The vegetable garden is located on an unused patch of land on the lower part of SEARHC’s Sitka campus, between the employee fitness center and daycare facilities and across the street from the SEARHC Behavioral Health residential substance abuse treatment centers. The garden is being built with the blessings of the SEARHC Employee Wellness Team, SEARHC Green Team and SEARHC Facilities Management Department. The garden was initiated by SEARHC Grant Writer Kerry MacLane, who also is president of the Sitka Local Foods Network.
SEARHC employees are holding regular lunchtime work parties on Fridays, and employees who work in the garden will be eligible to share in the bounty when the produce is ready to harvest. The garden will be used to grow potatoes, onions, greens, herbs and edible flowers, among other items.
In his note about this Friday’s work party (May 7), MacLane wrote, “This will be a great opportunity to work out and get out any angst that you might be harboring. Come go crazy on the weeds. Aggressive behavior is encouraged. We are going to be digging up weeds, chopping down salmonberries, mixing in sand and compost, and forming two big raised beds.”
SEARHC Employee Wellness Team leaders Lisa Sadleir-Hart and Doug Osborne said a community garden for employees is something a lot of businesses in Sitka can build. A workplace community garden allows employees a chance to get physical activity and gives them the opportunity to add more locally grown vegetables to their diets. Other benefits of an employee garden include reduced stress and improved employee morale. Also, some employees may live in small apartments where they don’t have room for a garden.
To learn more about how you can start a similar employee garden project at your business, contact Kerry MacLane at 966-8839, Lisa Sadleir-Hart at 966-8735 or Doug Osborne at 966-8734.
The 2009-10 Sitka Local Foods Network board of directors. Back row, from left, Doug Osborne, Linda Wilson, Lisa Sadleir-Hart, Natalie Sattler, Peggy Reeves and Maybelle Filler. Front row, from left, Lynnda Strong, Kerry MacLane and Suzan Brawnlyn. Not pictured, Tom Crane.
The time and location have been changed for this month’s meeting Sitka Local Foods Network Board of Directors. The meeting now will take place at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, May 3, at the Sitka Economic Development Association (SEDA)/Greater Sitka Chamber of Commerce conference room on the second floor of the Troutte Center Building on Lincoln Street (above Seasons card store).
Some of the agenda items for this meeting include Sitka Farmers Market planning, an update from the St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm communal garden, information about a new garden at U.S. Coast Guard-Air Station Sitka, an update on the 2010 farmers market vendor requirements for the WIC (Women, Infants, Children) supplemental food program, an update on the two presentations by nationally known gardener/author Ed Hume on Monday, May 31, and information about the state response to a request to lease some empty Mt. Edgecumbe High School land for a community greenhouse.
The Sitka Local Foods Network board meetings are open to the public and we welcome new volunteers who want to help with our projects. For more information, contact Kerry MacLane at 752-0654 or maclanekerry@yahoo.com, or Linda Wilson at 747-3096 (evenings or weekends only) or lawilson87@hotmail.com.
Help support the Sitka Local Foods Network by purchasing organic seed varieties from Bountiful Gardens seed company that have been specially selected for our challenging climate by longtime Sitka gardener Jamie Chevalier.
There will be a serve-yourself seed rack at Old Harbor Books, with an honor-system donation jar for making change next to the seeds.
Among the seed varieties available will be cabbage, broccoli, beets, carrots, a variety of greens mixes, kale, lettuces, peas, radishes and summer squash. Seed supplies are limited for first come, first served.
Bountiful Gardens is an educational nonprofit organization that specializes in heirloom, untreated and open-pollinated varieties of seeds for sustainable agriculture. Bountiful Gardens also promotes the GROW BIOINTENSIVE sustainable mini-farming concept, which helps gardeners make small plots of land productive sources for agriculture.
For more information, contact Kerry MacLane at 752-0654.
As you start to plan your garden for this spring and summer, don’t forget to Plant A Row For The Hungry. The Plant A Row For The Hungry program (also known as Plant A Row or PAR) is a national campaign by the Garden Writers Association of America that got its start in Alaska.
In the cold winter of 1994, Anchorage Daily News garden columnist and former Garden Writers Association of America President Jeff Lowenfels was returning to his hotel after a Washington, D.C., event when he was approached by a homeless person who asked for some money to buy food. Lowenfels said Washington, D.C., had signs saying, “Don’t give money to panhandlers,” so he shook his head and kept on walking. But the man’s reply, “I really am homeless and I really am hungry. You can come with me and watch me eat,” stayed with Lowenfels for the rest of his trip.
