Arizona volunteers catalog thousands of plants
By Shar Porier | 08.27.09
Ever wonder about that unknown plant in your yard — is it a good weed or a bad weed? Thanks to the efforts of a group of volunteers, that plant can be identified, dried, and even archived. The Cochise County Herbarium, a facility that houses mounted plant specimens, is a little-heralded resource for residents of the county to identify the thousands of plants found in backyards, alleyways, mountains and deserts.
Cecile Lumer, the curator of the herbarium, pulled out some yellowed files of plant identifications performed 50 years ago from 1958 to 1962 in the Chiricahua Mountains. Though the plants have lost color from the drying process, they still hold all the attributes necessary to identify them. What has piqued her interest, though, is the mapped recordation of plots and a list of the plants found in them.
“We could go back to these same plots today with GPS and see what, if any, change has occurred,” she said. “There could be something different there now.”
It is just one of the projects she has on the back burner.
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High school students start a farmers’ market
By ELIZABETH KERSJES | 08.26.09
On a small plot of land owned by The Ohio State University, 13 high school students have dedicated their summer vacation to farming. The youths from nearby Metro Early College High School are growing organic vegetables for a student-run market they spent months organizing.
Never mind that most of the participants began with little — if any — knowledge of the agricultural world.
“They’ve never been to a farmers’ market before; they’ve never worked on a farm before — and yet they’ve put together this business just through straight research and interviews and talking to people,” said Neal Bluel, the marketing manager for the farm and a botany teacher at Metro.
Their efforts came to fruition on July 25, when the market opened for the first time.
“They’ve done a good job so far,” Mr. Bluel said. “It’s gone beyond our expectations already.”
The project represents a collaboration between the so-called STEM school adjacent to Ohio State and the university.
Ohio State students enrolled in a horticulture class mapped out the crop placement on the farm; Metro students planned the market and found other vendors. Both groups tend to the vegetables in the field.
Support for the initiative — including marketing and grant writing — was supplied by the Past Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works with the 11 STEM schools (”science, technology, engineering and math”) throughout Ohio to develop hands-on programs.
The four Metro students serving as managers and eight Ohio State students earn credit hours for their work.
A rotating group of volunteers from Ohio State, Metro, and other high schools in the area pitches in to help maintain the farm.
For their volunteer time, the Metro students get service hours — a graduation requirement.
The experience has given farm manager Meagan Jones a new appreciation for the vocation. “I didn’t know what carrots looked like when they were in the ground,” said Megan, a 17-year-old senior. “I didn’t know there were so many different varieties of lettuce. I didn’t know anything about it, and I didn’t give farmers enough credit.”
With the market’s Saturday debut, Megan learned firsthand about some end-of-the-line challenges: Morning thunderstorms kept three of the nine vendors away.
By about 8 a.m., though, the rain had slowed to an occasional drizzle. And the six vendors who had set up shop in the Metro parking lot — five vegetable stands and one pottery stand — stayed busy.
Upper Arlington resident Barbara Shramo stopped with her husband, Richard. “The produce is beautiful,” she said. “And I think this is a great experience for the kids.”
The couple left with peppers, basil, green beans and summer squash.
Danielle Stellato of Upper Arlington and her husband, Chris, were driving to the North Market when they saw signs for the Metro market. They went no farther.
“It’s smaller than most of the farmers’ markets we’ve been to, but we got everything we needed,” said Mrs. Stellato.
The students made about $200 — money for the Ohio State student-farm fund, which pays for supplies. The vendor fees go into the Metro general student fund.
“For the weather and for it being the first market, it did very well,” said Bluel, also an Ohio State graduate student in horticulture and crop science. “The other vendors were happy with the amount they sold.”
Market hours were planned for four consecutive Saturdays — and possibly longer, depending on the availability of student produce, which includes greens, peppers, sweet corn, tomatoes, and edible flowers.
Jack McClintock, a Metro senior, signed on as a farm manager because he plans to go into business and wanted to be involved in the startup of a small operation. Beyond the accounting and advertising lessons he gleaned from the work, he also learned a lot about food production.
“What this has done is opened me more to the unawareness of where our food comes from,” he said. “I think often we take for granted the food that we have, what we eat, and what we live off of.”
Elizabeth Roche, a volunteer, has broadened her knowledge of food and gardening. “In Columbus, it’s probably not your average school that does farming,” said Elizabeth, a 16-year-old Metro junior from Westerville. “Everyone talks about local produce and how good it is for you.”
