Category Archives: Gardening

Picking and cooking beautyberry

Those small violet berries in the woods: it’s beautyberry, and you can eat it. (No, not pokeberry; those are larger, and the stems are purple.) Beautyberry grows in clumps that you can pick like you’re milking the bush.

First, find some ripe ones:

Pick them and wash them:

And boil them:

To be continued….

Pictures of Callicarpa americana, Lowndes County, Georgia, 12 Oct 2010, as well as picking, cooking, by Gretchen Quarterman.

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Local food for sustainability

James Polk provides us some Food for Thought:
Let’s take a quick tally. 1) Locally grown food uses less fossil fuel getting to market, 2) fresh fruits and vegetables are healthier than packaged foods, and 3) buying locally grown food supports your local economy possibly keeping your would-be deadbeat friends employed.

My favorite reason to eat locally grown foods is the taste. Go to a farmers’ market and load up on freshly picked tomatoes, bite into a raw crisp green bean, take home some succulent zuccinni and eggplant to stir-fry – you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more delicious meal.

Yep. That and okra. Anybody need some okra?

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Farmland for Food, Wildlife, Flood Control, Air Quality, and Agrotourism

Gretchen found this one, too (think I can get her to blog?). Judi Gerber writes about Why Saving Farmland Is So Important:
…without local farms, there’s no local food, or, as the American Farmland Trust (AFT) puts it: “No Farms, No Food.”.

And it’s not even just food:

Farmland is green space, even though most people don’t think of it that way. It is a significant contributor to environmental quality. As AFT states, “Farm and ranch lands provide food and cover for wildlife, help control flooding, protect wetlands and watersheds, and maintain air quality. They can absorb and filter wastewater and provide groundwater recharge. New energy crops even have the potential to replace fossil fuels.”

And there’s more:

Farmland provides fiscal stability to local governments and boosts the economy. It does this by contributing to a community’s infrastructure and helps a local economy through sales, job creation, and support services or businesses.

One of the most unique of these support services is tourism, or more specifically, agri-tourism. There are plenty of places that people visit to see rural scenery or to enjoy the food or drink of a specific region including the wineries in California’s Napa Valley, or popular farm stays like those found in Italy, and increasingly, here in the United States.

There are some plans afoot about agrotourism in Lowndes County.

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