Jeff Lowenfels
The encounter continued to bother Lowenfels, even as he was flying back to Anchorage. During the flight, Lowenfels came up with an idea when he started writing his weekly garden column (the longest continuously running garden column in the country, with no missed weeks since it started on Nov. 13, 1976). He asked his readers to plant one extra row in their gardens to grow food to donate to Bean’s Café, an Anchorage soup kitchen. The idea took off.
When Anchorage hosted the Garden Writers Association of America convention in 1995, Lowenfels took the GWAA members to Bean’s Café to learn about the Plant A Row For Bean’s Café program. The Garden Writers Association of America liked the idea, and it became the national Plant A Row For The Hungry campaign. In 2002, the Garden Writers Association Foundation was created as a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit to manage the Plant A Row For The Hungry program.
“I am not surprised by the growth of PAR,” Lowenfels wrote in an e-mail to the Sitka Local Foods Network. “It is now in all 50 states and across Canada and there are thousands of variations of the original program — from prison gardens for the hungry to botanical gardens donating their produce from public display gardens. This is because gardeners always share information and extra food, so the idea was a natural.”
It took five years for the program to reach its first million pounds of donated food, but the second million only took two years and the next eight years saw a million pounds of donated food (or more) each year. Since 1995, more than 14 million pounds of food have been donated. Not only that, the program is getting ready to expand overseas to Australia, England and other countries with avid gardeners.
“We have supplied something in the vicinity of enough food for 50 million meals,” Lowenfels wrote in his e-mail. “Gardeners can solve this hunger problem without the government. And we don’t need a tea party to do it! Or chemicals, I might add, as author of a book on organic gardening (Teaming With Microbes, written with Wayne Lewis)!”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one out of every eight U.S. households experiences hunger or the risk of hunger. Many people skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going an entire day or more without food. About 33 million Americans, including 13 million children, have substandard diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they can’t always afford to buy the food they need. In recent years the demand for hunger assistance has increased 70 percent, and research shows that hundreds of children and adults are turned away from food banks each year because of lack of resources.
While many people credit Lowenfels for creating the Plant A Row For The Hungry program, Lowenfels says the real heroes are the gardeners growing the extra food and donating it to local soup kitchens, senior programs, schools, homeless shelters and neighbors. You can hear him pass along the credit to all gardeners at the end of this interview last year with an Oklahoma television station (video also embedded below).
“One row. That’s all it takes. No rules other than the food goes to the hungry. You pick the drop-off spot or just give it to a needy friend or neighbor. Nothing slips between the lip and the cup, I say,” Lowenfels wrote in his e-mail.
For people wanting to Plant A Row For The Hungry in Sitka, there are several places that would love to help distribute some fresh locally grown veggies or berries to those who are less fortunate, such as the Salvation Army (note, the current officers are Capts. Kevin and Tina Bottjen), Sitkans Against Family Violence (SAFV), local churches, Sitka Tribe of Alaska and other organizations. The food the Sitka Local Foods Network grows at St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm communal garden goes to the Sitka Farmers Market, where people who are in the WIC (Women, Infants, Children)supplemental food program can use special farmers market vouchers to buy fresh vegetables.
The Sitka Local Foods Network also takes donations of local produce to sell at the Sitka Farmers Markets, and all proceeds from the Sitka Farmers Markets are used to help pay for Sitka Local Foods Network projects geared toward helping more people in Sitka grow and harvest local food. For more information, contact Sitka Farmers Market coordinators Linda Wilson (lawilson87@hotmail.com) or Kerry MacLane (maclanekerry@yahoo.com).
Sitka Local Foods Network President Kerry MacLane was one of the featured guests for the Alaska Public Radio Network’s“Talk of Alaska” statewide call-in show hosted by Steve Heimel on Tuesday, March 30.
The topic of Tuesday’s hour-long show was “Local Food Production.” If you weren’t able to hear the show, you can listen to it by clicking this link and then looking for the arrow above the comments box. In addition to Kerry, the other featured guest was Tim Meyers of Meyers Farm in Bethel. Some of the topics on this show included community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, spring planting, the Sitka Farmers Market, the Sitka Seafood Festival, the new Alaska Food Policy Council, sac roe herring, composting, soil conditions and other issues.
Some of the clips from Tuesday’s Talk of Alaska show were reorganized into a news feature story that ran on Wednesday’s “Alaska News Nightly” half-hour newscast on APRN. The news feature used some of Kerry MacLane’s comments about the Sitka Local Foods Network, but there were several minor errors in the story about what’s going on in Sitka.