Although not particularly fond of weeding, she plans to volunteer at the farm again next year — when a new crop of managers and volunteers will lead the effort.
Jones hopes that more young people will visit farm markets and explore agriculture. “Because a lot of urban teenagers aren’t really into farming,” she said, “they don’t know what it’s about.
“It would be really rewarding to see people who would just go to Burger King to eat … come here instead.”
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In New Orleans, a plan to bring back a favorite vegetable
By Judy Walker | 08.17.09
Lance Hill has a vision.
He sees neighbors swapping mirlitons over the back fence, like they used to do. He sees blighted lots covered with tidy horizontal trellises, where the big leaves of mirliton vines form shade canopies for neighbors to sit under, with mirlitons hanging down for the picking. He sees microbusinesses built around mirlitons, maybe even “Ninth Ward Mirliton Jam.”
But the Mirliton Man’s first step is to “restore the traditional mirliton variety that was lost over the last several years in particular. I think it was wiped out by Katrina,” Hill said. “I want people to be able to grow them like they did 30 years ago, without a variety of sprays in the garage.”
After the big storm, Hill and other growers, including some commercial growers in Plaquemines Parish, tried to root new plants from store-bought mirlitons (or chayotes, as most of the country knows them). But supermarket varieties are from Costa Rica. They grow at elevations of 3,000 to 4,000 feet and need a lot of chemical help to survive in south Louisiana.
“We needed to find the traditional variety,” Hill said — and the heirloom ones don’t have names. After a couple of years hunting outside the flood zone, he found Ervin Crawford in Pumpkin Center, who had gotten his mirliton starts from another farmer in Tangipahoa Parish. The original was purchased in Kenner when that town consisted of truck farms.
Hill started growing the backyard vegetables. By Mother’s Day, Hill had 18 potted mirliton plants, enough to give away in a project with the Crescent City Farmers Market. Their newsletter advertised the “Adopt-a-Mirliton” project, for serious growers who would like to raise a mirliton vine, with the understanding that they will bring half their crop back to the market and help propagate the variety.
“We got an incredibly enthusiastic response [to] Lance sitting at a table in the middle of the market with the beautiful plants he’d grown,” said Emery Van Hook, director of markets at marketumbrella.org, which runs the Crescent City Farmers’ Market. “Our shoppers are incredibly curious and passionate about local food and local food culture, and I think it’s one of the most culturally significant products at the market.”
Last fall when mirlitons were in season, the market had two mirliton vendors, Van Hook said.
“They sold out almost as soon as they put them out on the table,” she added.
“Serious growers” who contacted Hill were given the plants. The summer’s early heat, and then the rain after it, took a heavy toll, but there have been survivors, too.
Ann Butcher’s plant is now blossoming, after a period of “awful peakedness” when she thought it wouldn’t survive, she said. Butcher used to live in an old house that had its own mirliton vine.
“Everybody used to have them,” she said. “They’re not all over the place any more. You never bought them; you used to just go pick them somewhere.
“I had been thinking of planting [mirlitons] anyway” when she saw Hill’s notice, Butcher said. She doesn’t garden much, but she decided she really wanted to plant things that “are hard to come by. I planted a fig tree that was really doing well, except the birds took all my figs.”
When visiting Butcher in the Bywater neighborhood, Hill realized that many people have quit growing the perennial at home because so many people now have wooden security fences instead of chain link, a natural trellis.
Pamela Broom got a mirliton plant, too.
“It’s still alive, bless its little heart,” she said. “It’s still green and hanging in there.” She is growing it in her porch garden and plans to train it up the railing.
Broom also happens to be the farm-yard director of the New Orleans Food and Farm Network. “We would love to explore working with Lance on this,” she said.
Growers were asked to keep records of their vine: watering, fertilization, diseases, etc. Hill came up with a 16-page growers guide, which also includes instructions for building a sturdy horizontal trellis out of bamboo, and much, much more. Hill also has enlisted help from experts at the LSU AgCenter.
Van Hook said the CCFM Web site — www.crescentcityfarmersmarket.org — has posted the growers guide, with links to Hill’s Flickr site of photographs that show trellising and more. Hill also wants to partner with the CCFM on an international recipe database. He’s found recipes by the dozen by searching the Internet under the vegetable’s many names.
“The research he’s done blows my mind,” Van Hook said. “I had no idea when he came to us with this project the international significance of this food.”
