An informational meeting will be held on Thursday April 12 at 6:00 p.m. about Acme Farms + Kitchen, a CSK or Community Supported Kitchen that supports local agriculture and is working to build a truly sustainable food system.  The business provides locally produced food, has online shopping and with 5 island subscriptions will deliver to the ferry landing.  Minimum weekly order is a small box for $45 a large box for $65 may also be ordered.

From Nancy Ging’s Whatcom Locavore blog:

On Friday, AF+K emails all their members with information about what proteins will be available the next week. Beef, poultry, pork, and wild salmon are all possibilities. Based on that information, members log into the AF+K website store and order the Turf or Surf options, as well as any other products they want included in their delivery. The basic food packages are large and small “locavore” boxes, similar to what you’d get in most other CSA programs, but with a twist. AF+K boxes include dinner menus and recipes utilizing the week’s ingredients. The small box includes at least three meals and the large box includes five meals (based on a family of four).

Besides seasonal local organic produce, the boxes currently include a loaf of bread from Breadfarm Bread, a wedge of cheese from Samish Bay Cheese or Gothberg Farms, a pound of pasta from Bellingham Pasta Company, one dozen pasture raised eggs, a dairy selection (cream, yogurt, ice cream), a rotating pantry item (dried beans, honey, flour, pancake mix, etc.), and a selection of 2 meats/proteins (either grass fed beef, pastured pork or chicken, wild fish). There’s even vegetarian and gluten-free options on the small locavore boxes.

Read more at http://whatcomlocavore.com/acme-farms-kitchen-part-1-of-2

Learn more about the business at their website http://acmefarmsandkitchen.com/store

Space at the meeting is limited, contact Janice Holmes 758-2559 or Nancy Ging 758 2529 for more information and to reserve your spot.

Twenty people attended Nancy Ging’s Locavore workshop at the Grange on Saturday and came away with a better understanding of the benefits and challenges of eating local. The benefits are many: improved local economy, development of successful local food producers, reduction in the use of fuel, better health, the satisfaction of knowing who raised and produced the food you eat, tastier food and more.

Nancy recommended that those of us wanting to become locavores—one who eats local food, defined as food produced within 100 miles—ease into it gradually. One of the best ways to do this is to participate in a CSA—Community Supported Agriculture. Since no one on the island is operating a CSA picking up your weekly food box will mean a run to town. However, there may be a solution.

Acme Farm and Kitchen has a very interesting business model that I will detail in the next blog post. If Acme can get five families to sign up for their service they will deliver to Gooseberry Pt making it quite easy for the participants to pick up their CSA boxes. There will be an informational meeting about Acme Farm and Kitchen on Thursday, April 12. Space at the meeting is limited, contact Janice Holmes 758-2559 or Nancy Ging 758 2529 for more information and to reserve your spot.

The next Grange Country Living Workshop will be Saturday, March 31 at Al and Sheila Marshall’s orchard which is located adjacent to Westshore Bed and Breakfast on Westshore Drive. We will learn a lot more about pruning fruit trees than we know now. Bring by-pass hand pruners, by-pass loppers, pruning saws and ladders if you have them.

We have become accustomed to having the world at our fingertips. A couple of keystrokes on the computer and Amazon will deliver virtually any product from anywhere to our doorstep. Another couple of keystrokes and we are off to Europe or cruising the Caribbean. At Trader Joe’s and even the Community Food Store there is produce from around the world flown in at great cost. The question, of course, is how long can this continue? If you think that oil shale, natural gas and wind/solar will keep the game going you can stop reading now. If one is a believer in Peak Oil the answer would be: not too much longer.

(If you are behind on your reading about Peak Oil, The Oil Drum has a summary of articles on the subject from all of their contributors for the period 2004-2011 here)

In the short term, our penchant for bombing countries that produce oil will likely cause price increases. Cheap fuel costs are an important political issue. Americans seem to consider cheap gas as an entitlement and taxing it to pay for long term problems or to build public transportation networks as in Europe has never been considered. To make matters worse, Americans typically own more than one vehicle. Three, four and even five vehicles in one family is not unusual.

