While I aspire to one day be providing much of my household’s vegetable consumption straight from home and community gardens, I always value being able to support local and regional organic farmers in buying their produce.
I’ve loved my ritual, often weekly, visits to local farmers markets wherever I lived that they were available.
Over two decades ago, while attending university on the Big Island of Hawai’i, a highlight of my week was always going to the fantastic farmers market in Hilo (often together with my parents) that always had such an incredible annd diverse range of locally grown veggies and fruits.
Ever since, I have always adored the tradition of such practical weekly visits in any place I lived that had a farmers market nearby.
This photo of me holding some broccoli (my son has lately been requesting this vegetable specifically which thrills me) was snapped at Biobazar. Biobazar is not in my neighborhood or even district but I make the special trip about twice a month as I just love buying organic produce directly from the vendors and farmers there while often also engaging in some small chat.
I’m excited to finally be ready to begin my own work of weaving together issues of food, walkability, urbanism, media and agriculture.
Last week I hosted my 1st workshop on issues of community agriculture, facilitated by The Schumacher Institute. View here
This year I established our first-ever kitchen garden on our two spacious balconies. I see our balcony gardens as my current private educational gardening space. This is not our permanent home and in accepting its transience, I was also able to accept it as an experimental space to learn from.
We have diverse plants growing including sunflowers, green beans, radish, red beets, yellow beets, garlic, green onions, parsley, cilantro and Japanese pumpkin, We have already had first harvests and samples of peas, carrots, chili peppers, lettuce, garlic, cilantro, parsley, oregano, jalapeno peppers, birdseye peppers and corn (nearly all of which we continue to grow).
Food literacy and translating that to kitchen and cooking literacy is really at the heart of this current garden project, along with beginning to learn how to grow these diverse plants. I loved learning this month how to begin using the tops of carrots in diverse dishes. Our multiple pepper plants are fruiting which is positively thrilling for me. I’m learning that corn is a plant that deeply fascinates me and it was truly a small triumph for me to harvest my first fully developed cobs earlier this month.
These growing spaces on our balcony are ways for me to build my knowledge and experience growing edible plants for my family but and also cultivating experience to bring to future community garden projects.
I hosted my 1st school gardening workshop last month know that for the types of community garden projects I want to help organize and get involved with, many hands and different types of knowledge are needed. We need people expert in agricultural knowledge but also people comfortable and expert in organizing, in sparking interest in others to getting involved, in effectively communicating the benefits of such activity and more.
I now know that at any community gardening project that is growing carrots, I can 100% volunteer to make the carrot tops chimchurri for the volunteer meeting 
-Annika