The Slow Cook hanging his bean trellis

There was a Washington Post photographer in the studio during my recent appearance on the Kojo Nnamdi show to illustrate a piece in today’s food section about Kojo’s James Beard Award-winning Wednesday food segment.

I had already planned to bring some of my pickles along for Kojo to sample. But when I heard a photographer would be on hand, I thought I’d add a little catering flourish–plates of zucchini carpaccio and an hors d’oeuvres constructed of zucchini slices topped with goat cheese and our favorite green tomato chutney.

The result is captured in a slide show attached to today’s story by Tim Carman (himself nominated for a Beard award for the second year running.) You can read the story here, and view the slides here.

If you have a tree killer edition of the Post, look at the bottom of the front page. There’s a picture of Kojo holding a jar of my pickles.

Can I just say, Kojo loved my version of sweet pickled zucchini that was named “Best D.C. Grown Food Product” at last year’s first-ever D.C. State Fair.

Shredding leaves for compost

For 4,000 years prior to the advent of factory-made fertilizers, the Chinese used every bit of organic matter they could lay their hands on–including their own excrement–to return to the soil the nitrogen and other nutrients their vegetable crops removed. It was only through meticulous attention to the cycle of terrestrial rot upon which new life depends that Asian cultures managed to cultivate the same land intensively for centuries, and thereby sustain themselves.

Americans have never been quite so industrious. In colonial days, raising livestock and growing vegetables went hand-in-hand–but not always. Farmers who applied manure and cover crops to maintain fertility were called “improvers.” Other farmers, citing a shortage of labor for soil husbandry, simply tilled their land until the soil was exhausted of nutrients. They then moved to greener pastures, something the western frontier seemed to offer in infinite abundance.

Today the frontier is long gone and modern “improvers”–otherwise known as organic gardeners–are left to ponder where to get the materials they need to maintain soil fertility. I should know. I go to great lengths to make the compost I use to feed my hungry kitchen garden here in the District of Columbia: snatching leaves my neighbors put at the curb in the fall; begging grass clippings from landscaping crews; hauling bags of coffee grounds from Starbucks; shoveling buckets of horse manure from a riding stables; religiously collecting our own kitchen scraps. Yet, it never seems to be enough.

My guess is that most urban and suburban gardeners operate at a soil deficit, meaning they don’t generate enough compost or manure of their own to adequately fertilize their soil. Unlike the Chinese, our culture treats the organic matter we should be putting back into the soil as waste material, shipping it off to landfills or flushing it down the toilet. Thus, while we disdain industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides, organic gardeners remain largely dependent on fossil-fueled modern commerce to provide the soil amendments our crops require, be it compost, horse manure or fish emulsion. What’s more, there is no agreement on specific practices when it comes to deciding what amendments–or cover crops–to use and how much.

I recently asked readers of The Slow Cook, as well as garden blogger friends and subscribers to the D.C. Urban Gardeners listserv, how they approach the question of maintaining soil fertility. Specifically, what do you use to improve your soil, and how much? As you can see from their responses, there is a wide diversity of approaches. In fact, organic gardening remains a kind of home-grown alchemy for which there seem to be as many different formulae for success as there are practitioners.

Among the most precise responses was this one from Joshua Wenz, who operates a professional vegetable gardening service. He also is a partner in the Neighborhood Farm Initiative, which grows produce for sale on a plot near Ft. Totten NE and teaches neophytes how to garden.

“To replenish soil fertility in my gardens and my clients’ gardens,” Joshua wrote, “I use:

“Compost (an inch or so a year)

“Nitrogen (N): Alfalfa meal, sometimes (but rarely) chicken manure. Twelve pounds, or about 36 cups per 100 sq feet per year. Easy to find on-line, but I haven’t found it locally, which is where the chicken manure comes in handy

“Phosphorous (P): Colloidal Phosphate. FEDCO sells “Tennessee Brown” which is essentially gleaned from phosphate mining tailings. Purportedly has less heavy metals, and of course is recycled. Hard rock phosphate is all I’ve found locally. Colloidal phosphate seems to be preferred by organic growers to hard rock phosphate, but I can’t seem to find anything that outright shows one is more sustainable or environmentally friendly than the other.  Amount added depends on soil analysis and I only add every three years.

