education

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• Sitka Local Foods Network building a pool of volunteers who can teach gardening

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Are you an experienced Sitka gardener willing to share some of your knowledge? The Sitka Local Foods Network needs you. The Sitka Local Foods Network is building a pool of volunteers who can teach gardening to local residents who might be new to growing local food.

We’re looking for people who can teach all aspects of gardening, such as how to build a raised garden bed, how to amend soil, how to choose seeds and plant starts for our climate, how to manage your garden once it’s planted, and more. To learn more about our education plans and our efforts to build a pool of teaching volunteers, please join us for a Sitka Local Foods Network education committee meeting from 5:30-7 p.m. on Monday, March 3, at Harrigan Centennial Hall.

While we encourage people who have completed the Master Gardener program to apply, you don’t have to be a Master Gardener for our list of teaching volunteers. Just send us a a note expressing your interest in teaching or helping with a class, what types of classes you’re comfortable teaching, and the best dates and times for teaching that class. Please list your prior experience with these skills (such as I’ve been growing my own garden in Sitka for 12 years).

In addition to skilled gardeners willing to teach basic gardening, we’re also looking for people who can teach Sitka residents how to gather seaweed and other beach greens, how to go berry picking, how to preserve and can food, how to field dress a deer, how to cook with some of the lesser-known veggies that grow in Sitka, and other local food skills. Also, please let us know if you can teach specialized classes, such as permaculture, hydroponics, square-foot gardening, container gardening, how to raise chickens, etc.

This spring our local University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service agent is retiring, so we’re trying to build a pool of volunteers who can provide gardening education until the UAF Cooperative Extension Service can hire a replacement. We might be without a Sitka agent for a period of time, and when they hire a new agent they may rewrite the job description.

To join our pool of teaching volunteers, send your information to charleswbingham3@gmail.com. Please put SLFN Education in the subject line of your email. Please send us a note if you’re willing to teach at a later date and not just this spring or summer. We thank you for your support.

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• Alaska DEC, UAF Cooperative Extension to host food regulations training for farmers markets

Farmers Market Regs

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service will team up to offer two training sessions about food regulations for farmers markets from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on both Wednesday, Feb. 26 (videoconference available in five locations, including Sitka) and on Thursday, Feb. 27 (by teleconference available statewide).

During these trainings you will learn how to market your products, how to set up your temporary food booth, and what foods do and do not require Alaska DEC permits. The course will be taught by Kate Idzorek with the UAF Cooperative Extension Service, and by Lorinda Lhotka and Morgan Poloni with the Alaska DEC Food Safety and Sanitation office. Kate will discuss marketing strategies including packaging and sampling, Lorinda will talk about Alaska DEC cottage food rules and the different types of permits, and Morgan review temporary food booth rules, resources and setup.

The first training will be offered by videoconference in five locations on Wednesday — Juneau, the Matanuska Valley, Soldotna, Fairbanks and Sitka. The Sitka videoconference site is University of Alaska Southeast Sitka Campus, Room 110 (see the flier for the other videoconference locations). The second training will be offered by teleconference or webinar (Go-To Meeting).

To register, go to http://bit.ly/MarketReg2014. For more information, contact Kate at 1-907-474-5211 or jizdorak@alaska.edu, or contact Morgan at 1-907-269-7501 or morgan.poloni@alaska.gov. The UAF Cooperative Extension Service can be reached (toll-free) at 1-877-520-5211. (Editor’s note: the three PowerPoint presentations from the Feb. 26 workshop are linked below as PDF files.)

• Cottage Foods at the market handout

• Food safety at farmers markets PowerPoint (opens as PDF file)

• Update on Alaska Farmers Markets Quest Card program PowerPoint (opens as PDF file)

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• Sitka Maritime Heritage Society annual meeting features stories of harvesting and sharing foods from our local waters and shores

annual meet 2014 web

Local food will be the focus when the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society holds its annual meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 25, at the Sheet’ká Kwáan Naa Kahídi. The meeting’s program topic is Harvesting and Sharing Foods from our Waters and Shores: Stories of Sitka’s Oldest Family Tradition. There will be mingling and refreshments starting at 6:30 p.m., with the program running from 7-9 p.m.

