On March 31, two employees who had been campaigning for a community garden for our office got the OK from our publisher and our garden was born. Initially about 30 people signed on to help create the garden, but as with all worthy projects, the number who've actually spent significant energy on the project is much smaller. The really cool thing about it, though, is that people helped out when they could help out, and somehow it all got done.

This is some of what the garden committee (of which I have been a nominal member – meaning, I watered once, weeded once and have done a lot of cheerleading) planted:

Giant Sunflowers
Kentucky Wonder beans
Dill
Cosmos (lovely chocolate-brown ones)
Popcorn
Country Gentleman Sweet Corn 
Yellow  Onion
Pole beans 'Greasy Grits'
Bush BeanBean 'Blue Lake'
Basil – 'Herb Fine Verde' (Which I hadn't heard of before)

Plus a variety of lettuces, herbs – and flowers, to give the garden curb appeal. The curb appeal thing is definitely working. I frequently see people slow down and give the garden a good once-over. I figure at some point we'll lose a few vegetables to passersby, though this isn't much of a pedestrian area. But even if we do, the project has been fabulous and the result is simply wonderful. I think now that we've had an experimental first year, we'll regroup and do some perennials, too.

One of the best parts is that we now will have fresh herbs and flowers – free for the picking – for our vases here in the office for the rest of the season. (See example from my very own desk over to the left there.)

And I absolutely love that in just a few weeks we've transformed this somewhat sterile, boring patch of lawn into this lovely, juicy, lively and fertile little plot of Creation. Priceless.

The Farm to School bill has so much win-win embedded in it, I have trouble imagining why any legislator wouldn’t be willing and even eager to support it. The program would increase sales of farm products and improve child nutrition by making locally raised food available in our schools.

A farm-to-school program was first authorized in 2004 in the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, but funds were never actually appropriated for the effort. Earlier this year, Senator Leahy (D-VT) and Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) each introduced farm-to-school bills that include $50 million in mandatory funding for a program to be administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Representatives Farr (D-CA) and Putnam (R-FL) included $50 million for farm-to-school in their Children's Fruit and Vegetable Act of 2009 (H.R. 4333), as did California Sen. Barbara Boxer in her Growing Farm to School Protection Act (S. 3144).

On Monday, 41 national organizations delivered a letter to House and Senate Congressional leaders urging them to include $50 million in mandatory funding for programs linking farmers with local schools as part of the 2010 Child Nutrition Act reauthorization. Farm to School programs have been shown to increase farmers' incomes while improving the nutrition and food literacy of school children. Considering that an alarming number of our school children think food actually originates in supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, this seems like a truly valuable program.

The Senate Agriculture Committee passed its version of the Child Nutrition bill on March 24, including $40 million for Farm to School. Mark-up in the House Education and Labor Committee is expected later this spring. The full Senate and House are expected to take action on the bill sometime this year.

According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Farm to school programs improve nutrition for children who participate in the school lunch program and lead to significant changes in the young people’s eating habits – particularly important as our country faces an epidemic of childhood obesity.

“We know that we need to do a better job of ensuring that school food programs provide the best food possible for children,” Fitzgerald stated in a NSAC press release. “This is the rallying call of many prominent dietitians, educators and doctors, as well as First Lady Michelle Obama. Food sourced from local farms is freshest and, combined with teaching children about where their food comes from, provides children the knowledge they need to make good food choices for the rest of their lives.”

Farm to school programs also offers immediate and long-term economic benefits, the NSAC said. According to a study in Oregon, every dollar school districts spent on local food purchases stimulated an additional eighty-seven cents in economic activity.

“Farm to school increases farm sales and because the money stays local, it generates a ripple effect throughout the area's economy,” Fitzgerald said. “In addition, delivering nutritious food to local schools can bring producers into neighborhoods that are now ‘food deserts,’ creating an opportunity to expand good food choices to area stores and institutions. Farm to school is a winning idea nutritionally, economically and environmentally.”

Sen. Leahy's bill (S. 3123) was included in the Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act of 2010 that was voted out of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee unanimously on March 24 and is waiting to go to the Senate floor. During markup in the Senate Committee, the bill reduced the funding level for farm to school to $40 million. In the House, Rep. Holt's bill, the Farm to School Improvements Act (H.R. 4710), is waiting for consideration by the Education and Labor Committee.

Concerns in both the Senate and House about how to pay for the funding increases have slowed The Child Nutrition Act reauthorization. Discussions of funding methods continue, with attention increasingly focused on the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee. The closing of tax loopholes was used to pay for improved food stamp benefits during the 2008 Farm Bill negotiations, and some suggest a similar maneuver to pay for improved school meals.