By the way, this isn’t the first time local food has been featured on Talk of Alaska this year. In October 2009, Talk of Alaska did a show “Our Food Supply” as a preview for the Bioneers of Alaska annual conference.
In response to concerns by Alaskans about food security, health and job creation, the Alaska Food Policy Council is being formed and it will host a meeting on May 18-19 at a location TBA in Anchorage.
“This will be a chance for Alaskans to come together and develop a plan to produce more food for our communities,” said Danny Consenstein, the Executive Director of the USDA Alaska Farm Service Agency in Palmer.
The Alaska Food Policy Council wants your help in examining how our food system relates to our economy, our security and our health. The meeting will provide an opportunity for the wide variety of food system stakeholders to connect, so they can begin to develop comprehensive solutions toward building a stronger Alaska food system.
The first face-to-face meeting takes place from noon to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, May 18, and from 8 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, May 19, at a location TBA in Anchorage. Mark Winne of the Community Food Security Coalition will facilitate the meeting. The goal will be to learn about food policy councils (which exist in many states and local communities), consult with experts to establish the lay of the land in Alaska, and to begin to set the direction for the Alaska Food Policy Council to take. Sitka Local Foods Network President Kerry MacLane has been asked to represent our group on this council, and he said he plans to attend the May meeting.
Seating is limited for this meeting, so please contact Public Health Specialist Diane Peck, MPH, RD, with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services by May 1 to RSVP or request more information. Diane can be reached at 269-8447 (Anchorage) or diane.peck@alaska.gov. The Alaska Center for the Environment’s local food project page has more information about the creation of the Alaska Food Policy Council.
There was too much business to get through during the regular board meeting of the Sitka Local Foods Network on Monday, Jan. 4, so a special board meeting will be held from 5-7 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 12, at the Sitka Economic Development Association (SEDA) conference room upstairs in the Troutte Center building on Lincoln Street. Here is the suggested agenda.
Sitka Local Foods Network
January 12, 2010, Board Meeting Agenda
5-7 p.m. SEDA Meeting Room
* Approve Minutes of Last Meeting
* Review Mission Statement and Goals
* President’s Report: Turning Point; from volunteers to staff
* Standing reports
___o 501(c)(3) and financial update (Kerry)
___o Education/Let’s Grow Sitka update (Linda W.)
___o Sitka Farmers Market update/Educational Programs (Linda & Kerry)
___o St. Peter’s Fellowship farm update (Doug & Lisa)
___o Sitka Community Greenhouse update (workgroup – see minutes)
* Old Business
___o t-shirt update (Natalie & Peggy)
___o Ed Hume fundraiser (Maybelle – Lisa will bring her report; need approval of board to go ahead)
___o Earth day/Shane Smith
* New Business
___o Turning Point (Kerry);
___o Motion to support a CSA by inviting Hope and Florence to sign people up at the ‘Let’s Grow Sitka’ event.
___o Island Institute Humanities project focused on sustainability
___o Other?
The Sunday edition of the Juneau Empire and Monday edition of the Daily Sitka Sentinel (Page 4) both featured a press release about a Sitka Local Foods Network-hosted presentation about “Growing in Sitka and Southeast Alaska: The Food of Today, Tomorrow and 200 Years Ago” that takes place at 5 p.m. this Friday, Oct. 16, at the Kettleson Memorial Library. The presentation is by UAS anthropology student Elizabeth Kunibe of Juneau, who has spent the last six years researching traditional gardens in Southeast Alaska. The presentation also received a write-up in this week’s issue of Capital City Weekly that came out on Wednesday.
Monday’s issue of the Daily Sitka Sentinel also featured a press release about a put-the-garden-to-bed work party the Sitka Local Foods network is hosting from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 17, at the St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm.
On Tuesday, the Alaska Public Radio Network’s statewide call-in show “Talk of Alaska” was about food security and during the show the work of the Sitka Local Foods Network was mentioned. The Talk of Alaska topic on food security was a preview of the Bioneers In Alaska conference this weekend (Oct. 16-18) in Anchorage where food security will be one of the topics. Kerry MacLane, president of the Sitka Local Foods Network, is supposed to travel to Anchorage to participate in the conference.
In addition to the Sitka Local Foods Network mentions, there has been a lot of other local foods news around Alaska this week.
In Sunday’s Juneau Empire, Ginny Mahar (a chef at Rainbow Foods) wrote a column featuring a mac and cheese recipe with king crab. Ginny also writes the Food-G blog, which features a lot of local foods recipes for Southeast Alaska.
