The most wonderful time of the year…

… is Autumn!  This year we’re getting treated to an especially long and unusually warm season.  Why is Fall so colorful here?  Among other exciting things, harvest time brings community together: meals, service, chores, celebrations, generosity, and activity.  Just when students have hit a groove in balancing studies, work, and play- they’re almost ready for a break.  Now they’re busier than ever as final projects, presentations, and exams loom.  But all this activity ends in some satisfying, concrete results:  gardens put to bed, papers submitted, root cellar stocked with veggies (more on this soon!), credits earned, experience gained.  In short, harvest.

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1st Annual Food Day, Just around the corner!

This Monday, October 24^th, Unity College will be participating in the inaugural Food Day!  Food Day is a nationwide event meant to bring attention to current issues that we face with in this country in regards to: diet related diseases from high fat, high sugar and processed foods, food access and hunger, subsidies to large agribusiness as well as environmental and animal right’s issues associated with factory farming.  Food Day is sponsored by The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non for profit watchdog group that
has led successful fights for food labeling, better nutrition and safer food since 1971.

Several events will be hosted on Food Day throughout the campus that will highlight the issues at
hand.  This event is a perfect opportunity to engage students, faculty and community members with dilemmas, that are not only happening nationwide but in our own backyard, with in our food system.

To sum it all up: come out and enjoy a fun filled day with, local foods and community building!

Hunters & Huggers Dinner – a slide show

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This event was also covered in the Morning Sentinel.  Nice story, here.

A mid-summer’s virtual tour of VFA

For those of you who can’t tour around Unity with VFA, I suggest you take this virtual tour of our fields to see how we’re progressing.  2011 is gonna be big.  How big?  We’ve got:

• over 2000 row feet of onions
• 2000 row feet of potatoes
• over 1400 row feet of winter squash and pumpkins
• 1800 row feet of early cabbage and 2500 row feet of late cabbage
• and roughly 1800 row feet of carrots

….and miscellaneous crops at our Albion Road garden (including beans, tomatoes, corn, and rutabaga).

If you’re not excited yet, you’re not eating enough vegetables, ’cause this is going to mean tons and tons of fresh food for folks in our community!

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Garden Fiesta Community Meal

Come out to the Unity Community Center to support UBR’s Veggies For All project by eating some fresh, festive Mexican-style fare.  It’s that easy!  Eat some dinner with us on Saturday August 6th (5:30-7:30pm).

While you’re in town, why not check out the sweet show at 8:00pm at the Unity College Centre for the Performing Arts.  Yup, Fishtank Ensemble is back in town.  Don’t you dare miss all the good stuff we’ve got going on in our little town on the 6th!

Sometimes you feel like a potato…

…and sometimes you feel like planting potatoes!  That’s exactly how we felt yesterday.

Yesterday, Veggies For All folks put darn near 600 pounds of seed potato in our plot just south of the Quimby Library.  That translates to just under a half mile of row-footage! Thanks a ton to Marty, Tess, Trey, all the folks who chopped seed potato, and big, big, au gratin-style thank you to Moose Tubers for their continued support!

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All(ium) hands on deck!

Get it, onions are in the allium family…

Yesterday, Veggies For All planted our first big round of onions.  We got some sweet, strong seedlings from the good people at the Village Farm and planted them with the help of super volunteers.  Volunteers included UC students, two local alums (not to be confused with allium), our Unity Barn Raisers ED, and one robust baby.  Thanks to all!

Onions are one of those crops that really demand our attention and consistency as growers.   While last year was wildly successful for VFA (and all farmers and gardeners), we noted that our onion crop had room for improvement.

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Tiny seeds get started indoors back in March, they are carefully tended for months in the greenhouse.  Our field is tilled, beds built, soil amended, seedlings transplanted.  Then we feed, weed, and water for quite a while in the field.  It’s not over at harvest- we’ll pick, clean, cure, and trim the onions, which will need to be monitored closely in storage.  Our onions are then incrementally released from storage and distributed through the VRFP to our neighbors who have reduced access to food like local onions.

The challenge of growing good onions is a lot like the challenge of growing a healthy community.  It’s takes time, a lot of hands, and a good dose of letting the sun and rain do their good work.

Who’s plowin’ your garden now?

Well, we’ll be plowing our own garden any day now!  Pictured above is our new-to-us two-bottom plow, an Allis Chalmers 80.  Thanks to the VRFP for making the purchase possible and to Don for doing the equipment “matchmaking.”  Stay tuned for word on the delivery of our tractor!

Sharpen your shovel…

…and spruce up your spreadsheet.  With the growing season on its way, garden planning is underway!  At Unity that means more than just consulting last year’s crop map to plan for a nice rotation.  It’s a family affair.

Dining Services leadership and Sustainability Office staffers put their heads together this week to determine a strategy for increasing the use of campus-grown crops in Dining Services meals.  Aside from determining the perfect greens for blanching and freezing (AND student taste), picking potato varieties to cultivate, and getting guidance on a ton of other agricultural choices- we’re embarking on a review of purchasing to identify areas where we can increase local buying.  We are already serious about supporting regional businesses and growers, but we’re always looking for ways to bump up local buying.

What does that work look like?  Just yesterday work study staff-person Ryan Green was poring over a big pile of invoices and calculating interesting figures, such as Unity College’s annual broccoli consumption and carrot purchasing frequency.  Thanks, Ryan!  One thought is, if we can help our Dining Services department save resources with on-campus supplementary crops, perhaps there will be some wiggle room to purchase local products that tend to be slightly more expensive.  It’s a working theory, but we’re excited to work on it more with students, Dining folks, and garden staff as we head into the warmer months.

Trusty sustainable foods work study, Ryan Green, sipping sustainable soup.

Dave Hubbard, Dining Service Production Manager, can really dish it out.

Student volunteers in the south library plot last Fall.

Veggies For All winter squash harvest reaches pantry

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Veggies For All’s 2010 winter squash harvest reached the Volunteer Regional Food Pantry yesterday.  We’re stoked to report 2,500 pounds of squash will now reach food insecure folks throughout the Fall via the VRFP’s monthly distribution!  That means that our squash will be enjoyed in about 350 local households.

How is Unity College playing a part in this bounty?

Now that Veggies For All locates it home base on Unity College campus, we’re all sharing infrastructure.  Half of our veggie fields are right on campus!  The College is providing administrative and partnership support, too.

Best part of it is we can better interact with students and faculty.  For instance, this very squash was harvested by Jim Merkel’s Environmental Citizen: Plan, Design, and Build a Root Cellar class.  We cured the  squash in the barn on campus that was built by students in a Mick Womersley Environmental Citizen class.

That kind of collaboration and community-effort is as sweet as a roasted Delicata!