We’ll keep an eye on these programs as they make their way through the legislative process. We think they’re important for the health of our children, the health of our rural economies and the economic well-being of our farm and market-gardener friends.

When the doorbell rang on Saturday morning, I wasn’t expecting anyone and wasn’t looking forward to interruptions. I had plans, and Important Stuff to Do.

I went to the door and instantly had to restrain my bouncy pup, who simply can’t hear children’s voices without wanting to join the party.

And it was a party. Three little girls, hovering in the 8 to 10 age group, bobbed and weaved outside my door. One wore a pink tutu over her jeans and the other had glitter on her cheeks, remnants from whatever previous game they had been playing.

Cheeks all a-flush with excitement, the eldest – who had either been elected to or simply commandeered the role of spokesgirl – quickly explained.

“We’re playing a game with another team of kids and are trying to see how much silly stuff we can trade in the next 20 minutes!

“This is what we’re trading,” she said exuberantly, holding up a half-used bottle of bubbles liquid.

“Well, my house is full of pretty silly stuff, so give me a minute,” I said, not certain what I might dig up back in my “office,” which, looked at in another light, could be called “the catch-all.” As soon as I entered the room, I saw the grail and grabbed it.

It was a vintage fake Christmas corsage, all turquoise and white and feathery, that my beautiful, inventive daughter-in-law had affixed to my gift this year. I hadn't been sure what to do with it after the initial amusement on Christmas morning, but I liked it because it reminded me of my kids. I left it out on my supply cabinet where it gave me a brief smile whenever I saw it.

Perfect! And my son and daughter-in-law would love that it became part of this game.

I took it to the door and presented it to the girls, who were appropriately impressed. They thought it was really pretty but agreed with me that it was also very silly. So they gave me their bubbles, I turned over the corsage and they bounced back down the driveway. I heard them shrieking and giggling as they galloped to the next neighbor’s house.

There are so many levels of pleasure for me in this little vignette. First is just the happiness of being in the presence of giggly little girls with that mischievous light in their eyes. I don’t know these girls’ names, but I see them plenty, playing in their driveway and bopping around the neighborhood. In their shouts and cries I hear the echo of my own girlhood, when my sister and I were the ones tearing around, inventing adventures and challenges and trouble with the twins across the street.

I love that our neighborhood is safe and friendly and full of families, and that the kids are mostly sweet and appropriately managed. I love that this couple across the street plays with their children and lets them play outdoors – or insists that they go outside. I actually get to see them. They aren’t holed up indoors in front of electronic devices; they’re outside sharing the music of their laughter and the familiarity of their sibling fusses, just like children of old. Like, say, of my generation. The young ‘uns in my neighborhood have a freedom that I think is increasingly rare.

I wish all the world – literally, all the adults everywhere – could stop whatever else we’re doing and devote ourselves to making life sweet and safe and free for the children. Not to make the children the center of attention, which makes them narcissistic and nuts, but to make the foundational value of every single community that the children are getting what they need to be healthy, smart and free. Just that context would give rise to the actions that would nourish our world and correct so much environmental, social and political lunacy.

Isn’t it strange that such a simple desire could be viewed by so many as far too lofty a goal?

What I love about our GRIT community is that I honestly believe that we are engaged in accomplishing precisely this. We are committed to diverse communities and families in which we get along, and to raising our food and conducting our businesses in a way that has worked in this country for generations and has the promise of workability for generations to come.

They don't know it, but those are thoroughly GRIT-ty Girls across the street.

Several thought streams have diverged in my mind today to have me thinking even more intently than usual on the importance and value of locally raised and processed food.

The first thought is connected with the ongoing horror story that continues to emerge from Haiti, a country in which, among a multitude of other problems, its system of local agriculture has been completely destroyed in the past couple of decades, so that even people living in the countryside have been dependent on food and water being trucked in on a weekly basis. With the roads now destroyed, these people’s already precarious existence becomes even more precarious.

The second thought has to do with a University of Iowa study that reports a new strain of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacterium (sometimes called the “superbug”) was found in nearly three quarters of hogs and nearly two-thirds of the workers on several farms in Iowa and Western Illinois. All of these farms used antibiotics frequently and routinely.

On antibiotic-free farms, no MRSA was found. I don’t know any other word for that comparison but “stark.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, antibiotic resistance is now one of the world’s most pressing public health problems. Almost every type of bacteria has become stronger and less responsive to antibiotic treatment. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria can quickly spread throughout communities – including schools, hospitals and the workplace.

