Old 99 Farm Week of Mar 9 2015

As of March 9th, we can offer 50+ items including the following crops: celeriac, carrots, squashes (delicata), mizuna and green onions. There are lots of eggs. My flour mill is back in service so I can offer whole ground Red Fife Wheat and Spelt flour.

Camelia is cooking prepared foods from our produce: garlic pesto, cucumber relish, quiches (on order).

“…it’s possible that people are now looking for an experience that can’t be found in a McDonald’s: the experience of eating in a restaurant that’s not owned by a multinational corporation, a restaurant where we can thank the owners for the fine meal and help support their families and employees, who just might receive a living wage. That might be the real “happy meal” we’ve been waiting for."
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/as-sales-slump-at-mcdonald-s-the-fast-food-icon-takes-a-walk-on-desperation-row

Well, you don’t say! I hadn’t seen any news about fastfood restaurant sales trends for many months, so this one popped out. The tough door to door campaigns of getting citizens to vote with their dollars and eat out less, buy basic ingredients, eat local, in season, organic if possible, may be gaining some traction. But it’s got a long way to go.

How to make sense of the world, it’s contradictions, violence, inaction on blatantly compelling issues? I’m coming around to the idea of ‘thinking in systems’ after reading a basic book by that title by Dana Meadows, lead author of Limits to Growth study in the 70s.
For we now have the computational models to reflect much of the complexity of hte natural world and the basic reality that ‘everything is connected’. She has a list of 12 leverage points, places to intervene in a system, that she distilled from decades of study of many different kinds of systems. The least potent is Numbers: such as stats, subsidies, taxes and standards. The second most potent is "Paradigms: the mindset out of which the system – it’s goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters, arises. We all can work here she says, quoting Thomas Kuhn: keep pointing out the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm and keep speaking and acting boldly from the new one. Work with the vast middle ground of people who are open minded. And so on, I encourage you to read the book, only 200 pgs and visit www.thinkinginsystems.org. for more tools and perspectives.

We have planted flats of long germination root crops and some salad greens, prepped more of the greenhouse and created a wish list for the summer garden. If you are thinking you’d like a place to plant some veggies of your own, come here and do it. If you might need someone to grow your transplants, bring us the seeds.

Specials still on for stewing hens and ground beef, a dollar per kg off the usual price.

Healthy Eating,
Ian and Cami