Hill is a font of mirliton knowledge. He has visited Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, where mirlitons “have a cult following. Escaped slaves could take a couple into the mountains and [they] literally help them survive. They could make fabric out of it, and hats, and eat it, and could feed the tendrils to their chickens.”
All parts of the mirliton are edible, it turns out. In areas without nematodes in the soil — not the case in the New Orleans area — the roots can be harvested and eaten. Some countries feed the roots to cattle. In Taiwan, “dragon-whisker vegetable” is mirliton shoots.
Other names: Christophene, mango squash, pear squash, vegetable pear, choko, pepinella, pepinello, xuxu, xoxo, sayote, tayota. “Cho-cho,” as it’s called in Jamaica and Belize, also is a word for “pet.” Guess where it’s called a mirliton, besides here? In Haiti, which makes one wonder if this is another culinary link to the St. Domingue slave revolt.
This squash is Hill’s hobby. Trained as a historian of the civil rights movement, he is executive director of Tulane University’s Southern Institute for Education and Research, a race and ethnic relations center.
“The mirliton is an antidote from my day-to-day work,” he said.
Hill said those with questions about his project may contact him through mirlitons@marketumbrella.org.
Editor’s note: For more on gardening, see the Monitor’s main gardening page. Our blog archive. Our RSS feed.
You may also want to visit Gardening With the Monitor on Flickr. Join the group (it’s free) and upload your garden photos. Join the discussions and get answers to your gardening questions.
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A parking lot becomes an heirloom garden to benefit abused women
By Brandy Welvaert | 08.03.09
Karen Dohrn bops around the chipped and buckled parking lot at Ninth Street and Fourth Avenue in Rock Island. She wears a brown tank top, khaki shorts, and flip-flops. Her gardener’s tan glows.
Here in this arid lot that she rents from the city for $1, Ms. Dohrn is growing tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, herbs, edible flowers, and more in raised beds. She is using the square-foot gardening method, growing as many plants as she can in a small space.
These aren’t just any plants: They’re heirlooms — those old-fashioned favorites bred for flavor and nutrition, rather than for their ability to survive long-distance transport.
Once harvest time comes, she plans to sell the produce and use the money to help women who, like herself, have escaped from verbally and emotionally abusive relationships. Her nonprofit project is called 3E Heirlooms, and the E’s stand for environment, ecology, and economics.
Right now she is working the gardens alone, paying for the project mostly with her own money.
“This has been me,” she says, pointing to the beds. She hasn’t applied for any grants to fund the project.
She has had a few volunteers, and several businesses have chipped in. A second planting site is located outside Stern Beverage Inc., in Milan, Ill., which donated the space.
Other donors have included Country Spring Water Company, the Davenport Compost Facility, Miller’s Trucking and Excavating, Quad City Rain Barrels, Royal Neighbors of America, Bonnie Plants, and Standard Forwarding.
Last year Dohrn moved back to the Quad-Cities from Des Moines, Iowa, where she was a civil engineer. “I was working 90-hour weeks,” she says, “and I just thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ ”
She also left behind an abusive relationship, she says. That experience, in part, encouraged her to start 3E Heirlooms. She hopes to help women who are living in shelters to get on their feet.
“I wouldn’t want my grandchildren living in a shelter,” she says.
So far, she says, Augustana College has shown interest in purchasing some of her vegetables. In the future, she would like to open a store, where patrons could buy heirloom vegetables and fresh foods made from them, such as salads. Her vision also includes planting five heirloom gardens in each of the Quad-Cities next year.
Dohrn says she never has lost anything more than a garden hose. “I have no security, no fencing, but nothing has even been touched.”
Of greater worry, she says, are garden pests. To deter hungry animals, she crushes homegrown cayenne pepper with a mortar and pestle, then mixes it into a solution that she sprays on the plants.
“All of this is natural,” Dohrn says of the garden, noting that she doesn’t use commercial pesticides or herbicides.
At the end of the season, she will collect seeds from some plants to sow next spring.
“I wanted to venture out and do something new to the Quad-Cities,” she says of the project. “I’m falling in love with this.”
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In Maine, and other states, local fare is on the Fourth of July menu
By Clarke Canfield | 07.02.09
On the day Americans celebrate the land of the free, a Maine man wants governors to feel free to live off the land.
A sustainable food advocate who campaigned for the Obamas to plant a garden at the White House has now received pledges from several governor’s offices to feature local foods on their Fourth of July menus, from Maine lobster to South Dakota pheasant jerky to milkshakes made with Montana huckleberries.