“Potassium (K): Greensand, or sometimes wood ash if pH is low enough. Available locally. Amount added depends on soil analysis, and also once every three years.

“For trace nutrients, kelp meal, azomite, other rock dust would probably work. I do that every three years as well.”

On the subject of cover-cropping, or planting sacrificial crops that act as fertilizer, Joshua had this to say:

“Cover cropping is a bear. It requires following a strict schedule on when to mow
and till. You won’t be able to work it in by hand. I have tried vetch/cowpea/oats
mixes, ryegrass, clover in raised garden beds with loose fluffy soil and it was
too tough to cut and work into the soil without a tiller. I now just pull it up
and use it as a mulch or toss into the compost.

“Buckwheat’s easier, but done in six to eight weeks, and make sure to mow or till when
you don’t want it to reseed anymore.”

D.C. gardener Patrick Polischuk, who maintains four garden beds, each six feet long and two to three feet wide, offered this:

“Compost. How much? As much as I can. Two to three inches at planting and if I have enough, another surface application part-way through a crop’s season…I make the compost in two big bins out of yard scraps, kitchen scraps, and most of my block’s fall leaves.”

Christa Carignan, who gardens behind her home in Rockville, Maryland, said this:

“I use homemade compost made from leaves and kitchen scraps, but unfortunately I never have quite enough to feed all five of my veggie beds sufficiently each spring/fall. I have two compost bins (one cubic yard each) and I am lucky if I get enough mature compost to put about one inch on all the beds once each year. Not enough.

“Last year I got a truckload of mushroom compost from Pennsylvania (only $25 for a pickup truck full + the kindness of family members to deliver it here). I added about three to four inches of mushroom compost last spring and it really gave my garden a good boost. I will do the same again this year.”

Sylvie Rowand, who gardens in Rappahannock County, Virginia, had this to say:

“Compost, compost and more compost.

“I compost everything I can get my hands on. You could say I grow grass so I can make compost. When I used to live in the city, I would get several truckloads of shredded leaves from the city every winter, the grass clippings of neighbors who did not spray their lawn, coffee grounds from the office, and we’d take regular trips to Rock Creek stables (for manure).

“Today, I have grass fields, lots of garden debris, horse manure, straw, leaves – and as I say, whatever I can get my hand on. My best beds have four to six inches of compost on top. Actually my best beds used to be my compost piles. I have huge compost piles, and they change locations every year. When one is done, I just spread it a little and plant straight in. Now that the garden is reaching its physical limits – at least for a few years – I can focus on making compost to retop all the beds.”

El, who gardens in Michigan, described her solution:

“Moving to the country AND getting animals.  At first, I was gathering our pine needles until I realized there was poison ivy growing nearby, then I gathered bagged leaves from curbsides in town, then I asked a neighbor who had horses (and they gladly dumped pickup truck loads for me) and THEN we got the bagger for the lawn tractor.  Then, we got enough animals to make a difference. 

“Sigh. It’s all a process, and I am still of the belief that one can never have enough compost or mulch…temporary surpluses, maybe, but not enough.

“I’m testing that theory though with the goats’ output.  Pee is much more highly activating than dried chicken poop.  But!  It takes me almost two hours to haul out the goat shed, and that’s about 30 to 40 wheelbarrowloads of (mostly) straw.  And:  I do this monthly.  Yikes!

“I have raised beds into which I regularly add about a foot or more of compost and mulch every year.  (Compost:  mostly used chicken/goat straw bedding, kitchen/garden scraps, and–it’s true–all unusable guts/feathers/feet/heads of the poultry.  Mulch:  grass/leaf clippings the garden tractor picks up.)

