End Of Summer

Saturday saw the last regular Midtown Farmers’ market. Barbara was at the East Side Co-op sampling, and I backed Jason up at the market. People were eager to stock up -- nuts for the winter -- and we ran out of Smokies, and made big dents in the other flavors. Sunday Barbara and Jason baked 180 pounds, a record amount.

This was also the last market for Chase Brook Farm, who are packing up and going back east. It gripes my guts that somebody who is trying to do right by the environment and create wealth goes out of business, while idiots who farm from their desks, and foul our nest can ride out an economic storm.

I got a letter from my cousin. Our grandmother had given her a cemetery plot in Chicago as a wedding present -- lets say -- thirty-five years ago. Apparently possession of the title wasn't good enough for the archdiocese, and Marty needed me to go to a notary and sign something that said I didn't care. I don't, and I toddled over to the bank for a little one-man signing ceremony. Marty's letter was formal enough that I was a little put off, and I have an idea that she didn't write it. I'd been doing some design exercises in my sketch book, and worked a note into one page's composition: "I'd forgotten that Grandmother had given you a cemetery plot as a wedding gift. That's a premise for a sitcom episode. I don't think I could have kept a straight face. Still, it's kind of beautiful when I think of it. Use it in good health."

Abdullah Abdullah pulled out of the race for the Afghan presidency Sunday, assuring current president Ahmed Karzai’s re-election.

Abdullah is an MD, has been the Afghan Foreign Minister, and was active in resisting Soviet occupation as well as the Taliban. He accuses Karzai of rigging next Saturdays election, and the August 20 preliminary election was tainted with bribery, armed coercion, and ballot stuffing. Even so, Abdullah’s withdrawal seems convenient, and resonates with electoral fraud in next-door Iran, which probably didn’t affect that election’s results, but did galvanize opposition to the sitting government.

Hamid Karzai is Afghanistan’s twelfth president. Like Abdullah, he was active in resitance to the Soviets. He supported the Taliban, then broke with them. He has been president since 2002, and chaired the governing committee between Operation Enduring Freedom’s evicting the Taliban until then. he has a younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, with reputed ties to narcotics smuggling. Hamid refused an offer from the US in 2004 to use herbicides to eradicate the poppy crop because of its importance to Afghanistan’s economy.

I don’t care which of these characters is Afghanimanian president, but I do recognize a historical soap opera when I see one. It makes me think of the coup and assasination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Diem had reisted the Japanese occupation, and held colonial positions between the end of WWII and French departure in 1954. In 1955 he prevailed in establishing a republican government in South Vietnam, with himself as president. He was authoritarian, even repressive, with self-immolating Buddhist monks representing resitance to his regime. In 1963 Vientnamese generals removed him from office and executed him.

Which isn’t to say that Karzai is a tyrant, or predict that he will end up shot in the back of a military van. It’s more to point out a parallel instability. Last week the Onion’s headline read, “U. S. Continues Quagmire Building Effort in Afghanistan.” I voted for Barack Obama hoping for an FDR. I think I’m getting an LBJ.

Barbara and I dropped in on Sam's and Marissa's Halloween party Saturday night, and left early so as not to cramp anybody's style. We got to sample the mad Scientist India Pale Ale, and the older Steam Punk Beer. Good stuff.

Tomorrow’s election day. It’s ranked-choice voting’s trial run. We vote for our first, second, and third choices for city office. There’s a mayoral race, as well as City Council, Board of Estimate and Taxation, and Park Board Races, and a proposition to fold the Board of Estimate and Taxation into the City Council.

For mayor (in order): Kolstad, Rybak, Lombard.

For Ninth Ward Council Member (in order): Bicking, Schiff, and no third choice.

For At-Large Park Board Commissioner (in no particular order): Nordyke, Anderson, Fine.

For District 3 Park Board Commissioner: Vreeland.

For Board of Estimate and Taxation (in order): Becker, Townsend, Wheeler.

Should the City Council take over the board of Estimate and Taxation duties? No.

Transition Town Weekend

I read a short piece in the Corcoran Neighborhood News: “Mutual Self-Reliance Group Begins.” There was a subhead about being handy and wanting to share my skills. My skills are such a grab bag of personal fads that I didn’t read the piece first time through. Who cares if you can juggle four balls or double-clutch a bus. Barbara asked me if I read it, and I went, “Huh?” Then she told me I probably should.

The magic words were “transition town stuff.” Transition towns were an idea cooked up in Ireland for adapting to a world with expensive fuel and unpredictable climate. It came out of the permaculture movement, and the idea is to reduce oil use and implement strategies for local self reliance.

The get-together was at the Midtown Farmers’ Market Saturday. Midtown won fourth place in the Care2/Local Harvest “Love Your Farmers’ Market” contest, and claimed a thousand dollars.

It was a cool, sunny day. The sun felt good, but I drank too much coffee keeping warm. There may have been as many as fifteen people there, but several of them just checked in and moved on. Kim and Tom from across the street were there, as was Anne from down the alley. The core group (the ones who sat down and stayed) were about ten. Joe Hesla, who put the note in the paper facilitated, and we went around the circle quickly three times, coming up with a list of interesting projects.

