Ron Krupp

Mark Kastel is the co-director of the organic advocacy non-profit, Cornucopia, and Mark says we’re seeing the rise of two definitions of organic.

On snowy evening just before Thanksgiving, a meeting was held in Franklin, Vermont to discuss toxic pollution in Lake Carmi.

Friend and fellow gardener Fred Schmidt and I have been offering composting workshops to the public at the Tommy Thompson Community Garden, with support from the Chittenden Regional Solid Waste District.

From the re-development of Church Street to plans for a thirty million dollar, two and a half mile Champlain Parkway, Burlington is re-inventing itself.

I wonder what would happen if all Vermont schools, churches, and businesses planted a portion of their property with pollinator-friendly plants for a butterfly garden or a bee habitat.

Landfill disposal of recyclables like glass, paper and plastic milk jugs – fully half the trash discarded by Vermont residents and businesses – is banned by Vermont’ New Recycling law.

In the spring of 1969 I worked in the apple orchards at Scott Farm in Dummerston. And back then I’d never heard of climate change. Yet today, Zeke Goodband, the manager of Scott Farm is relying more on wild bees for pollination because they work in cooler temperatures and tolerate wind and wet weather. And Goodband says native bees seem more resilient and better able to deal with climate instability.

In hydroponics, plants are fed in a greenhouse setting with fertilized irrigation water instead of soil. And when I was a commercial organic vegetable grower some thirty years ago, I would have been hard put to find any hydroponic lettuce growing in Vermont.

It wasn’t that long ago that folks put their gardens to rest in late fall by raking and burning leaves and cutting down dead plant material and hauling it off. This resulted in yards being made clean and devoid of life.

If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest producer of greenhouse gases on Earth.

This month, the Vermont Foodbank, together with the Feeding America nationwide network of food banks, has been working to mobilize all 50 states in an effort to bring an end to hunger. This initiative, designated Hunger Action Month, is designed to raise awareness of the fact that 48 million Americans, including 15 million children, are food insecure which translates into children being hungry and not knowing where their next meal is coming from.

When I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, the ‘Louisville Lip’, then still known as Cassius Clay, and later Mohammed Ali, would come into my dad’s drug store after training down the street for the Golden gloves for an ice-cream cone and some change to take the bus home. Then, while eating the cone, he would playfully hold me off with his other hand.

Thirty one percent of all U.S. households, an estimated 36 million, participated in food gardening in 2008. Twenty one percent of food gardening households in 2009 are new to gardening. But I can’t help wondering why these numbers aren’t even higher.

I was at the grocery store a few days ago when the woman at the checkout started asking me some questions about gardening. The woman behind me overheard the conversation and commented that while her sister was a great gardener, she herself had a brown thumb.

Another time, the woman who delivers my mail told me her husband won’t let her garden because she once pulled out a young clematis vine, thinking it was a weed. And these encounters got me thinking about how, for too many aspiring gardeners, life in the backyard can be a string of disappointments - where gardens are places where plants go to wither, and working with shovels and hoes is more like digging grave s than growing plants.

As a young boy in Marshfield, Arthur Gilman roamed the woods and wetlands around his home. His family spent summers at their camp on Peacham Pond. Gilman remembers that even before he started school, he liked to go out every day and look for wild flowers.

One of the most exciting gardening innovations I’ve seen in recent years are the "teaching gardens" run by the Vermont Community Garden Network - or VCGN - where new participants learn the A to Z's of basic organic gardening.

Well folks, it’s been another weird weather year. In fact, 2015 was the hottest year on record. 2014 was the second hottest.
 

In my front yard, snapdragons, violets, dandelions and forsythia were in flower right before Christmas. I’ve heard from friends that daffodils and crocus were also blooming. And I’ve been worried about the swelling of the buds in the trees.

As the cold advances, I like to reflect on favorite warm weather moments – like the trip I took this summer to the Alburgh Dunes and Bog on a tour sponsored by the Vermont Hardy Plant Club and led by plant biologist Liz Thompson.

Ever since Tropical Storm Irene flooded the slopes and valleys of Vermont in late August of 2011, we’ve become much more aware of how climate change is affecting our lives.

The Missisquoi Wildlife Refuge in Northwestern Vermont near Canada is by far the best nature preserve in the Green Mountains. It was established in 1943 to provide habitat for migratory birds that extend along the Atlantic Flyway between northern breeding grounds and southern wintering areas. The refuge consists of over 67-hundred acres, mostly wetland habitats, with more than 200 species of birds.

I'd been hoping for a summer of gardening with intervals of blue skies and sun interspersed with soft rain and even a few rainbows. But of course, that's always my ideal scenario and so far it's been a rather strange season.