“Other (more minor) practices:  I plant potatoes, tomatoes/peppers, squash seeds and onion-y things directly into compost in their holes, hills or trenches.  Everything else doesn’t need it nearly as much; in fact, root crops (carrots, etc.) and the cole family tend to hate super-nitrogenated soils of the composted variety so they don’t get anything.  And the squash is the only plant I baby with compost tea.”

Reader Luci Wilson offered this:

“Well, I’m kind of spoiled because I also keep a small flock of chickens and a handful of dairy goats, so I sheet mulch the straw bedding mixed with poop and ammonia from the goat pen on top of my (vegetable) beds each fall.  That way in spring it’s already partially composted, the winter rains have worked the nutrients into the soil and everything is already mulched.  I just have to lay in the drip lines and drop my plants and seeds into the planting holes.

My sauerkraut croc makes a star appearance

My, how the Rooting D.C. confab has grown. Even in it’s very first year, local gardeners overran the facilities and the conclave was moved to the refurbished Carnegie Library, site of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. Now in its third year, however, even these new digs look to be cramped. From what I saw, there had to be more than the 350 billed as capacity for the event. What’s next? The convention center?

Congratulations to Bea Trickett and Katie Rehwaldt, who’ve done an incredible job turning this event into a high point for urban food gardening in the nation’s capitol. Interest in growing food just keeps, well, growing. And growing. I was there to lead a one-hour discussion on “wild fermentation.”

I can’t think of anything I enjoy doing more than watching my sauerkraut ferment. It gives me a great feeling of self-sufficiency.  Funny how the very best foods are also the simplest. Shred some cabbage, add salt and nature takes over. As I explained to a room full of would-be fermenters, the “wild” part simply refers to the fact that the bacteria needed to ferment things like sauerkraut and kimchi are already everywhere in the environment. You don’t need to purchase any fancy inoculants.

But here are a couple of tips. When buying cabbage for sauerkraut, make sure it is heavy for its size. That means it is fresh and contains enough water to make the brine required for the fermentation process. After you salt the cabbage–using a ratio of three tablespoons salt for every five pounds of cabbage–the cabbage must remain completely submerged in the brine for a period of weeks. You just have to press the cabbage down, then hold it down with some type of weight. (One woman said her grandmother has always used garbage bags filled with water for this purpose.)

As for the salt, I prefer pickling salt. But sea salt also works, Just make sure the salt you use does not contain iodine or chemical additives, as these tend to kill the bacteria.

People want to know all the different vegetables that can be fermented, and to that I say “lots.” But I’m not big on experimenting. I like my sauerkraut plain and simple: I don’t add carrots or Brussels sprouts or anything else. One well-kept secret in the world of wild fermentation is German sauerrueben, or fermented turnips. These are grated and then salted exactly like sauerkraut, but they have a more robust, nutty flavor. They also keep forever. I still have a container in my fridge that I made three years ago. I like to add it to our choucroute.

In fact, you can ferment many different vegetables, including beans, beets, cabbage, cauliflower, celery cucumbers, kohlrabi, leeks, onions, peppers, rutabaga, tomatoes, turnips. One of the best resources is the classic Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz. Katz covers everything from sauerkraut and kimchi to miso, ginger beer and fermented porridge. If you really want to pursue kimchi, there are any number of books on the market devoted to that subject.

Eggs from backyard chickens are a great source of inexpensive protein

Washington Post garden columnist Adrian Higgins today lends his voice to the growing movement behind backyard chickens in the nation’s capitol with a front-page spread in the paper’s Home section.

Higgins recounts the story of Caryn Ernst and how D.C. police and animal control agents swooped down on her family’s Capitol Hill home in June when they discovered that Ernst and her daughters were raising some chickens in their back yard as part of an elementary school science project. After the chickens were taken away, Ernst started digging into D.C. law and discovered that it is nearly impossible to raise backyard chickens in the District of Columbia. Animal control regulations require that chickens be kept at least 50 feet from the nearest residence.

Ernst took her concerns to local Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), who, with Ernst’s assistance, drafted a new law that would ease restrictions on keeping chickens. That bill is now in the hands of Councilmember David Catania (I-At Large), pending a hearing before the Council’s Committee on Health, which Catania chairs.