The meeting’s format, as in past years, is to have a panel of individuals with stories and experiences to share about the topic. In the second half of the program, the floor will be opened up to stories from the audience. The panel host and moderator will be longtime troller Eric Jordan.

According to the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society’s website:

Being able to get our food for our families from the ocean and shores is a big reason for living here. In fact, for many of us, it’s a big reason to live, period: the collective effort with friends and family, teaching and learning, the satisfaction of a productive day on the water (never dull!), the deep contentment of having food put up to feed our children and elders. As in past annual meetings, we are expecting a lot of laughter, and a lot of learning about our fellow Sitkans, this place we live in, family and history. Oh, and cookies.

For more information about the annual meeting, go to the group’s website, send email to sitkamaritime@gmail.com, or contact new executive director Carole Gibb at 747-3448.

 

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• Sitka Food Hub sub-committees to host meetings on food storage, community kitchen

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Summit_LogoThe two sub-committees from the Sitka Food Hub project of the 2013 Sitka Health Summit will host meetings in the next week. The project has two main focus groups — to increase Sitka’s capacity for emergency food storage, and to create a community commercial kitchen that can be rented to local start-up businesses and residents who need a place to preserve food they’ve harvested.

The emergency food storage group will meet at noon on Friday, Feb. 14, at Harrigan Centennial Hall. This group is looking for ways to help improve and expand community food storage for disaster preparedness. It also will be looking for ways to help educate Sitka residents about how to improve their own family food storage to be better prepared for emergencies.

The community commercial kitchen group will meet at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 17, at Blatchley Middle School, Room 208. This group is trying to gauge the interest of local residents in having a rental commercial kitchen available for use. It also is looking at examples from other communities at how community commercial kitchens helped educate residents on food preservation, incubated local small businesses, and cultivated new opportunities for the community.

The next meeting for both groups combined is at 6:30 p.m on Thursday, March 6, at Harrigan Centennial Hall. Fo more information about the project, contact Marjorie Hennessy at marjorie@sitkawild.org.

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• Sitka School District touts more state investment into local foods for school lunch programs

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During its Feb. 4 meeting, the Sitka School Board put its weight behind an effort to increase funding for locally sourced food in schools across the state.

In a resolution to the legislature, the board cited the success of Sitka’s Fish to Schools program as justification for extending a similar statewide program beyond one year. Nutritional Alaskan Food for Schools (NAFS) was introduced by Rep. Bill Stoltze (R-Anchorage) in 2012, and piloted last year. This year the governor has included funding of $3 million dollars for the program — but only for one year. All schools in Alaska will receive funding from the program, based on student population. The Sitka School District and state-run Mount Edgecumbe High School received $39,000 from the program last year, which mostly went for seafood purchases (Mount Edgecumbe did buy some potatoes from Gustavus, and Pacific High School bought some vegetables from St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm).

In late January, Tracy Gagnon, who coordinates the Fish to Schools program for the Sitka Conservation Society, submitted the following letter to the editor to the Daily Sitka Sentinel outlining the reasons to support the program.

Nutritional Alaskan Foods for Schools

Dear Editor,

Sitka is one of the first communities in Alaska to push for local foods in schools through the Fish to Schools program; now it’s time to go state-wide. The Governor has included in his FY15 budget state funding to reimburse school districts for their purchases of Alaskan grown or caught foods through the Nutritional Alaskan Foods for Schools program (NAFS). This makes it possible for schools to serve local, nutritious foods to their students, sourcing from farmers, fishermen, and processors in or around their communities. NAFS improves Alaska’s food security and helps us create a more sustainable local food system.

Representative Stoltze proposed NAFS in 2011, and more than 100 vendors and 48 school districts benefited from this legislation in the 2012-2013 school year. Nearly 90 percent of those 48 school districts purchased local seafood.

Every year food producers and school food service providers wait anxiously every spring for NAFS to pass. And usually it’s too late for farmers to meet the extra demand because they’ve already planted their crops and food service has already purchased other foods. Making this funding permanent would provide both food service and food producers the consistency necessary for advanced planning and coordination of harvest to ensure supply meets demand.

