Calliope's Table Urban Gardens and CSA

www.calliopes-table.com

With the turn of the season into February and the promise, or maybe the Oregon Tease, of an early spring, I roll out (with very muted drumroll) the direction all my ideas of the last few years have started to take. Calliope's Table will start a CSA (Commmunity Supported Agriculture) project this year with produce grown in urban plots around Portland. I am certainly not the first to think of farming urban spaces; it's being done right here, right now in Portland as well as most other decent sized urban cities. In fact, it's being done all over the world and has been for centuries.

If you look at the history of urban farming you'll see it's been the norm for most of the time the human race has been around. The large-scale, long-distance, high-impact modern methods of farming have been around less than a hundred years. The rest of the time it was many small-scale efforts that most people were involved in.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is the partnering of farmers directly with the people that will eventually eat the bounty. This arrangement is proving to be of benefit to everyone. Farmers get to do their marketing in the beginning of the season which finances the growing for the season and provides some income to the farmer while the crops are maturing, and also allows the farmer to focus on growing during the season rather than spending much of their time selling what is ripening in the fields. The shareholders get fresh produce every week that has been picked just hours earlier, usually with more variety than they are used to. The level of involvement varies by CSA, but some offer opportunities to visit the farm and help in the field, or the CSA might organize social gatherings, or make and preserve food from the harvest.

I'll be working with other farmers, other CSA's, groups and individuals to share resources, ideas, and perhaps realize some economies of scale as we develop alliances. I just built a website to promote this idea and develop those alliances, www.calliopes-table.com.

CSA's come in many different varieties themselves following a few basic themes. Because I am going to be working with just a few shareholders, about a dozen, I can take the most attractive parts of different themes and use them together. This will be a subscription model, but I hope to be able to offer you choices to adjust your weekly share to give you plenty of things you like, or keep you from getting too much of something that isn't one of your favorites. My idea in all of this is that if I can focus on a smaller group of people I can be much better at helping them get what they want.

I'm going to be able to offer a lot of variety and flexibility this year in what is being grown as well. I am focusing on vegetable varieties bred for their taste and unique qualities, heirloom varieties including ones with an Oregon heritage, and culinary herbs even I can't usually find to buy. I think my CSA would be perfect for a home cook that loves variety and wants a source of produce of the quality that the best restaurants get. Oh, and if you're like me, you'll like that it will probably bring opportunities to cook some yummy food for appreciative fans too.

I think this would be great too for vegetarians or someone that likes to cook vegetarian food. Having the ingredients to make fabulous vegetarian fare and also to always have fresh salad greens around was what got me back into growing a few years ago. Now I want to grow enough to share with some friends.

I would love to find CSA members that love food like I do and can appreciate the beauty of an heirloom Costata Romanesca zucchini or whose favorite thing about August is heirloom tomatoes. But if you're someone who wants to eat better and is still discovering how wonderful that can be, there's a place for you too.

I'll be growing lots of different things this year in order to grow seed stock for future seasons, which will also help to hold down costs in future years. While the diversity will increase over the seasons, this year I expect to grow 75-100 varieties of vegetables and herbs, almost all of which will provide produce for the CSA. There is still some time for seed planning for this season if you have things you'd like planted too.

The Summer share will be 26 weeks beginning mid to late May. A 12 week Winter share will be offered following that. That leaves a full 3 months of the year we still have to eat so by Spring 2010 I plan to offer shares year-round on either a yearly subscription basis or seasonal programs you can pick and choose from.

I hope to plant an extra 20% or more of everything I grow as a buffer and also to provide some healthy, great tasting produce to people in our community that are often deprived of the opportunity to eat well. This planned surplus can also be used to create products like pesto or marinara sauce.

I think it's great if you have an interest in how your food grows and want to put some of your own energy into the food you eat. There will be opportunities to work in the gardens if that's what you like to do, and opportunities to learn more about gardening and growing food if you like.

Community gatherings with potlucks or cooking meals together are also planned. If you are one of those people with the gift for organizing social gatherings or love to cook and feed people, this will be a chance for you to shine. These will be great
opportunities for us to get to know others interested in the food they eat and living well. Please bring your artistic gifts too, music, art, performance. We're also going to need people with good appetites for food you can't get just anywhere served with a big helping of love.

There will be an Urban Farming Event held in Portland sometime in Feb. Check the website for details in the next few days.

Peace and peas,
Calliope

Down on the Farm

Has it been that long? It's been more than 6 months since I’ve written here. I’ve been exploring all things food in a more rural setting since then. My brief experience doing demos in supermarkets gave me tremendous inspiration to spend another season growing food and developing local food systems. This year I had a great time helping a family farm in the Umpqua Valley get a local chicken egg business started. I also got to watch the humble beginnings of a new farmer’s market, built some new gardens and grew some yummy veggies, and started compost heaps. Good stuff!

While I came to enjoy the demo work in a supermarket less and less over the few short weeks I was doing it, it was so worth it because I got to meet so many of you! I enjoyed talking to you all about what you eat and why, and I especially loved talking about cooking and gardening with so many. It’s just that, as I said in an earlier post, we so badly need better choices about where we’re going to get our food and how we’re going to turn it into something great to eat. While doing those demos, it became harder and harder for me to watch what we all have to go through in order to feed ourselves, and the lack of real choices we have. I knew we could do so much better for ourselves. But how?

While away on the farm I have been so excited to learn of some really innovative things happening in Portland’s local food scene. It seems like a lot of us are starting to take an interest in becoming empowered about our personal food supply. And so many people everywhere are gardening now! Yes! I think the Hundredth Monkey Principle is really at work here with regards to how many of us are waking up to the realities of what is going on with our food supply.

So, in talking to you, participating in the mass-market food system briefly, reconnecting with the farm and growing food, watching local food start to really take a foothold everywhere, and as always doing a lot of cooking, I finally have some vision of how to best use all of these elements together to make some positive change in how we deal with food and eating well everyday.

I’m excited. The movement to reconnect us all with the food we eat is gaining momentum. I’ll be back soon, both on the blog and back in Portland, and I’ll keep you posted as this develops. Nice to see you all again!

Peace and Peas,
Calliope