In the meantime, Ernst and fellow chicken enthusiast Amanda Cundiff have started a petition drive in support of backyard chickens at the DC Food for All blog, a collaborative effort of local food access advocates. Ernst and Cundiff have presented Catania with 130 signatures of D.C. resients in favor of a new chicken law.

In the latest development, Catania’s staff has suggested that the issue could be resolved by Animal Control officials, without the need for a new law. Ernst and Cundiff say they now plan to present their petition to Animal Control.

The bill written by Tommy Wells would permit keeping hens for laying eggs, not meat, and it would prohibit roosters, which make too much noise. Still. Wells’ bill would be far more restrictive than chicken legislation in other jurisdictions–including city’s such as New York–because it would require that anyone wishing to keep hens obtain written permission from 80 percent of neighbors living within 100 feet.

Backyard chickens have been embraced by a surging local food movement as a boon to those who want to eat more healthfully, more sustainably and more cheaply. If that applies to you, by all means sign the petition.

And don’t miss edible gardening columnist Barbara Damrosch’s sidebar on the benefits of raising chickens at home–even in the city.

There goes the neighborhood?

Caryn Ernst had not seen herself as a chicken crusader when she hatched some eggs for her daughters’ elementary school project. But after D.C. Animal Control swooped in and snatched the six-week-old chicks out of her Capitol Hill back yard, Ernst found a new mission She teamed up with her local city council member and drafted a new law that would liberalize chicken ownership in the nation’s capitol.

Could this be the start of a movement?

Good food advocates might be surprised to learn that owning chickens was not, strictly speaking, illegal in the District of Columbia. You just never heard about them because the law was so stringent, legal ownership was practically impossible. Chickens could not be kept within 50 feet of any “habitable residence.” If you wanted chickens, you had to apply for a permit. But even the agency charged with issuing the permits had no clue.

As Ernst explains, this is a far cry from days not too long ago when growing food–and, yes even raising chickens–was not at all uncommon in the city. Many jurisdictions drifted away from the grow-your-own ethic, but now people fed up with industrial food are pushing back. Why shouldn’t chickens be legal? As long as they’re not roosters, keeping neighbors up half the night, and as long as you maintain a clean hen house, there’s no reason a few chickens should disturb anyone. And the protein they produce in the form of eggs is one of the best to be found anywhere.

The new law, introduced by Council Member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) would hardly open the floodgates. It would require that anyone wanting to raise chickens in the city obtain written consent from 80 percent of neighbors within 100 feet. That’s quite a bit more restrictive than other jurisdictions. Even New York City has a more liberal chicken policy. Is it any surprise many New Yorkers are raising their own chickens?

According to Ernst, at least 30 cities have recently passed new laws permitting backyard chickens. The measure she drafted with Wells is now pending before the Council’s health committee. What will be most interesting to see is whether the chairman of that committee, David A. Catania (I-At Large), will be in any hurry to bring the measure up for a public hearing. Catania has been embroiled in efforts to legalize gay marriage in the District. That measure just passed the Council and is certain to stir up a stormy debate in Congress. Will Catania have a moment to spare for backyard chickens?

You can read all about it in Caryn Ernst’s post on the DC Food for All blog, which has started a campaign to pass new chicken legislation and offers chicken enthusiasts a petition to sign. We encourage everyone who cares about sustainable food and self reliance to get behind a new chicken law, hopefully without the onerous neighbor approval provision. We will be following this closely.

Will Allen has a vision for urban agriculture

Liz Falk, founder of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious example of urban agriculture, Common Good City Farm, recently flew off to Milwaukee to spend time with farmer/genius Will Allen and his mind-boggling chain of farm operations in Milwaukee called Growing Power. Last night Liz gave a slideshow talk on the experience that was worth every penny of my $2 donation to the cause.

