Judy Kirk remembers going to the Fleece Tent at the Common Ground Country Fair for the first time six years ago. “It’s pretty exciting when you walk into a tent with 500 fleeces. I was like a child in a candy store.” A fleece producer and spinner herself, she started getting “more and more involved,”
By Jane Lamb Debbie Deal had just completed the monumental task of converting a collapsing lobster-trap shed into a trim little shop. She’d had a contractor jack up the derelict outbuilding, resill it and skid it up to the roadside. Then she’d tackled the restoration herself – reframing, reboarding, setting in windows, shingling. “I’d never
By Russell Libby What do you do when you keep running into the same farmers while you’re delivering to the local restaurant trade? Often, you work hard to try to build better connections with the chef so that you can be sure that your produce is in demand. However, when your competition is mostly your
Robert Shetterly unveiled the latest in his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series of paintings at a November 1, 2012, celebration of Russell Libby’s tenure as MOFGA’s executive director. Russell’s truth quoted in this painting: “We have to challenge the idea that contamination is just the price of living in the modern world. Our bodies
Provided by Dandelion Spring Farm and Straw Farm Lee Straw and Beth Schiller produce most of the food their CSA members might eat, at their two businesses located on the same farm in Newcastle, Maine. Photo by Keri Pickett, courtesy of Horizon Organics. By Holli Cederholm Dandelion Spring’s vegetable fields and Straw Farm’s rolling pastures
Joan Federman. Photo by Emily Horton. By Hannah Kreitzer Joan Federman attended her first Common Ground Country Fair in 1996, when she had just moved to Maine. She spent all three days soaking up information from presenters’ panels and workshops, nourishing a growing passion for sustainable, responsible local and global citizenry. Listening to people she
By Jane Lamb Agricultural challenges in Third World countries, particularly in neighboring Latin America, have long been a special concern of MOFGA members. Usually members work to improve food production for malnourished populations by various means, ranging from university-level research to sister city programs to just plain sharing of organic know-how. Board member Laura Merrick,
This year Jason Kafka, member-at-large of the MOFGA board of directors, will plant 3,000 pounds of seed potatoes. Last year he harvested three tons of potatoes and 7,000 row feet of alliums – not including the garlic. “Think about that with a hoe in your hand,” he says. When he ponders the growth of his
By Jane Lamb It’s one thing to strive earnestly for self-sufficiency – raising your own food, chopping firewood, reliving the rural New England tradition of thrift. It’s quite another when you add an aesthetic dimension that raises the whole experience to the level of art. Anyone who visits the Old Stage Farmstand on Route 5-A
1996 Farmer to Farmer Conference University of Maine Cooperative Extension educator Dick Brzozowski spent half of his sabbatical in Ireland last year, and he brought back some green and economical ideas that could be adapted in Maine. He shared these ideas at the Farmer to Farmer Conference in Bar Harbor in November. During Brzozowski’s three-month
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