Consider the impact on our lives if gas goes to $5, $6, $7 per gallon or higher. We have been a one car family for twenty years now. (One car, one riding lawn mower, two chain saws, one brush cutter). Last week I filled the car and a five gallon can and added $74 to my credit card balance. I cringe at the thought of multiplying this by two or three vehicles or computing the gallons times $5, $6 or $7.

Increase fuel costs will dramatically impact us. It will force us to be more local. Living on an island gives us somewhat of a head start. Even though we have a virtual bridge to the mainland, Hale’s Passage makes us plan just a bit more than someone not living on an island. A trip to town normally has a plan with multiple stops made in some sort of logical sequence to minimize the number of miles driven.

It seems imperative that at fuel costs rise we must try and live even more locally which will increase our self-sufficiency as a community. There are many things we can do to localize. It starts with sourcing our food. Buying food from local producers benefits and strengthens the local economy and keeps money at home to help create jobs. Being a locavore has a learning curve attached to it.

We are lucky on Lummi Island to have have Nancy Ging who has developed expertise in eating local as evidenced in her blog  Whatcom Locavore and weekly columns in the Bellingham Herald.

This Saturday, March 24, at 10am, Nancy will teach us how to be locavores as part of the Grange Country Living Series. Hope you can find the time to join us.

Correction: I flip flopped the April 28/29 workshops. Susan Chidester will have the Saturday workshop. Mary Stack will teach cheese making on Sunday April 29. Check lummigrange.com calendar and Nextdoor “event” for details.

Reskilling is a key aspect of the Transition Movement. It’s important that we all re-familiarize ourselves with skills that were second nature to our parents and grandparents: gardening, canning, baking, etc.

We kicked off the Country Living Series with a workshop on gardening ( homemade potting soil, bokashi, fertilizer and compost teas). Twenty-three people attended.

Next up is Nancy Ging’s workshop on Eating Local which will be at the Grange this coming Saturday (March 24 at 10am). Rebuilding local economies, depending more on local food sources, learning how to live closer to home are important skills especially when you consider that the average meal travels 1500 miles to get to us. RSVP for Nancy’s workshop via comment to this site or on Nextdoor.

Al Marshall has been working diligently to find a master fruit tree pruning to teach those of us interested on how to rehabilitate an old orchard. We are hoping to have something lined up for the weekend of March 31. Stay tuned. There are a lot of us who need work on the art of pruning.

Two workshops are scheduled for April (so far). April 28 Mary Stack will teach you how to make three different kinds of cheese. This will happen at the Grange. Watch for more details. The next day, April 29, Susan Chidester will conduct a baking class for a small group of five (two spots are already spoken for). She will also teach you how to make mozerella while the bread is rising.

Also in April we hope to schedule a workshop on backyard chicken raising.

In June (9th and 23rd), Master Gardeners from Bellingham will conduct a two part workshop on Seed Saving.

Watch this site and Nextdoor and the Grange calendar (lummigrange.com) for details.

As always, the Country Living Series Committee of the Grange would appreciate suggestions for workshops, tips on people who can give them and subjects of interest.

Monday, March 12, 6:30pm at the Grange.

All gardeners, wannabee gardeners, friends of gardeners and people who want to see what gardeners look like are welcome to attend. If you don’t have any seeds to swap, come and get some seed to try out. These don’t have to seeds you saved yourself. They can be excess from your seed packets. A packet of seeds contains way more seed than most gardeners can plant in one season so come and trade and pick up some new items and save some money.

Flower seeds are welcome too. Most veggie gardens are full of flowers for good reason. They help attract pollinators and beneficial insects.

Seed saving and seed swapping are a really good indicator of a resilient community interested in growing its own food.

The Gardener’s Network, now sponsored by the Lummi Island Grange, has monthly meetings to provide gardeners a chance to meet and share ideas.  Each meeting has a program. March will be the Seed Swap. In April Krista Rome will join us to discuss beans and grains. In May we will have a program on soil testing.

Check it out. A good group of islanders trying to grow healthy, nutritious food.