Pictures of Allen’s growing methods are breathtaking. Imagine renegade farmer Joel Salatin’s holistic, earth-friendly approach applied to an urban setting. Greenhouses are crammed floor-to-ceiling with all manner of vegetable beds, seed trays, growing pots. Trenches are dug down the middle for fish ponds; the water circulates up through several levels to feed watercress. Workers scour the city for food waste and beer mash, turning it into tons of compost that then feeds endless troughs of worms to make fertilizer. A chicken coop consists of  recycled plastic milk crates as nesting sites. The chickens, along with active compost piles, are strategically placed inside greenhouses to provide heat.

As Liz describes it, Growing Power functions more like an ant farm, with staff and volunteers swarming over problems, depending less on actual organization than on frequent doses of inspiration from Will Allen.

Planted in a food dessert, next door to Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, Growing Power now feeds some 10,000 people and Allen has become a rock star in the new food movement. Will Allen’s vision is messy and innovative and wonderful. But what impresses me most is that even after 16 years of operation, and a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” award, Growing Power does not support itself from what it produces. It still relies on grants and earnings from training outsiders and other income sources not directly related to selling its vegetables (even with the watercress fetching $12 a pound).

Is Growing Power the proper model for a successful urban farm? Or is it simply an incubator for ideas about how we might farm in the city if we could ever find a way to make that idea an actual possibility?

Following Liz’s talk, discussion about worm composting techniques gave way to the Big Question: We have the know-how. We have the land. Why don’t we have urban farms that can make fresh, nutritious food available to everyone at prices they can afford? The answer, of course, is that current urban agriculture efforts are still running on grants and volunteers, just like Growing Power. They don’t really compete with our conventional food system because the price of conventional food has never factored in the true costs of producing it: overuse of water and fossil fuels, extravagant carbon emissions, destruction of soil, toxic pollution of air and water. It thrives on huge subsidies of tax dollars, and a license to destroy the planet.

We’ve allowed our free-market method of producing food to spin out of control. For a good idea of how we’ve permitted faceless corporations to consolidate and wreck  local food system, read this piece by Grist food editor Tom Philpott in Newsweek. He sums up the dilemma neatly. Our current food system, like much of our consumer economy, is unsustainble precisely because it is so destructive, because it has never been priced according to the damage it does.

Is there a day of reckoning coming? Dwindling resources. Overpopulation. Global heating. Overwhelming government debt. Nobel economist Milton Friedman liked to say that no true change occurs without a crisis. Perhaps visionaries like Will Allen and Liz Falk are only a few years ahead of their times.

Plans for Justice Park Community Garden

The last time I sat in on a planning meeting for our neighborhood’s new community garden I was nearly run out of the room for suggesting it be built along the lines of a CSA farm, rather than simply providing plots to individuals. I reasoned that lots more food could be grown on a small farm under single management, but gardeners want their individual plots.

The plans for this 1/4-acre garden have come a long way since then. Recently Mayor Adrian Fenty participated in a much ballyhooed ground-breaking. Since our last meeting, a working group of gardeners has put up a site on Facebook, registered a Twitter account and even printed business cards, along with the Yahoo! listerv we’ve been using to announce meetings.

Last night, revised architectural drawings were revealed to a meeting of about 20 prospective plot holders and representatives from the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, which is responsible for the land.

In all, the plans provide for 40 individual plots, each about 50 square feet in size. That’s a pretty good size for a community garden plot. But the parcel also has room for a public area with room to stroll, seating and even tables. The discussion now centers on a proposed storage shed that some members would rather not look at, or think is too big. But the more I look at the plans, the more I see a place for a community composting facility, or even a greenhouse.

One of the most frequent questions I get from neighbors is where can they compost their kitchen scraps if the don’t have a compost heap of their own. The District of Columbia does not have a municipal composting program (it needs one), and people want to be more environmentally responsible and not send their food wastes to the landfill, where it just turns into methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Last year, a group proposed building such a composting facility at another community garden but could not get the grant funding it needed to get the project off the ground. With the city funding our new community garden, this is the perfect time to take up the idea of a small neighborhood composting facility, perhaps an indoor worm operation that could be used as a model for the whole city, as well as providing valuable worm castings for the garden plots.