Microbes are becoming resistant to antibiotics for a variety of reasons – our insistence on using them at the first sign of a cold or flu for one thing – but certainly confined animal feeding operations and other conditions collectively known as “factory farms” are increasingly recognized as a source of these very, very bad bugs. I lost a friend a few years back to MRSA. It isn’t anything any of us ever want to see in our lifetimes, and yet 70 percent of the hogs studied in the University of Iowa study carried this bacterium.

The third thought contributing to this stream today is a much happier one. I’ve been editing stories about starting farmer’s markets and about how to make the products from your garden or your home craft projects attractive for sale at local farmer’s markets and craft sales. And that has me thinking about the deep satisfaction and pleasure to be had whenever I visit the farmer’s market my friends in Kansas City created, or when I talk with the small food growers I know here in our pretty, fertile area of Kansas.

My farmer friends in Kansas City are about to have their sweet little urban farm shut down because their neighbor wants to sell his house and he thinks those huge, wild gardens next door and the chickens clucking (no roosters!) and the visitors coming to learn about gardening all somehow diminish the value of his property.

I wish I were in the market for a house in Kansas City. I’d love to have a farm right next door with just about everything I’d need to sustain a pretty healthy life. That would be a huge selling point in my book. Clean food within 30 yards, no MRSA, no E. coli? Sweet! And if the poop hits the propeller from some social disruption or natural disaster, there could be much worse ways to get through it than hunkering down with the farmers next door.

Last night I found myself gnashing my teeth once more over the poisonous political atmosphere in our country, the fury erupting in Haiti, the insanity of our financial situation and other things that go bump in the night, and in the process of sorting it all out, I wrote a note to a friend. What I said sort of popped out and surprised me, but now that I’ve articulated it, I think it makes perfect sense: GRIT needs to take over the world.

Yes, I know. It’s a bold statement, but please, hear me out. Here at GRIT, our values are all about hard work and pleasure in simple things. We’re about community and self-reliance, in just about equal measure. We talk about how to feed ourselves, grow things, build stuff, get along with each other and say a holy “Gee whiz” at the amazing intricacy of the natural world. And that’s just what’s between the pages of our magazine.

Even better is what goes on here behind the scenes. Get this: our staff gets along and works out differences. I know. I know. Amazing. When things get rough, we have conversations and figure out ways to do better.

Now, within the GRIT staff itself, we have the comfort level of somewhat similar backgrounds: We grew up in small towns or on farms, we went to church and were in 4-H, FFA or FHA, had some experience doing chores we didn’t want to and some sense of celebration with our families and communities when the work was done.

But we work for a company with a couple hundred people here under the same roof, and not everyone has that same history. We live in a relatively conservative state, one that the national media would have us believe is intolerant and impossible for anyone who isn’t white, politically conservative and religiously fundamental. Daily, we put the lie to that assumption.

We have white people working here, black people, Hispanic people, Asian people. We have Christians of various flavors—Protestant, with several subdivisions (Baptist, Freewill Baptist, Episcopalian, Church of Christ, Community churches, etc.); Catholic; Jewish; Buddhist and a few employees who might be described as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The staff includes straights, gays and who-the-heck-knows; liberals, conservatives, arch-liberals, arch-conservatives and maybe a few commies or anarchists who just know how to keep their mouths shut (doubtful).

When a long-time employee recently experienced a devastating medical situation and used up all her leave and financial resources, no one asked what church she attended or if she followed a particular political orthodoxy. We just started organizing raffles and potlucks and other opportunities for employees to support her in unofficial ways. Last year, we did the same with another employee who had a baby so premature it was a medical miracle that she survived. Prior to that, another employee’s daughter passed away suddenly, leaving him and his wife with an infant and three older children to support on a custodian’s income. In each case, we rallied ‘round, made up a bunch of food and just started doing what we could to assist them past the rocky parts.

We’re like that here. Quietly, matter-of-factly, without the need for trumpets blaring and news cameras focused on how generous we are. We take care of each other.

We don’t argue about politics, religion or sex in our break room or in our individual work areas – and believe me, for some of us more opinionated types, that occasionally requires restraint. We let each other be, we get along and we get an unbelievable amount of work done. Not only that, we actually like each other.

I think it’s a model the rest of the country would do well to follow. We’re happy to share.

Earlier yesterday, we were hemmed in by a cold, dense fog. Later in the day weather conditions morphed into a storm of little ice pellets that bounced off the frozen grass like popcorn, clicking like tiny fingernails on my window glass. Fearless Editor Hank stopped by my office, and I pointed excitedly out the window.

“I know what that is!”

