Buying local, organic groceries is often listed as one of the top 10 things you can do to help the environment, and this is a good chance to try it out at a lower price and see if you like it.

If you click on the title of this blog entry, you should be able to see that it’s tagged “Johnson’s Backyard Garden.”  You can click on that tag to see some of the meals I’ve made using my CSA box.

I received this info today and have already registered myself for a chance to win!

SFC’s fifth annual Farm to Plate fundraiser will take place May 10, 2012 from 6:30-9:30pm at Barr Mansion, the nation’s first certified organic event venue. This “sip and stroll” event sells out each year and features over 25 local chefs, farmers, food artisans, award-winning craft breweries, wineries and spirits-makers, and is SFC’s major fundraiser of the year, providing support for our three main programs.You can enter in our drawing right now online »

Entry in the drawing is free. Once you’ve entered, you can improve your chances of winning by helping us promote our giveaway.

Barr Mansion is an awesome venue, and I bet it would be an amazing event!

We invite you to join local farmers and dignitaries from the City of Austin, St. David’s Foundation, the State of Texas Department of Agriculture, Dept. of State Health Services, Travis County, YMCA of Austin and local state legislator Eddie Rodriguez to help kick off the market at 9:30 am with opening remarks and an official bell ringing ceremony to introduce the new market to the community in style!

The opening day of the SFC Farmers’ Market East will host more than a dozen vegetable and fruit farmers that you have come to know and love through our other SFC Farmers’ Markets at Sunset Valley, Downtown and the Triangle, as well as farmers of eggs, cheeses, meats, plants and honey.  Prepared food and drinks will also be available from some of the most eco-conscious and locally inspired food vendors in Austin.

In addition to fresh, local and nutritious fruits and vegetables available for sale at the market, there will also be delicious ready to eat foods. Part of the celebration includes a number of children’s activities including “how-to” classes on starting your own seedlings (which the children will then be able to take home), Little Kitchen cooking sessions with kid-friendly, parent-approved recipes, face painting, a farm animal petting pen with a Swede Goat Dairy “kid”, and physical activities and games hosted by the YMCA in their sports field.

The grand opening activities will also include live music by Mariachi Centenario the first two hours, followed by Joe Sundell and the Show and Tellers.  Alma Alcocer-Thomas of El Alma Bar y Restaurante will also present a chef’s demonstration at 10:30 am. SFC Taste the Place will also be present to provide produce tastings from the farmers selling at the market.

The new market will be open year-round on Tuesdays, 10 am to 1 pm and also provides a shaded picnic area, playground and plenty of free parking. It is free and everyone is welcome!

YMCA of Austin is the host of the market year round.

Not only was the food amazing though, Jack Allen’s Kitchen uses  local ingredients whenever possible.  (You can read more about that here.)  I thought the menu was very unique with a lot of choices, and the prices were very reasonable.

To start, we were given complimentary homemade pimento cheese spread with crackers, a very nice touch.

Then we ordered the blue crab gratin, described as crab baked with artichoke hearts, spinach, Parmesan and grilled ciabatta.  It was very good although one of the more expensive appetizers ($10.99).

My husband had the Country Club Fancy Chicken Salad, described as being composed of grilled achiote chicken, figs, pears, candied walnuts, crumbled bleu cheese and champagne vinaigrette ($11.99).  It was a really fresh, large salad and I especially liked the use of figs.

I had the veggie and portobello South Texas Taco Platter ($9.99), which was also delicious.  The tacos seemed homemade, the portobello was really well cooked (not rubbery at all), and the salsa and rice were tasty.

Finally, we had an amazing dessert that I can’t remember the name of, but it was some kind of chocolate cookie pie with nuts.  Not too sweet and really good!

The service was excellent, the place was really clean and efficient, and it had a great atmosphere that would be great for a romantic date or going with a family.  And with wonderful LOCAL food at reasonable prices, I will be going back again for sure!

Johnson and his crew grow organic produce for over a thousand community shared agriculture members on the 200 acres he converted from a historic dairy farm. On the day we spoke last week, Johnson and his crew were out there building a barn. Barnraising is a time-honored community-builder, where everyone comes together for a central purpose. It’s a time of both work and party, and you end up with something solid and real at the end of the day. It’s a nice metaphor for organic farming.

At a time when we’re all trying to find signs of economic life and bemoan the dearth of green jobs, organic farming is what we’ve been waiting for. In addition to growing the food we eat in ethical, sustainable ways and without chemicals and environmental toxins, organic farmers like Johnson help grow the economy and the community. According to the Organic Farming Research Foundation, farmers markets are the fastest growing job opportunites in communities and municipalities, and organic farming has grown in this sluggish job market by eight percent.

Maureen Wilmot is “an organic believer.” The executive director of Organic Farmers Research Foundation, Wilmot has a background in biology and ocean conservation, but “you don’t have to have dirt under the fingernails to really appreciate organic farmers,” she says.