Better yet, if not a storage shed, what about a greenhouse? Even if it were just a large hoop house, it could not only house a worm composting operation, it would provide an invaluable site for gardeners to start their seedlings in spring and extend the growing season spring and fall.

And dare I mention chickens? Can you picture a community garden with chickens, just a mile from the White House? Kids would be lined up around the block to get a look. And the gardeners would have fresh eggs every day.

Well, I’m not sure they’d go for the chickens. But there are all sorts of tantalizing possibilities for making this site a valuable food resource. It’s a blank slate–a completely vacant lot–with tons of room around the perimeter for fruit and nut trees. A landscape architect has been working with the group, and apparently a desire for shade trees has been expressed. But why not trees that feed people? Walnut, hazelnut, chestnut: with very little care, these not only provide shade and valuable carbon sequestration, but shed edible nuts year after year. Cherry, plum, apple, peach, pear, fig thrive in the city. Paw paw has the added virtue of being native to the area.

The group has also requested hedging. But why not berries for hedges? Raspberries, blueberries, black berries, currants: they are all worthy landscape plants, as well as providing a bounty of nutritious food at different times of the year. Fruit and nut trees, berries, perennial vining plants such as grapes or kiwi–all should be features in any modern, sustainable community gardening scheme, to my mind.

On its Facebook page, the Justice Park Community Garden lists the Capitol Area Food Bank as a partner. In fact, 10 percent of the garden–or four plots–are to be set aside for a local food bank. But it was disappointing at last night’s meeting to see only white faces representing an area of the city that is heavily populated with blacks and Hispanics. This garden is one of the most urban of any in the city. It is surrounded  by apartment buildings. In fact, the garden site abuts a low-income housing complex.

At one point early in the planning process it was suggested that an effort should be made to go door-to-door, with interpreters if necessary, to encourage people who might benefit most from growing their own food to participate. I wonder if a more valiant outreach effort should not be made. We were told that anyone belonging to the Yahoo! listserv automaticallyqualifies for a garden plot. But as one would-be plot holder noted, many of our neighbors don’t even have computers.

The question sits there waiting to be answered: how do you get the entire community involved?

A great way to start a blog

People were spilling out of the Big Bear Cafe onto the sidewalks at 1st and R streets NW last night. You might have thought it was just another wild party night in the nation’s capitol. But the drinks were all donated, the long line of food on the bar was made from ingredients gleaned earlier in the day from local farmers markets and a nearby urban farm. So what were we celebrating?

The occasion is a new blog in town–DC Food for All–that aims to shine a light on our own food movement here in the District of Columbia, and especially all those people working to make wholesome, nutritious food available to everyone who needs it. The idea is the product of several food groups that have banded together under the name Healthy Affordable  Food for All, but I think you have to give the lion’s share of credit for pulling this project together to Greg Bloom and Joni Podschun at Bread for the City.

Bread for the City is an amazing organization, providing not only food but badly needed medical, social and housing services all over town as well as crucial leadership on policy issues that affect the poor and underserved. Lately I’ve written about the tons of food they bring to the city by organizing volunteers to glean produce from local farms.

Over the summer, Greg approached me about helping with the new blog. It had always been my ambition to create a source for news about the food gardening activities in the District. So much good work is being done that flies under the radar. I was never able to make that blog work. But my job with DC Food for All offers the same kind of opportunity: I’ll be acting as editor for bloggers of all kinds involved in growing food in the city, from community gardeners with individual plots to teachers heading school gardens to our thriving urban farms.

Mine is just one segment of the blog. There will also be plenty of news and analysis on issues of food access and nutrition, all of it focused on what’s happening right here in our own city. Do you know of another city with a blog like that? I can’t think of one.

The blog is still in its formative stages Expect it to be up and running soon. And if you have ambitions to blog about food in D.C., do give us a ring.