Also in Sunday’s Juneau Empire was an article about the Alaska Native Brotherhood/Alaska Native Sisterhood Grand Camp meeting in Juneau and discussion about subsistence fishing rights following the recent arrest of Sen. Albert Kookesh.
In this week’s Capital City Weekly, there is an article from Carla Peterson about the chocolate lily and how to prepare this edible plant for food.
In his Anchorage Daily News garden column last week, Jeff Lowenfels wrote about planting garlic now for spring flowers and an August crop.
The Mat-Su Frontiersman recently ran an article about a sustainability project at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Mat-Su College where students were gathering organic spuds.
Finally, while this isn’t about Alaska, you might want to read an article about efforts to preserve our biodiversity so we don’t lose more food plant varieties and why these efforts are important.
Screenshot of Capital City Weekly page about Mike Wise winning the Table of the Day Award at the final Sitka Farmers Market of the summer
Click here to see this week’s Capital City Weekly coverage of Mike Wise of Raven’s Peek Roasters and Sailor’s Choice Coffee winning the Table of the Day Award for the final Sitka Farmers Market of the summer on Sept. 12.
Click here to read a notice in this week’s Capital City Weekly about the Running of the Boots on Saturday, Sept. 26.
For those of you who will be in Juneau and not in Sitka on Saturday for the Running of the Boots, click here to read about the Autumn Garden Party and Wine Tasting event on Saturday at the Jensen-Olson Arboretum up in Juneau.
In a local foods story from the Northwest Arctic, Kotzebue author/photographer Seth Kantner (author of “Ordinary Wolves” and “Shooping for Porcupine”) writes an essay for the Alaska Dispatch Web site about hunting caribou to provide meat for his family.
Finally, we have two stories about the role salmon played in the development of two Southeast Alaska communities — Ketchikan and Pelican. Ketchikan’s Dave Kiffer writes one of his regular history columns for the Stories in the News Web site about how Ketchikan became “the canned salmon capital of the world.” In the Capital City Weekly, Norm Carson writes a story about how a cold storage plant helped Pelican “settled closest to the fish.”
Sitka has many wonderful events that happen year after year; the Monthly Grind, Whalefest, the Running of the Boots and the Sitka Summer Music Festival, just to name a few. Our hope and dream has been to create one more tradition that people can look forward to year after year, summer after summer. Our goal was to create a Sitka Farmers Market that brings Native and non-Native people together to celebrate Sitka and the wonderful things people can do here, which includes growing, harvesting and sharing nutritious local food.
For the past two years, we have seen our dream come true and the seeds for even bigger and better markets have been sown. This happened because of tremendous amount of community support. To every vendor, shopper and sponsoring group that has made this happen, we would like to extend our sincere appreciation.
The Sitka Conservation Society (SCS), SEARHC, the Sitka office of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service, Alaska Native Sisterhood, Kayaaní Commission, Baranof Island Housing Authority and the Women, Infants, Children (WIC) supplemental nutrition program have been tremendous and true partners. The delicious smell of grilling local black cod was made possible by the generous loan of the Reindeer Redhots cart to the Alaska Longline Fisherman’s Association. To our friends at the historic Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, who have provided the perfect gathering space for a Sitka market, we say Gunalchéesh. We are grateful to the media in town, who time and again helped us to promote our market and our cause. Last but certainly not least, we’d like to recognize the vendors.
In the past two years we’ve had almost 50 local entrepreneurs who made this event happen. Your creativity, your enthusiasm, your customer service and your willingness to share your time and talents is most appreciated. You and the shoppers who buy local are the backbone of our market.
The 2009 Sitka Farmers Market season has come to an end. Plans for next year have already begun. We hope to see you there, and thanks again to everyone who is supporting the local foods movement.
Even though the Sitka Farmers Market season has ended, the Sitka Local Foods Network will be active throughout the year. We will continue our work on expanding community gardens, getting a community greenhouse built in Sitka, encouraging the sustainable use of traditional subsistence foods and providing educational opportunities to Sitka residents who want to learn more about producing local food. The next Sitka Local Foods Network event is the Running of the Boots fundraiser, which takes place at 11 a.m. (register at 10) on Saturday, Sept. 26, at the Crescent Harbor shelter. For more information, click here.
Sincerely,
Sitka Local Foods Network
Kerry MacLane, Peggy Reeve, Linda Wilson, Doug Osborne, Natalie Sattler, Sharon Romine, Tom Crane, Maybelle Filler, Lisa Sadleir-Hart, Ellen Frankenstein, Charles Bingham (2009 SLFN board members and/or Sitka Farmers Market volunteers)
Sitka Local Foods Network 
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