The Sitka Conservation Society thanks both the leadership of Representative Stoltze and Governor Parnell for including NAFS in his proposed budget. We urge Alaska Legislators to support the permanent funding of a program that increases Alaska’s food security, catalyzes Alaska’s food production, supports local communities, and improves the health of our students.

Tracy Gagnon
Community Sustainability Organizer
Sitka Conservation Society

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• Sitka Community Greenhouse and Education Center project to hold meeting on Friday, Feb. 7

Sitka Local Foods Network President Kerry MacLane, left, and Sprucecot Garden Owner Judy Johnstone pose in front of one of the high tunnels recently erected on Judy's land on Peterson Street. (Photo Courtesy of KCAW-Raven Radio)

Sitka Local Foods Network President Kerry MacLane, left, and Sprucecot Garden Owner Judy Johnstone pose in front of one of the high tunnels recently erected on Judy’s land on Peterson Street. (Photo Courtesy of KCAW-Raven Radio)

The Sitka Community Greenhouse and Education Center project will hold its next meeting at 5 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 7, at the Sprucecot B&B and Gardens at 308 Peterson St. This meeting is open to the public.

Judy Johnstone, who owns Sprucecot B&B and Gardens, is hosting the meeting, where participants will discuss the possibility of her donating her high-tunnel greenhouse to the project and the possible use of her garden site for community gardeners. She will provide refreshments.

In addition, committee members will report on the meeting we had with some of the gardeners from the Blatchley Community Gardens and research done on other sites. The new “mystery” sites are the former tank farm overlooking Indian Village and the two lots owned by Tess Hayburn (from the former Lane 7 eatery to the Back Street site, where her house was destroyed by a small plane that crashed into it a few years ago).

Please bring your creativity to the table, but try to keep your comments concise and on topic, as the meeting will end at 6:30 p.m. (i.e., no swapping of gardening stories … sorry!). Folks are welcome to stay and socialize after the meeting and swap all the stories they want. The Sitka Local Foods Network is supporting this project, but is not coordinating it.

For more information, call Kerry MacLane at 752-0654.

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• How to weed through the conflicting information about Fukushima radiation and its impacts on Alaska waters

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Alaskans have been worried about their seafood ever since the March 2011 Fukushima earthquake and Japanese nuclear plant problems. It’s understandable that Alaskans are concerned about the safety of the seafood, seaweed and marine mammals in the area. But Alaskans also should note that most of the information posted on social marketing sites just isn’t true.

This NOAA map has been showing up on social media posts with a note that it shows the path of 300 tons of radioactive material entering the ocean each day. This map really shows the probable tsunami paths from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.

FALSE IMAGE: TSUNAMI WAVES, NOT RADIATION: Many people have posted on social media that this NOAA map shows the path of 300 tons of radioactive material entering the ocean each day. This map really shows the probable tsunami wave heights from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.

One of the biggest examples of false information usually is accompanied by an official-looking map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a note that each day the map shows 300 tons of radioactive material entering the water each day. The map is an official NOAA map, but it doesn’t show radiation. It actually shows the probable tsunami paths from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. When in doubt, or even if not, don’t be afraid to consult one of the myth-debunker sites such as Snopes.com, which has the details on the real story behind this map.

The Sitka Local Foods Network has been following the situation since it happened, and we even posted an update in March 2012 in hopes of easing people’s worries (many of the links on this page have been updated). The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services also has a site with updates.

In recent weeks, Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (D-Sitka) did some research, interviewing Dr. Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and one of the country’s top researchers on oceanographic radiation. Rep. Kreiss-Tomkins posted his findings in his Jan. 8 constituent newsletter, and that write-up also appeared in several Alaska publications such as the Alaska Dispatch.

010714_Fukushima-Radiation-GraphAlso in January, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Larry Hartig gave an update to the Alaska Senate’s Natural Resources Committee about what it’s doing to track the radiation, and he said so far the DEC hasn’t seen anything to cause concern. The Ketchikan website Stories In The News also had a follow-up story that included information from Hartic’s testimony and an update from Buesseler, who announced the launch of a new “How Radioactive Is Our Ocean?” website to help crowd-source information about what’s happening along the 5,000-mile Pacific coastline.