The challenge yesterday was to drop by the Bread for the City offices around 1 p.m. and collect gleaned ingredients, then turn them into something fabulous to eat by 5:30. Originally the gleaning was going to be for broccoli on a farm outside the city. But because of rain, that trip was cancelled and we got more of a grab-bag of ingredients. I had decided to make a broccoli frittata. What I got was a bag of broccoli and kohlrabi.

Ever heard of a kohlrabi frittata?

Well, kohlrabi just happens to be one of our favorite vegetables, highly underrated. These were the biggest kohlrabi I’d ever seen. After peeling them and removing the tough parts, I cut them into large dice and cooked them very simply in salted water. Same with the broccoli florets. From there, it was simply a matter of making frittatas as usual, each with a dozen eggs in a non-stick skillet, some kohlrabi and broccoli, sauteed red onion, then topped with pieces of goat cheese before going under the broiler.

While we’re donating food, though, why not just clean out the pantry? Since we stopped eating starchy foods, we have hardly any use for all the bulk grains and legumes we store in glass jars. Thus was born an impromptuy multi-grain and legume salad with fresh greens from the garden. The recipe for this could hardly be less precise. I simply cooked what we had: quinoa, millet, wheat berries, wild rice, then lentils, red beans, adzuki beans, black-eyed peas. I tossed everything together in a bus tub with mizuna leaves and baby red mustard greens from the garden, some diced red onion, then seasoned with olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt and pepper.

The result was at least 20 pounds of salad. Would you believe every last grain was devoured before the night was through?

Meanwhile, my wife, the baker, was assembling two large ceramic ovals of beautiful apple crisp. It came hot out of the oven just in time to be driven down to Big Bear Cafe for the buffet, where it joined all sorts of dishes from other contributors, including stir fry from the chef at Thai X-Ing down the street.

It was a great start for a worthy project.

Kitchen scraps make great compost

Making compost is a second occupaton for The Slow Cook. Since we garden organically, without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, our source of fertility consists of what’s in the ground already and what we add to it in the form of compost. Being in the city, about a mile from Michelle Obama’s White House garden here in the District of Columbia, making enough compost to satisfy our nine rather large vegetable beds can be a challenge.

We are, in effect, compost foragers. I am always looking for sources of nitrogen–what we composters refer to as the “green” side of the compost equation–as well as carbon, or what we often call ”browns.” Greens can be anything from grass clippings to coffee grounds. (You don’t normally think of coffee grounds as “green,” I know. But they are a good source of nitrogen.) Browns are more abundant. They are everywhere around us in different forms, from newspaper to cardboard, straw to fall leaves.

The trouble is, equal amounts of greens and browns are not always available at the same time of year. We collect barrels of leaves in the fall. But they are quickly used up when we make our initial compost pile in the spring. That’s why I’ve taken to shredding bales of straw as a continuous source of carbon. I used to collect plenty of grass clippings from our own lawn–or what’s left of it between the garden beds. But that ended when I switched from an electric mower to a manual push mower. Sometimes I get clippings from local landscaping crews. But for a more reliable source, I’ve taken to scavaging coffee grounds from the local Starbucks (I bring home huge 40-pound bags at a time) and filling buckets with horse manure from riding stables.

And of course we are always composting our kitchen scraps. We produce a steady supply of vegetable peels and apple cores and egg shells in our kitchen and these get buried deep inside the compost pile. In the presence of coffee grounds and horse manure, they quickly break down into a luscious black soil amendment that makes our plants very happy.

We also accept donations of kitchen scraps from neighbors. More and more people are becoming aware of the benefits of compost and of the need to reduce the amount of organic material we send to the landfill. Last time I looked, about a third of the material sent to the landfill consisted of food waste. In an anaerobic garbage environment, that organic material is likely to turn into methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas. We’d much rather turn it back into garden soil.

But not everyone has the interest or the ability to compost.  Over the years, I’ve had many people from all over the city ask me where they can take their kitchen waste to be composted. Unfortunately, unlike places such as San Francisco, we don’t have a municipal composting program here in the District of Columbia. At one point, a group proposed building a small-scale, neigborhood  facility near a community garden so that people in the area could start composting. But they were unable to obtain the grant funds they needed to get started. That’s a shame. Short of implimenting compost collection citywide, the D.C. government could start community composting operations at recreation centers. Think how that might turn thousands of urbanites into composters.

