Archives: Resources

Hemp

Hemp Resources: Magazine and Web Site Wendy Kochenthal’s hemp vests, belts, bags and leashes were displayed at the Common Ground Country Fair. English photo. By Jean English Last winter, Wendy Kochenthal of Jackson, Maine, took a two-month trip to the West Coast, traveling from Seattle to Baja and back again. Along the way she found

Read More »

Off the Grid

By Jane Lamb “It doesn’t make sense for us to have a big garden when we have Dad’s right across the street,“ says Rebecca Haines, who grew up on her father’s, Austin Moore’s, Uncas Farm in North Whitefield. Instead, she and her husband, Fred, have put their environmental concerns into building a self-sufficient solar-powered home

Read More »

Open Pollinated Deli

By Roberta Bailey Seed saving is rapidly becoming a national craze, hot on the heels of football and baseball. Well, not quite, but it is gaining popularity. It’s making the newspapers, and when it gets its own section, I’m convinced that it will have a place before the sports section. I’ve stated it before but

Read More »

Soy for Health

By Roberta Bailey About 15 years ago, I wrote a column entitled “What is Tofu?” Tofu was just hitting the market shelf in individual, one-pound containers. Until then, it was only available at co-op storefronts or health food stores. You brought your own container and ladled out blocks of it from a 5-gallon bucket. If

Read More »

GYO Orchard

By Roberta Bailey Close to 2 acres of the Common Ground Country Fair’s permanent site is being planted to an experimental orchard. Another quarter acre or so will be a tree nursery. Both sites will be test plots for soil amendments, cover crops, rootstocks, and new and old fruit cultivars, hardy and tender. A portion

Read More »

Chervil

By Ellie MacDougall If parsley is the workhorse of the herb family, chervil is its refined, sophisticated cousin. A native of Europe and western Asia, and naturalized throughout North America, Anthriscus cerefolium is a member of the family Umbelliferae, as are carrots and parsley. It features lacy leaves that echo the shape of parsley but

Read More »

Crop Rotation

Rotations with winter and spring cereal grains have good possibilities in Maine, said Dr. Matt Liebman at a MOFGA-sponsored talk at the Maine Agricultural Trades Show in January. The keys to successful cereal production, he continued, are adequate weed control – especially paying attention to mechanical weed control – and adequate soil fertility. Regarding winter

Read More »

Seeds

Drawing by Toki Oshima By Roberta Bailey When we plant a seed, we create a direct link between our ancestral past and our potential future. The seed we plant has traveled around the world, from farmer to farmer, from native populations to traders and conquerors to royalty and eventually back to farmers. The carrot seed

Read More »

Shell Beans

Drawing by Toki Oshima By Roberta Bailey For the first time in almost, 20 years of preserving food, I had a surplus of canned green beans and tomato sauce. I had planned on putting up a little less food as my son, Isak, was leaving for college. I hadn’t planned on my daughter having swim

Read More »

Going Native With Pollinators

By Sue Smith-Heavenrich I spent 10 minutes one morning last summer watching the bees in my blooming asparagus – the bumblebees, honeybees and a number of smaller bees I couldn’t immediately identify. They were incredibly busy, moving from one flower to the next. In the squash and pumpkin blossoms, small bumblebees were vibrating, making quite

Read More »
Categories
Scroll to Top