What is your role on the local foods team?
I’m the Community Horticulture Educator, so I help county residents with gardening questions and skill-building through programming. I also coordinate a dedicated group of Master Gardener Volunteers who amplify this work, and I teach classes to the public as well as BOCES Ag Studies Academy students, NorthWind after-school students, and 4H.
How did you come to be in the North Country?
I consider my dad both a local and a back-to-the-lander. He left after college and returned to the North Country with a young family. A generation later I followed that same trajectory. I left the area for college in 2000 and returned with my partner and first child in 2013 after some years pursuing farming, community gardening, and cooperative living in Ithaca and Boston. The land prices here are a real draw and enabled my family to start an orchard and garden and to pasture goats and chickens. Raising my kids in the same special place that formed me has been a real gift. I believe the North Country forges resilient, resourceful, appreciative people.
What excites you about food and farming?
Food becomes more than food when it’s steeped in geography and relationships. I love to grow food in my large garden because it adds meaning and satisfaction to the potentially mundane act of eating. Even buying food from a farmer I’ve interacted with imbues the food with something more, and I know I’m not alone in that. If we all sought that extra connection to our food, our whole food system would be transformed. Aside from my time gardening and farming, I’ve also worked on Farm-to-School, a movement I would love to see grow in this area.
If you could pick a NoCo view to look at everyday, what would it look like?
I love rolling hills of pasture bordered by forest.
What are some of your favorite foods to grow and cook with?
I love scallions and consider them unsung heroes of the garden – it gives me hope to seed them indoors in winter, they are easy to cook with, they overwinter and provide the earliest food from my garden in spring, they support pollinators with beautiful flowers in their second year, and it’s easy to save their seed… so yeah, there’s so much to like about scallions!
What was the last local food you ate, and where did it come from?
In spring, I teach the BOCES and NorthWind students about season extension in the high tunnel at the Learning Farm. One of my favorite parts of my job is sampling the spinach, cilantro and mesclun with NorthWind students, as I did this morning. It doesn’t get fresher or more local than that!
What is a wild food you enjoy from the North Country?
I like morel hunting. Some years are better than others, but I always enjoy the off-trail woods walks and the excitement of hunting these elusive and prized mushrooms. Even if I collect more ticks than morels, it’s time well-spent.
What new services have you offered the community in the past year?
In spring of 2021, the Master Gardener Volunteers and I began offering a course called Seed to Supper, which is a 6-week food gardening course for low-income members of our community. Our first 15 participants have learned about planning, planting, and caring for their gardens and we’ve received lots of positive feedback.
We answer any and all garden-related inquiries at our hotline called the Growline (SLCgrowline@gmail.com). The Growline has become a popular resource, particularly since the pandemic began, and it’s been energizing to support so many gardeners of all levels during a time when many are expanding their plantings or growing food for the first time.