The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way*

For me growing fruits trees and berries is a more daunting task than growing vegetables. A mistake in the garden is much easier to correct than a misstep with a tree. I’m always looking for help when it comes to trees.

The workshops on tree fruit at Cloud Mountain Farm are especially helpful. Even though we have this great resource an hour away, it’s often difficult to take advantage of everything that Cloud Mountain has to offer. They do have a paid subscription newsletter that details orchard tasks and techniques season by season that I have found helpful and instructive.

I’m always looking for a good book to help me along and a new one by New Hampshire orchardist Michael Phillips is turning out to be educational plus easy to read. Through his books and his website Mr. Phillips is promoting and helping the community orchard movement. He also has a newsletter one can sign up for to which covers items of interest to orchardists and backyard fruit growers.

I owe a lot to the apple and the pear. Because of my involvement with these fruits I was able to retire at quite an early age.

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There’s been a really positive reaction to the announcement of the Lummi Island Grange’s Country Living Series Workshops.

Lot’s of good suggestions and people stepping up to lead classes and teach their neighbor’s what they know about self-sufficiency and self-reliance.

One of the keys to the whole Transition Movement is the idea that everything has to be more locally oriented. That starts with what we eat.

We are pleased to announce that Nancy Ging, who writes the Whatcom Locavore Blog and a weekly column in the Bellingham Herald on eating local will offer a workshop on the subject of Eating Local at the Grange, March 24 at 10am:

Look for the posting of this event on Nextdoor and RSVP or just show up.

This blog started because of a concern about Peak Oil which is a subject that is confusing to some and easy to deny by others. This following 34 minute film does a good job of outlining why Peak Oil is such a significant problem leading to many other peaks: soil, food, water, etc.

It discusses the enormous impact cheap fuel has had on growth and how growth is unsustainable. Many will hope that technology will find a solution to keep our oil based energy way of life moving the graph line up the chart. This seems impossible given the facts and will require that we all begin to retrain ourselves to a more sustainable self-sufficient style of life.

GARDENER ALERT          GARDENER ALERT          GARDENER ALERT

Gary Kline is the owner of Black Lake Organics in Olympia, Washington, the best source in the Northwest for mineral fertilizers.

A Phone Call From Solomon

Reprinted with permission of Gary Kline

“Steve Solomon, for those who don’t know, is the founder of Territorial Seed Company, and author of Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades (six editions).  He is the acknowledged guru of gardening in the Maritime Northwest.  Steve and I have crossed paths a few times in the past and I regard him as a mentor and inspiration.  Steve is the one who turned me back on to the work of Dr. William A. Albrecht back in 1997, during a meeting in Yelm.  As a result, my nursery and garden supply business and, in fact, my whole world-outlook changed.  I owe Steve a lot.

Imagine my complete surprise when I picked up the phone on February 2^nd and heard a man say “This is someone you haven’t talked to in a long time; do you recognize my voice?”  “Sort of”, I said.  “This is Steve Solomon.”  I stalled out for awhile, thinking of another Steve who it did not sound like.  Then it sunk in.  Steve was calling me from Tasmania (using Magic Jack), and we had a long talk.

What mainly prompted Steve’s call was that he had been having trouble with his garden and got a soil test and evaluation through Michael Astera, author of The Ideal Soil, that I had some influence on.  It turns out Steve had not read far enough into Dr. Albrecht’s writings, which I always suspected.  Anyway, Steve implemented the fertilizer prescriptions from Astera and he had wonderful results with his garden.  He was very impressed and struck up an internet conversation with Michael that lead to an agreement to co-author a new book featuring a whole new perspective on mineral nutrient balancing, using ratios developed by Albrecht, plus others being researched by Astera.

The upshot is that the book writing deal fell through, and so Solomon called me to learn about the history of the development of Black Lake Organic’s BLOOM fertilizers and about the mineral make-up, etc..  Actually, his own fertilizer recipe was the basic inspiration.  As he said, he suspected that my BLOOM fertilizers were superior to his famous Complete Organic Fertilizer (C.O.F.) that appears in all his books, and he wanted to know the ingredients and nutrient numbers.