When she became part of OFRF three years ago, Wilmot applied her background in policy and research to organic farming “and had a real aha moment. I support ocean conservation — I didn’t know organic produce is helping the ocean. If we converted every acre along the Mississippi basin to organic farming, we would reduce nitrogen runoff by fifty percent and clean up the dead zone. My son has asthma; I’m working for cleaner air. I didn’t realize organic farming leads to cleaner air,” she says. “It’s all interwoven.”

It’s true — many positive things spring from the same fertile, organic soil. If you care about your health or the health of the planet, you will have an organic awakening. In the same way, at some point, you’re going to have to come to terms with how much meat you eat. Even Mayo Clinic, not exactly the bastion of woo-woo new age stuff, is touting the health benefits of a meatless diet. And if you’re into protecting the planet, the fact that raising livestock takes up more than double the acreage and consumes double the resources plus pumping out a lot of environmental nasties is going to make you question cow. It will, I hope, encourage you to eat food that’s luscious, real, unprocessed, organic, healthy, and good for you, your karma and all of mankind.

Better Bites of Austin presents Local Food Holiday Gift Fair, hosted at The Domain II. Sample products from our best local food and beverage artisans and buy locally made treats for holiday gift giving. 4–9 pm.

And with a shortage of local food, the concern is that prices for consumers will go up and drive some consumers away. Says Peg McCoy, owner of Farm to Market Grocery on South Congress, “When calories are so cheap, people aren’t willing or able to spend more for local food.”

Hopefully Austin has enough of a base dedicated to locally grown food that these farmers will still be able to make something off what they are able to grow in these conditions.

Council members also asked staffers to gather information about a possible ban on paper bags, as well as plastic ones, and about possibly charging fees for so-called single-use bags instead of banning them outright.

Details such as whether small stores should be exempt and the penalties for not complying with a ban will be worked out during the four-month process.

Austin would be the first large Texas city to enact such a ban; Brownsville already has one.

Council members say plastic bags are an environmental scourge – polluting waterways, clogging drainage systems and taking up landfill space, where they don’t biodegrade.

Austinites use 263 million plastic bags a year, and they cost the city and taxpayers about $850,000 a year to clean up as litter and put in landfills, according to city estimates.

A voluntary effort by large Austin retailers, including Walmart and Target, to cut plastic bag use was not effective enough, city officials have said.

On Thursday , the nonprofit Texas Campaign for the Environment called on the city to ban both plastic and paper bags, saying that would achieve the larger goal of helping consumers get in the habit of using reusable bags instead of single-use bags.

Mark Daniels , vice president of sustainability at Hilex , a large manufacturer and recycler of plastic bags with locations in the Dallas area and across the country, said Thursday that the bags pose no environmental threat because they are fully reusable and recyclable.

It will be interesting to see what City Council staff find.  This is certainly turning out to be a pretty controversial topic, looking at the angry comments on this Statesman article.

I”ll be on vacation for the next 2 weeks! Stay green while I’m gone!

One big problem with the bus option: Buses, say many transit mavens, have a bad image. People who won’t get on the bus, they say, will opt for nice rail cars. The reasons are multiple. For some, it’s classism – buses are seen as a service for poor people. For others, it’s mode of travel – the General Accounting Office report said “the public sees rail as faster, quieter, and less polluting than buses, even though Bus Rapid Tran­sit is designed to overcome those problems.”

The Central Austin Transit Study projected that better bus would attract only 9,000 boardings per weekday by 2030, compared with 27,600 on urban rail. But maybe “better bus” is the problem – by offering that limited concept, rather than full-fledged BRT*, as the only alternative to rail, perhaps URS** gave short shrift to the potential of bus. What if Austin created BRT that approached the quality of rail?

(*The article earlier explains “BRT” as “bus rapid transit” – a loosely defined term that usually means high-quality buses running on busy corridors at greater frequencies and with fewer stops. Beyond that, however, BRT systems vary widely in quality, ranging from buses that simply have traffic signal-changing technology (currently being considered by Cap Metro) to buses running in high-occupancy-vehicle lanes or even on exclusive bus highways, with fancy stops resembling rail stations.” **Also URS is an Austin company the city paid to do the Central Austin Tran­sit Study.)

The article goes on to talk about the costs of better bus versus urban rail, quoting former Tracor CEO Jim Skaggs:

“Fort Worth just went through this consideration in December and decided against rail as being the solution,” says Skaggs. “They decided that buses, which they could do for 10 percent of what the rail cost was, were perfectly adequate to do what they wanted to do, and give them more flexibility. They had $25 million in their pocket from the feds already and had to give it back, because they decided that [with the remaining costs], they couldn’t justify it.” (Actually, the Fort Worth City Council’s discussions of a downtown streetcar aren’t completely dead and buried, but it did halt a streetcar study in December over cost concerns.) Austin’s “alternatives studies from the very beginning have been based on rail,” Skaggs says. “[They've asked only] ‘What alternative rail are we going to use?’ They have really given lip service to alternative studies and haven’t really looked at the differences.”

I can see both sides of the debate of bus v. rail and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out as the election draws closer.