Are you looking for an opportunity to grow your community garden, add a component to your neighborhood project, strengthen your youth program or neighborhood outreach efforts, learn strategies to address policy challenges, market your city farm project or create value added products? Then join us in Buffalo, NY:

March 11-13, 2011

for the Growing Green Spring Urban Agriculture Training!

Registration page is here.

The Massachusetts Avenue Project’s Urban Agriculture Training features many practical, philosophical, and experiential opportunities to learn from MAP’s success with urban, youth centered agriculture.

In addition to witnessing the components of a functional urban farm first hand, such as urban fish farming, composting, and value-added food production, participants will be able to engage and observe many of the successful elements in MAP’s youth training program, Growing Green. Attending the training also means being able to hear from regional experts on food system planning and development, and network with other beginning or established urban farmers, with training at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus Innovation Center and hands on at Growing Green’s Urban Youth Farm. Only $200, this weekend workshop includes 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, a cocktail reception, and intensive, hands-on training opportunities.

Workshops include

• Moving Local Food Policy Forward with Diane Picard, MAP’s Executive Director
• Introduction to Urban Agriculture with Jesse Meeder, MAP’s Farm Manager
• Aquaponics with Jesse Meeder
• Compost and Worms with Jesse Meeder
• Urban Chickens with Jesse Meeder
• Youth, Social Enterprises and the New Food System with Zoe Hollomon, MAP’s Markets Manager
• Messaging for Local Food with Erin Sharkey, MAP’s Creative Director
• Developing Youth-centered Programming with Erin Sharkey, MAP’s Creative Director and several youth participants from the Growing Green Program.
• With a special presentation from Samina Raja, PhD- Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo entitled – Building Communities as if People Eat
• Introduction to Urban Agriculture will be offered for an additional $25 on Friday March 11 from 1-5pm

ReUse is participating in World on Your Plate this year!  Brad and I will be teaching a workshop on Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening Method on Saturday 4pm, but there are lots of other great workshops and speakers too!

Message from Jordana Geist:

The 7^th Annual World on Your Plate Food ForumFriday, October 8, 6 to 10 p.m.
Saturday, October 9, 9 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Daemen College,
Charles J. Wick Campus Center,
4380 Main Street,
Amherst, NY 14226.

Friday night includes:

• Vegan dinner reception and the screening of the documentary Living Downstream, a trailblazing and inspiring scientific exposé, based on the book by Dr. Sandra Steingraber

Saturday’s program includes:

• Morning keynote address from bestselling author of Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé

• Afternoon address from Dr. Sandra Steingraber, internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health.

The day also offers participants their choice of two workshop sessions, from choices including Community Gardens, Organic Apiculture, Living Roofs, Holistic Health, Raising Organic Beef, Raw Foods and more!

Also presenting in the afternoon are featured speakers:

• Margaret Mitchell, MD, Functional Medicine Specialist

• Caesandra Seawell, Dir. of Community Programs at Buffalo ReUse

• Michael Schade, PVC Campaign Coordinator, Center for Health, Environment and Justice will be bringing Betty, the Be Safe Ducky, an inflatable 25-foot rubber ducky that’s been making headlines coast to coast, in support of a PVC-free and toxic-free future.

Cost is $25 with pre-registration and $30 at the door.

Students with ID are admitted free but must pre-register.

Registration includes both Friday and Saturday programs, as well as a Friday night light vegan dinner, Saturday organic lunch, and ongoing access to local vendors and information tables.

For more info. or to register, visit www.worldonyourplate.org

Summer harvest is here — the tomatoes are ripening, squash is in endless supply, and you’re wondering what you’re going to do to keep up with the hoard of fresh vegetables that are growing in your garden.  Preserve the bounty that you put so much time and effort into!  That’s what you’re going to do.  Rather than sending highly nutritional food (that you’ve worked so hard to produce) to the compost pile simply because you have too much to eat, you can devote a little bit more time to preserve your harvest, and enjoy what you’ve grown for months to come.  Growing a surplus of food in the summer and preserving it creates food security for the winter months.  Doing it yourself creates the feeling of accomplishment, and the assurance of safety and quality.  Preserving food is a tradition that dates back centuries, but in the last half century has lost its appeal and necessity as modernized commerce and global food availability have made eating much easier (imagine trying to find a banana in January in Buffalo, 300 years ago…)  Canning, freezing, and dehydrating are excellent ways to preserve food — as well as the nutrients and flavor it holds.