We thought of organizing the following:

Canning parties, probably at a church kitchen;

Neighborhood weatherization projects (we insulated our walls in the early nineties, but I’d be interested in seeing an infrared photo);

Get togethers with musical instruments;

Tool sharing (Later I thought of a neighborhood permaculture library);

Raingarden building;

Outreach to minorities (Everybody was white and grown up, with mean and median ages both around forty-five, but this is probably a noblesse oblige kind of enterprise);

A Facebook page.

We will be meeting again in pot luck, at the quarterly Corcoran Neighborhood meeting on November 9.

I staffed Barsy’s booth for a while, giving Jason a bathroom-and-cigarette break. He said he felt sheepish taking off for a smoke because so many people who shop at farmers’ markets are non-smokers. When he got back, I took the train up to Franklin and hoofed it the mile or so to the Seward Co-op for a mushroom-cultivating class.

The Seward moved last winter, to a remodeled former supermarket. They have meeting rooms upstairs, with kitchens and big flat-screen AV systems.

The presenters, Ron Spinoza and Ty Allchin ran through a brief history of mushroom cultivation -- which has a recent history that reminded me of what Sam’s told me about home brewing -- and a survey of commonly eaten edible and medicinal mushrooms. This included an injunction not to grow psilcybe cubensis because it’s illegal. Then we got down to business: how to grow oyster mushrooms on toilet paper, the entry-level mushroom project. I left with a healthy lid of oyster-inoculated grain, and a petri dish with an oyster-mushroom culture. Sunday, I cleared a set of plastic shelves and wiped them down with chlorine bleach. Now there are two plastic bags there, each containing a soggy roll of toilet paper and spawn, with more to come.

Boom And Bust At The Farmers' Market

Saturday before Labor Day was busy at the Midtown Farmer’s Market. This was in spite of record-setting attendance at the State Fair, nine miles away (four as the crow flies). We talked with people who had never shopped at the Market before, and Barsy’s sales were up more than a third.

Shopping neighborhood farmer’s markets is the way to go. The produce is local, the atmosphere is great, and the price is right. Tom of MarthaandTom.com comparison shopped Midtown, The Wedge -- a big local co-op, and Rainbow -- an upper-midwest grocery chain. He bought seventeen pounds of fruits and vegetables. Midtown prices should embarrass the Wedge. The bottom line at Midtown was marginally better than Rainbow’s, although a few items were a little cheaper at Rainbow. You can see a table comparing prices, and read Tom’s discussion at the link.

As sensible as shopping The Market is, the real reason for our heavy traffic was probably Gail Rosenblum’s story, Small potatoes, yes, but Midtown Market vies for No. 1, in Thursday’s Star Tribune.

A sad note was the news that our friends, Jill and Jeff and sons Jeremy and Justin, of Chase Brook Farm are calling it quits and moving back to Ohio. The Merkels have raised beef, pork, chicken, lamb, and eggs since 2001. They have farmed four thousand acres, and pastured their animals or fed them feed milled from their own grain, forswearing hormones, antibiotics, recycled animal products, ethanol byproducts, feedlots, and mass-production slaughter. It’s hard to compete with the mass producers.

And it’s hard to compete with somebody who’s letting society pick up the tab for his operation. When you have an infection, and your doctor gives you an antibiotic, the doc will be emphatic that you take all the pills, according to the prescribed schedule. The idea is that, if you let some of the bugs that are making you sick survive, you’re choosing bugs to survive that can stand up to antibiotics. When a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria develops, it’s because we’ve killed off the majority of its normal cousins. There’s more of a chance of this happening when millions of pigs, cattle, and angora rabbits chow down on grain-flavored amoxycillin every day of their brief lives. Society picks up the tab when it has to develop new drugs, or the drugs don’t work. Society picks up the tab for feedlot pollution, as well, and by losing more flexible and entrepreneurial family operations.

Farmers' Market Saturday Morning

I filled in briefly Saturday at the Midtown Farmer’s Market.

If all commerce were like this, we wouldn’t ever worry about “th' stupid economy.” Midtown is a big parking lot full of local food, crafts, music, and information, rockin' out every Saturday morning and Tuesday afternoon, May-October. You’ve got Hmong families and fresh-faced hippie-looking youngsters making their tables groan beneath just picked-veggies. Also farmers from nearby pasture lands, with grass-fed meat; artisan bakers and other local gustatory value-adders (including the redoubtable Barsy’s Almonds); jewelers; soap makers; master gardeners with expert advice; a chef doing demos with seasonal garden produce...

What else? Local musicians trying out their chops, fair-trade, dark-roast coffee, crepes, roasted corn, tamales, boiled peanuts, Grateful Dead-flavored breakfasts from a big old purple school bus, flowers, canned stuff. Gee. I know I must be leaving somebody out, and I apologize. People go to the market to see their friends, and it’s a gas, gas, gas!