Meanwhile, I recently learned that Common Good City Farm (formerly the 7th Street Garden) will begin next year accepting your kitchen scraps for composting at their site in the Ledroit Park neighborhood. Liz Falk, the garden’s founder and director, told me she had been getting the same questions from people about where they could take their food wastes. Since Common Good City Farm also relies on compost to grow its fruits and vegetables, and because it is a fairly large operation, a logical step was to start accepting donations of organic material.

“People don’t want to throw their food scraps away and realize it’s a valuable resource.  But they either cannot or do not want to compost it themsevles,” Liz said. “Some live in apartments, some don’t want to “deal with it” and others have other reasons of course.  For us, we realized soil is our most limited resource and to buy it seems crazy–which is what we have had to do to set up the farm to the point it is at now.  But if we have bins large enough to accept people’s food and break it down then we can save ourselves money, provide a service the community wants, provide educational opportunities to everybody who comes to the farm, and maybe even set an example for other city neighborhoods, community gardens and the city.”

Liz said that precise details of the program have yet to be finalized. “I don’t know how it will work quite yet,” she said. “Of course, we have to maintain that great green/brown balance in the bins so when people bring food to compost they have to bring paper or some other brown with it, so we always have inputs of both.  I’ll need to train my staff on composting a bit more than they are. Some know it well and some less well.  We’ll have nice educational signage at the bins so it’s easy to follow.”

So if you are one of those people who’s been looking for a place to take your kitchen scraps, watch this space. Better yet, watch the space at Common Good City Farm. You can learn more about the farm and find contact information from their website. They also have tons of great volunteer and garden educational opportunities.

Cintia Cabib filming at the Washington Youth Garden

More than 120 people jammed Georgetown’s Letelier Theater last night for cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and a film screening to benefit the Neighborhood Farm Initiative, the novel urban agriculture program started by Bea Trickett and Joshua Wenz designed to teach people how to grow food.

The event was brilliantly organized, with help from Katie Rehwaldt of Rooting D.C. and the American the Beautiful Fund, which acts as fiscal sponsor for the farm initiative. Volunteers (more than 20 of them) were pouring local wines and home-brewed beers and dishing up a buffet of salads, cheeses and canapes groaning with fresh vegetables from local farms.

Looking at so many young, eager faces, it’s clear there is gathering interest and momentum behind the local food movement here in the District of Columbia. Bea Trickett announced that the intiative has received federal grant funds through the University of the District of Columbia to develop outreach programs aimed at teaching food gardening to people across the city. Now that’s a jolt of encouragement, to hear that federal funding for urban agriculture has actually reached our precincts. (Latest news: the USDA’s Kathleen Merrigan has circulated a memo describing available federal funding for school gardens, urban food programs and the like. Plus, President Obama has suggested starting a farmers market outside the White House.)

The draw for last night’s event was a screening of Cintia Cabib’s documentary in progress: “A Community of Gardeners.” It’s a love note to community gardeners everywhere, but especially here in the District of Columbia. What a delight to see so many of our local gardens and the people who make them happen on the screen. There are some hilarious moments, as when a young woman explains why she grows such huge amounts of lettuce in her community garden plot. It’s to feed her pet rabbit. Another woman who travels frequently for her job laments the notices she receives for weeds in her plot, but rejoices when a couple who are waiting for a plot of their own volunteer to do the weeding for her. Now she has “mixed emotions” about the couple eventually getting a plot of their own.

We are anxious for Cintia’s film to be available to the broader public. Perhaps on a public television station near you? Meanwhile, send all the encouragement you can to the Neighborhood Farm Initiative. Or perhaps you’d like to volunteer? I’m sure they’d find some work for you in the garden.

For more great stories about how we are taking back our food system, be sure to check out Fight Back Fridays.