Man in Overalls

After 16 months traveling, Mary Elizabeth and I are Florida bound. Our home base will be Jacksonville , and I look forward to rooting in a new community. I will, however, continue to support the good food work in Tallahassee. I remain on the board of Tallahassee Food Network (TFN). (This past year I served as TFN ambassador to connect with and learn from community-based good food efforts around the world.) More than remaining connected from afar, I intend to be in town monthly for TFN's Collards and Cornbread Gatherings , which means I'll be in Tallahassee on the 2nd Thursday of the month, 1:30pm, Oct 8th at TFN's iGrow Whatever You Like Youth Farm (514 Dunn Street). Will you join me? On a side note: if you would like a food gardening consult, a garden built, or you are dreaming of a community garden in Tallahassee, or, of course, in Jacksonville, by all means, send me an email  or ring me. To the extent that my ability and location allows, I'll jump right on it a...

Posted by Man in Overalls on  Thursday, June 25, 2015 Mary Elizabeth and I have been back in the country for three weeks -- long enough to...  attend a best friend's wedding in WNC; visit my herb-tea-farming buddy, Rachel in Virginia; catch sunrise on the Brooklyn Bridge; go berry u-picking with friends and put my overalls to work shoveling at a community garden in the Philly area; participate in a fellowship at the Wake Forest Food and Faith Conference in Asheville, NC; blur through Jacksonville for my wife's high school 10-year reunion; and stop in Tallahassee long enough to learn about the iGrow Southcity Grand Opening happening 2:30pm, Friday, June 26th . Folks, we've been on the move. But what about Europe? We were there for two months. Other than good, seemingly untainted bread , what stood out? There was this coop in Spain... A network of coops. THE COOP of coops! I gotta tell you about it. It's called Mondragon . It's a "federatio...

Just a quick note to say hey from Switzerland. On this leg so far, we flew into Madrid, and then spent two weeks with friends in the south of France. Tomorrow, we're headed to Zurich, then to Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and back to France, where we'll spend a couple weeks in Paris before we head back to Madrid at the beginning of June to catch our flight back to the States. Everywhere we go we're learning! In Madrid: Spanish recipes (Tortillas, yum!). In France, bread making, stone walls, old architecture (that orients towards the south to maximize passive solar... that then informs where the garden goes: also to the south), home-made, gravity pressurized irrigation, cheese, and did I mention cheese! We saw countless coops, one example of how businesses can operate pairing the ideas of community benefit and economic viability, a way to to ensure sustainability for the long haul-- which reminds me of the economic development happening in ...

I'm back in Tallahassee! (for two weeks). As I mentioned in previous posts, my wife, Mary Elizabeth and I spent the last two months in Nicaragua and Ecuador studying spanish , culture, dance, history, and community-based good food systems. Though we're back, there are more stories to tell. If you need a food garden consult, compost delivery, garden design, or a couple raised beds, let me know. Send me an email with subject line "Food Gardening Work"  or ring me at 322.0749, and I'll get right back with you. - - - In addition to the household-level food economy smarts of folks in Nicaragua, we also learned of many organized efforts to "alimentar" their communities, i.e., to ensure their communities are taken care of and are eating well. The good food movement, indeed, has many expressions! Take the the spanish language school, Hijos del Maiz  in el Lagartillo where we studied for example. On the surface, it is simply a community-based l...