and community gardens. Because the gardens in Detroit are tended communally, elders work with children, often under the age of 18, who can sometimes be seen by the older generation as a liability. Growing food together regenerates those communal bonds and respect across ages. “Food and growing food is this really powerful equalizer,” Atkinson reﬂects. “It’s way more accessible and way more of a common language in terms of a community having discussions about what it likes about itself and what it hopes to become. It’s really powerful.”

Colleen Leonardi is a writer, choreographer and editor of Edible Columbus. She loves rhubarb and strawberries come springtime. Learn more about her work at colleenleonardi.com.

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Please look for a complimentary copy of Edible Columbus each season at the businesses marked with a star. You can also subscribe to the magazine at ediblecolumbus.com.

A Cheese Shop Mystery Series

Dave Fox*

Market District Kingsdale*

Snowville Creamery*

davefox.com

marketdistrict.com

snowvillecreamery.com

Dental Reflections*

Melody Knudson

Sweet Thing Gourmet

dentalreflections4kids.com

614-235-5413 nationwide.com

sweetthinggourmet.com

Meza Wine Shop

thegoinggreenstore.com

Dine Originals dineoriginalscolumbus.com

The Going Green Store*

vinomeza.com

mysteryloverskitchen.com

Easton Farmers Market* All Star Lawn & Landscape

eastonfarmersmarket.org

allstarll.com

The Gourmet Farm Girl

M/I Homes New Home Sales Center*

thegourmetfarmgirl.com

homeateaston.com

Backroom Coffee Roasters*

Economic and Community Development Institute*

backroomcoffeeroasters.com

ecdi.org

Bexley Natural Market*

FoodHop

Mockingbird Meadows

bexleynaturalmarket.org

food-hop.com

mockingbirdmeadows.com

Bleu & Fig*

Franklin Park Conservatory*

The Hills Market* thehillsmarket.com

Middle West Spirits* middlewestspirits.com

The Women’s Book thewomensbook.com

The Worthington Inn* bleuandfig.com

worthingtoninn.com

MuBeauty mubeauty.com

Thurn’s Specialty Meats*

fpconservatory.org

Blue Jacket Dairy* www.bluejacketdairy.com

614-443-1449

North Market* Green B.E.A.N. Delivery*

northmarket.com

greenbeandelivery.com

Bluescreek Farm Meats* bluescreekfarmmeats.com

Greener Grocer*

Northridge Organic Farm

Trek Columbus Bicycle Store*

740-967-4462

trekstorecolumbus.com

thegreenergrocer.com

True Nature Retreat*

Northstar*

Café Brioso*

thenorthstarcafe.com

truenatureretreat.com

Gruntz

Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association

twocaterers.com

gruntzllc.com

oeffa.org

camelotcellars.com

Integrity Sustainable Planning & Design

Ohio Farmers Union

Canal Junction Cheese

integritysustainableplanning.com

cafebrioso.com

Gregg Organics 740-507-1064

Cambridge Tea House* cambridgeteahouse.com

Camelot Cellars*

canaljunctioncheese.com

Chadwick Arboretum

Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams*

chadwickarboretum.osu.edu

jenisicecreams.com

Coldwell Banker King Thompson

Katzinger’s* katzingers.com

Two Caterers* Watershed Distillery* watersheddistillery.com

ohfarmersunion.org

Oink Moo Cluck Farms

Watershed Organic Lawn Care

oinkmoocluck.com

watershedorganic.com

Outdoor Space Design

Whole Foods Market*

outdoorspacedesign.net

wholefoodsmarket.com

Pam’s Popcorn*

WOSU*

pamspopcorn.com

wosu.org

Shaw’s Restaurant & Inn*

Yoga on High*

shawsinn.com

yogaonhigh.com

614-314-5967 kingthompson.com/kim. snowberger

Local Matters*

Cooley’s Greenhouse*

Local Roots*

Skillet: Rustic. Urban. Food.*

Zentury Web Design

cooleysgreenhouse.net

localrootspowell.com

skilletruf.com

zentury.net

local-matters.org

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SPRING 2012

Last SEED

RAKE a big plastic leaf rake is useless in the garden, unless you have a lawn. Opt for a tiny hand rake—the bamboo rakes will grab everything if the curved ends are left on, but prune the ends for a perfect tool for getting amongst shrubbery

FELCO #2 PRUNERS no other pruners match them—a pair will easily last 15 years

HAWS WATERING CAN the balance of these cans has never been matched—they are available in plastic, but a copper one makes the ultimate gardener gift

GARDEN FORK you should have two, to divide perennials— use back to back and pry plants apart

A WORD TO THE WISE

DANDELION WEEDER

every gardener should get a tetanus shot every 10 years

you must get the full taproot or you’ll get a new plant, double the size

GARDEN SCISSORS for cutting twine, ﬂowers, trimming—have several pairs on hooks around the garden so there’s always one close at hand

WAXED STRING* for tying hearty plants—lasts through the wettest conditions, and the wax means it holds its knots tightly

JUTE* is soft and won’t cut through tender stems (tomatoes, delphiniums)

A LONG THIN TROWEL is best for planting small bulbs, like iris and narcissus

DO NOT use wooden tools for prying rocks or roots out, they don’t bend, they snap— have a PRY BAR at hand

A TIP: never, ever buy a cheap tool—you will bend and break 6 of them, and then go grumbling to buy the quality tool you should have purchased in the ﬁrst place. A good tool, treated properly, may outlast you!

MESH GLOVES WITH RUBBER GRIPS A POT OF SAND WITH OIL IN IT is a must for storing tools over winter. Oil the handles with LINSEED OIL at the end of the year, and put the metal blades into the sand until spring.

* string too short to be

of any use is good to leave out for nesting birds

great for gardening—they let your hands breathe while protecting them from punctures— also handy for de-shedding the cat

Illustrations by Bambi EdlundɄɄƌ Garden wisdom by James Bennett