Freezing Vegetables

Freezing your harvest (or part of your harvest, unless you have a really big freezer) is a very easy and effective way to preserve food.  A common preparation to freeze vegetables is blanching, but vegetables can be prepared to freeze in many ways (depends on the recipe).  Blanching works well for most vegetables, and is a technique used for canning as well.  Blanching removes bacteria and dirt, etc. from the surface of your veggies, and more importantly, stops the process of enzymes inside the vegetable that would cause it to toughen, lose flavor and nutrients, and change color.  Blanching is done by putting fresh, prepared vegetables into boiling water for a short amount of time (amount of time varies from vegetable to vegetable), and then immediately moving the produce to ice-cold water to stop the cooking process.  Typically, vegetables should be cooled in ice-water for the same amount of time that they were cooked in hot water, unless a recipe notes otherwise.  Guidelines for freezing and blanching are easily accessible online, and can also be found in cookbooks and books on preserving food.  Here are some guidelines for freezing beets, tomatoes, and zucchini:

Beets

Select young, tender beets, 2 – 3 inches across.  Wash carefully.  Cook in boiling water until tender,  from 60 – 90 minutes.  Cool in cold water, skins peel off easily.  Slice.  When cool, transfer to containers.  Label.  Freeze.  Keeps for 6 months.

Zucchini

Slice into 1-inch pieces, do not peel.  Saute in melted butter until barely tender.  Cool, pack into plastic containers, leaving headspace at the top.  Label.  Freeze.  Keeps for 3 months.

Tomatoes

Dip into boiling water 1 minute.  Remove, and dip into cold water for 1 minute.  Remove and peel.  Place on a tray and freeze for 30 minutes.  Place in plastic bags, remove air, seal and label.  Keeps up to 6 months.

There are many resources and guides for freezing vegetables from A to Z, whether online, or in a book.  Check out GardenGuides and PickYourOwn for online guides to preserving vegetables.  Extend your season, and eat your home-grown foods until they start growing again next year.  Please join us, as we are holding a Tomato Canning Workshop on September 1st @ 3pm in our gardens @ 320 Northampton.  If it rains, we will hold the workshop indoors @ 158 Eaton St.

Join Fancy & Delicious tomorrow, August 22nd, at 153 Eaton Street from 12-5 for our monthly bread workshop.

Arrive at noon if you want to knead and bake your own loaf of bread in our clay oven. There are still a few spots available. If you are not planning on baking, join us at any time in the afternoon to
enjoy some tea or coffee, and good company (the company is always good)!

There will be no special lesson or theme this month. All basic ingredients and supplies are provided, but if you want to experiment with any special flours or recipes, you should bring your own extras.
Instruction and guidance will be available for those who want it. The workshop is free, but we accept
donations to cover the cost of ingredients and to help keep the project alive!

Cheers,
Maura

–
Fancy and Delicious Baking Co.
153 Eaton St. Buffalo, NY 14208
fancyanddelicious.blogspot.com

MAP needs volunteers for a quick, early evening of work to finish their green house. We are hoping some of you might go over and practice so you’ll have some know-how for when ReUSE puts up ours later this summer!
Details Below:
This Tuesday (6/8)from 4-8 PM we will be putting the final touches on
our new greenhouse, and need volunteers to show up in force to help
us handle and install 2 40′X100′ sheets of plastic. No skilled labor needed, just lots of hands and smiles.

From 4-6 we will be installing the doors on the structure, and from
6-8 we will be putting the plastic in place. Come after work and
help this project become a reality!

Jesse @the farm
389 Massachusetts Avenue

Saturday, May 8th you can help local food banks by leaving non-perishable items at your mailbox. Your letter carriers will pick up your donations during the regularly scheduled route. So, please give what you can to Stamp Out Hunger.

This growing season ReUse will be setting aside some of the yield from the gardens to donate to the food banks. Volunteers who work in our gardens are helping make fresh food available to the food banks.  We have regularly scheduled garden workdays on Wednesdays (2-5pm) and Fridays (9-noon).  We also invite you to pick up some free seeds and grow food yourselves.

The Food and Emerging Media Speaker Series continues with visual/media artist, independent curator, and educator Kathy High.
“Interspecies Collaborations: Artists and Animal Stories” is a re-examination and re-consideration of how animals within our food systems are viable to our ecosystem beyond their function as merely food sources, pets or pests.  Tuesday, April 6th at 6pm at the Burchfield Penney. The event is Free and Open to the Public

High produces videos and installations posing queer and feminist questions into areas of medicine/bio-science, science fiction, and animal/interspecies collaborations. Her art works have been screened in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, and she has received awards for her media works from the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others.

In the last ten years she has become interested in working with living systems, animals and biology and art.  See Video Data Bank for information on video work by K.High