These are things that are on the back labels of all 10 BLOOM formulations, so I sent him the information, plus information on desired soil test parameters, since he now wants to get into that field.  In exchange, he said he would help my products and services become better known through two upcoming books and a worldwide network of contacts that he has.  Getting word of a superb fertilizer formulation out there will have a big impact on our mutual aims.

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I’m not a tea drinker. Perhaps I’ve never had a really good cup of tea. Following David Lee Hoffman, a pioneer importer of fine tea (Silk Road Tea Company) around China to find the finest teas available in this fascinating documentary increased my interest in this ancient food/medicine.

All of these food movies serve to make one more aware of what we eat, where the food comes from, how it’s grown and processed. Tea, of course, goes back perhaps into pre-history. Mr. Hoffman found areas that had tea bushes (trees) seven hundred years old. I’m not much of a connoisseur of anything but can admire someone who can stick their nose in a bag of freshly harvested tea and tell us that it’s been treated with pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

The young English speaking Chinese bureaucrat assigned to Hoffman is visibly pained and frustrated by Hoffman’s insistence on buying tea from the source, visiting the farm, meeting the farmer and wandering through the tea bushes. Persistently, Hoffman wears down the bureaucracy finally gaining the opportunity to buy what he wants and and export it to the USA. In doing so he created a boutique tea market in China that is growing (as is tea consumption in our coffee drinking culture).

I had no idea how labor intensive tea is, that the best tea is bud only, second best, bud with one leaf, third best bud with two leaves.

As we become more aware of the details of our food production we become more discriminating in what we will put in our bodies.

Coffee is another case in point. Most of us grew up drinking Folger’s from a can. As Mike McKenzie points out in his excellent coffee tastings Folger’s is a robusta coffee. In the seventies, enterprising importers and food explorers (mostly in Seattle) began to import and roast arabica coffee beans. I still remember stumbling into the flagship store of Seattle’s Best Coffee (which proceeded Starbuck’s) in the Pike Place market and enjoying my first really good cup of coffee ever. There was no turning back.

I believe this is true of any food product. Once we discover the best we will want to keep having it. Highly processed supermarket food is no longer attractive, save for low price, after one has eaten tasty, locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Chuck Keiper who is a long time Ham Operator and director of disaster preparedness communications for Lummi Island recently sent an email to people on the island who have joined the MURS radio network which is like an island intercom.  What he’s trying to tell us is that the island needs more Ham Radio Operators and one no longer needs a 40′ antenna, thousands of dollars worth of equipment or knowledge of Morse Code to qualify:

“Each of you receiving this eMail is either a participant in the Island Intercom Emergency Preparedness Network, is a licensed amateur radio operator, or is an individual whom I believe might be interested in becoming a Ham Operator. (In case you have not heard, Morse Code is no longer required!)  After reading this, if you believe you know someone else who might be interested in this activity, please forward a copy of this invitation to them.

Intra-island disaster communication needs are being well served by the volunteer participants in the unlicensed Lummi Island Intercom Network. However, in order to provide Off-island emergency communications to the mainland, licensed amateur radio operators (Hams) will be required.

I hope that you will be able to attend a meeting at the Lummi Fire Hall on Monday, March 5th, at 7:30 PM, to discuss the need for licensed amateur ratio operators to assist in implementation of an Island Emergency Communications Plan.  In a disaster situation, these are the individuals who will be the communication link between Island disaster workers and Whatcom Unified Emergency Management.  Individuals already reasonably comfortable with computer operations are particularly needed.

Lasting no longer than 90 minutes, the meeting will consist of four parts:

1. Island communication needs and general methodologies useful to meet these needs.

2. Personal introductions, backgrounds and interests; prior communications involvement, if any.

3. Licensing requirements, procedures and reference materials for those who want to become licensed.

4. Hands-on demonstration of (inexpensive) modern radio equipment, computer interfacing and free communications software, plus a look at the fire department’s new “radio room.

Please mark your calendar for three weeks from today, Monday, March 5th, 7:30PM.”