“What? The sleet?” he asked, peering out into the yuck outside.

“No! It’s grapple … no, wait … not that … it’s … it’s GRAUPEL!”

See? There is an exactly right word for absolutely everything. Graupel isn’t just your garden-variety sleet. It’s that fluffy, pellet-y stuff that forms when freezing fog condenses on a snowflake. The distinction between sleet and graupel, I think, is that graupel is fluffy-looking and sleet is icy. Graupel looks like a hybrid between snow and a ball-bearing.

Call me a wonk; I love these minute distinctions that make one thing not another. One of the ways I know I’m in exactly the right career is the glee I feel when I’ve discovered the precisely right word for something.

I also love that other people care enough about the physical world to create these bodies of distinctions. Somebody was really paying attention when they noticed not only that snowflakes were very different from each other, but that they fit in particular categories.

As I cruised the Internet yesterday, searching for more information on graupel (a surprising body of information can be found, as it turns out), I stumbled upon this post on Ðrawn Association describing the work of Wilson Allen Bentley, a 19-year-old farmer living in Vermont in 1885, who has now become sort of the Patron Saint of Snowflakes. Fascinated by snow crystals, this teenager was the first person to successfully produce a photo of snow or ice crystals. He magnified crystals at 69 to 3,000 times on glass plates, and ultimately verified that every ice crystal actually is unique, growing symmetrically in a 6-sided hexagon around a miniscule nucleus. The shape the snowflake ultimately takes depends on its water content and the temperature.

Those photos by Bentley completely knock me out. Photography was in its infancy when he started experimenting with photographing snowflakes. And he had to invent a new camera to be able to pursue his obsession. But just look at those photos. Simply amazing and awe-inspiring, just because a curious Vermont teenager cared enough to keep at an intellectual pursuit day after day, year after year.

After being inspired by Bentley's photos, check out www.snowcrystals.com to find more snowflake photos and physics as well as links to help you find snow activities (such as "snowflake watching") for children and adults. 

Let’s hear it for slightly fey compulsions, pretty pictures—and also graupel.

I have only had one personal experience with a flood. That was several years ago, just before Thanksgiving dinner, when a plumbing issue covered three rooms of my home in two inches of water, none of it particularly clean. The worst that happened was that Thanksgiving dinner was very late, we were very tired and hungry after the cleanup and the plumber’s bill for making an emergency house call on Thanksgiving Day was not precisely modest. Pain in the Butt Index (PITBI): 6 on a scale of 1 to 10.

For local farmers in Georgia, recent floods have pushed the PITBI completely off the scale.

Can you imagine having absolutely everything you own covered in muck, everything you’ve worked for washed away, your ability to make a living eliminated, and even the land you’ve intended to pass on to your children turned into a clay-laden silt pile? Yeah, me neither. But that’s what small farmers in Georgia are dealing with, and I hope some of our great GRIT community will be able to lend a helping hand, in whatever way they can.

In September, heavy rains combined with already saturated ground created serious flooding in several Georgia counties, and inundated parts of urban Atlanta. Unlike its anemic response immediately after Katrina, this time the Federal Emergency Management Agency appears to be responding quickly to give residents relief to help get their lives back on track. The catch is, FEMA doesn’t cover agricultural operations. Small farmers have been referred to state agencies, but those agencies only provide loans and these farms operate on such slender margins, a loan would sink them as surely as the flood.

By most measures, this group of farmers is doing things right. They are mostly families, growing as organically as possible, selling to local markets and farming in a way that respects the environment and provides nutritious food to their communities. Some operate as Community Supported Agriculture, offering subscriptions to their farms. They belong to their communities, their communities belong to them.

If these were larger agricultural endeavors, they might be able to bear the weight of a loan while they get reestablished. Small farms operate much closer to the bone and these floods have cut very deeply into their ability to survive. Their livestock drowned, their topsoil washed away, their fall crops were destroyed. That’s about as dire as it gets.

Their best hope right now is the fundraising being done by groups such as Slow Food Atlanta. You can read more about their efforts here: http://www.slowfoodatlanta.org/slow_food_atl_news.html

I’m sending a check today and will ask friends involved in local food groups in my area to see what we can do to help out. I hope some of you can do the same – and let us know if you can think of other ways to assist.

And once the crisis has passed, we all need to let our public officials that some provision needs to be made so public relief efforts include the small farmers who raise our food and steward our land.

Funds sent to “Georgia Flooded Farms Relief Fund” will be given directly to local farmers. Here’s the address:

Georgia Flooded Farms Relief Fund
P.O. Box 2641
Smyrna, GA 30081