Take a Small Action & Make a Big Difference for Farms, Farmers, & Everyone Who Eats

Can you take a look at this post from the Union of Concerned Scientists?

Call your senators today and urge them to support the full funding for conservation programs promised in the Food and Farm Bill.

These guys are smart, brave, and are recognizing the vital importance of sustainable farming practices. These guys are trying, and will make a difference, with your help.
Please take one minute to look at what they have to say -

the sweet taste of summer

We're finishing compiling our SF,SF Congress report, but, in the meantime, here on our island, what about the blackberries? The last hot days have made them ripe & sweet, and they're everywhere. It's great to spread them out on a cookie sheet, cover them with a sheet of wax paper, and freeze them, and then pour them, bouncing off each other like little wooden beads, back into freezer storage bags to defrost by the handful in the middle of winter.
Anybody want to organize a blackberry/raspberry/loganberry/marionberry (is that what they are?) pickers group? A guy could wear long sleeves, thick pants, and use a drop cloth to reach far into some of those brambles as you go. And those of us with freezer space could do a festival of freezing. Magically delicious! And how about those apples?
Time to learn about drying and preserving if we haven't already.

We're Back! and New Lunch Program Started Today!

We're back from the Slow Food Congress in San Francisco! It was quite incredible!
One of our first experiences was to stop in at the Museo ItaloAmericano in Fort Mason while documentary filmmaker/photographer Douglas Gayeton was hanging his show, "Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town", an exhibit of large sepia-tone images, each actually a composite of as many as one hundred photographs. This isn't what we first noticed about them, though. What we saw in these sepia mosaics were vibrant pictures of the people of Pistioa and their relationship with the food they produce - holding a clenched fist around radish tops or cupping a hand under more delicate eggs, their comments and local expressions and little notes about their daily lives written carefully in looping cursive along the edges, across the bottom, and inside the shapes of the people in the photographs. We happened into to the gallery the day before the show opened and looked at many of the photographs while they were still on the floor leaning against the wall. Douglas Gayeton was hanging the show with the Museo staff, and took time to talk to us. It was magical, like most of our experiences on this trip...
We're remembering and putting together a daily diary. We will be posting it in the next couple of days, with some photos, and we promise it will be interesting -
Right now we're off to eat some lunch at the the first day of the San Juan Island School District lunch program - When local healthy food is being served in our school, it is - A very happy day for us all!!
Linda