Taking things a step further, in January a couple of Seattle media organizations — KPLU and the Seattle Times — ran stories about Seattle fish-broker Loki Fish Co. ran its own tests on Alaska seafood. After the testing, the folks at Loki Fish Co. decided Pacific salmon is safe to eat.

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• Scenes from the Sitka Local Foods Network’s 2014 annual meeting and potluck dinner

On Saturday, Jan. 11, the Sitka Local Foods Network hosted its 2014 annual meeting and potluck dinner at the Sitka Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall.

The two dozen or so participants shared a meal of local food dishes, as well as heard reports on some of the various projects the Sitka Local Foods Network is coordinating and/or supporting. We also were introduced to new board member candidates who were added to the board a week later.

Here are some scenes from the event.

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• Former Sitka resident Nic Mink publishes book, ‘Salmon: A Glocal History,’ highlighting salmon in Sitka and the world

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Former Sitka resident Nicolaas “Nic” Mink — now the Urban Sustainable Foods Fellow at Butler University, Indianapolis — recently published the book Salmon: A Global History that highlights salmon in Sitka, Alaska, and the world.

The book is published by Reaktion Books, LTD, as part of The Edible Series, which features books about different types of food from around the world. The small hardback book is 127 pages with 49 illustrations (30 in color), recipes, bibliography, and index. It costs $18 in the United States ($9.99 on Kindle).

Nic used to lead the now-defunct Sitka Salmon Tours, which took visitors on a walking tour around Sitka to show them the different stages of salmon growth and processing, during the two-plus years he lived in Sitka and worked with the Sitka Conservation Society. He said many of the scripts he developed for the tours were incorporated into the book, which isn’t much longer than a traditional academic paper. Now that he lives in Indiana, Nic still has connections to Sitka’s salmon through a company he started called Sitka Salmon Shares, which markets sustainably caught salmon, halibut, sablefish (black cod), and other fish from Sitka and Juneau to residents of the Midwest United States.

While exploring the state of salmon throughout the world, Nic said he centered a lot of the book on Sitka’s salmon because of its place in the history of the fish. In addition to looking at the natural history of salmon eating, the book also examines cured, canned, and fresh salmon, plus the future of edible salmon. He writes about the role of salmon with Alaska Native cultures, how Alaska’s salmon industry was impacted when a British boy died from botulism after eating canned salmon from Ketchikan in the 1980s, the differences between wild Alaska salmon and farmed salmon, and more.

The book’s description, from the book jacket:

The story of salmon takes readers on a culinary journey from the coast of Alaska to the rivers of Scotland, tracing salmon’s history from the earliest known records to the present. He tells the story of how the salmon was transformed from an abundant fish found seasonally along coastal regions to a mass-produced canned food  and a highly prized culinary delight.

Rich in omega-3 fatty acids, cheap, and widely available, salmon is often listed as an essential part of any diet. A delicious and versatile fish, it can be used to make sashimi, cold smoked for lox, or shaped into a fishcake as an alternative to hamburgers. But while salmon is enjoyed all over the globe, it also swims at the center of controversy, with commercial fishing, global warming, and loss of freshwater habitats all threatening salmon populations and the ecological and health impacts of intense salmon farming under fire.

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• Sitka Local Foods Network to host annual meeting and potluck on Saturday, Jan. 11

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The Sitka Local Foods Network will host its annual meeting and potluck dinner from 6-7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 11, at the Sitka Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall (408 Marine St., parking off of Spruce Street).

Participants are encouraged to bring a dish featuring local foods to share, and please bring your own utensils (note, this is a non-alcoholic event). This event is a good event to attend for people who want to learn more about the Sitka Local Foods Network and what we do around town.

“Attendees will hear about project updates plus the current board will vote on by-law changes,” Sitka Local Foods Network Board President Lisa Sadleir-Hart said. “New board members also are being recruited.”

Individuals interested in board of directors membership can email sitkalocalfoodsnetwork@gmail.com for an application. For more information, call Lisa at 747-5985.

• Sitka Local Foods Network board of directors application

• Sitka Local Foods Network board of directors job description