Call out for Volunteers at the Shaker Organic Gardens

Do you enjoy spending time outdoors and working in your community? Do you have a few spare hours during the week to get your hands dirty? The Co-op's Organic Garden Manager, Stacey Cooper is in need of more active volunteers to keep up with the demands of the Co-op gardens at historic Canterbury Shaker Village.
If you can stick to a weekly schedule and can apply yourself to assigned tasks independently, Stacey is looking for you! In return you will learn valuable gardening skills to apply to your own home garden and the opportunity to take home some fresh produce when available.
Watch the video below as Shane, Co-op Outreach Coordinator lists what volunteer opportunities are needed.

For more information send an email to outreach@concordfoodcoop.coop

This Summer at the Farm, to the Co-op

A Letter from Our General Manager, Paula Harris

Welcome to summer, the season of perfection when it comes to local produce! Our produce team is always dedicated to finding the freshest, most local, and preferably organic produce we can for  you to buy. We are incredibly grateful for the many local farmers who sell to us – from well-known New Hampshire organic farmers to Concord-area favorites and small backyard gardens.

In spite of all of these great farmers, it’s still a challenge to meet the demand of our veg-hungry customers with local goods. That’s why this year we’re positively thrilled to add our very own organic gardens to the local farm roster in our produce department

As you probably know by now, the Co-op has teamed up with Canterbury Shaker Villages to farm its certified organic land. Our Organic Garden Manager Stacey Cooper has been hard at work in the greenhouse and fields getting spectacular farm-fresh goodies to our shelves. While farming in New Hampshire can sometimes be unpredictable, here’s a list of some of the produce you can expect to see on our shelves this summer from the Co-op’s Shaker Organic Gardens.

• In June, look for our very own spinach, lettuce, pac choi, scallions, radishes, arugula, and mustard greens.
• We plan to have more lettuce and scallions in July as well as chard, kale, fresh beans, beets, summer squash, cucumbers, basil, parsley, cabbage, and broccoli.
• Check out carrots, green onions, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, shell beans, potatoes, and rutabaga in August in addition to lettuce, scallions, chard, kale, fresh beans, beets, summer squash, basil, parsley, and broccoli.
• We plan to harvest traditional fall crops in September alongside the last of the summer crops, including parsnips, winter squash, pie pumpkins, and leeks.

You might be wondering if, with all this new produce, we’re giving our regular farmers the boot. Hardly the case! In our goal of sourcing as many of our products from local farms as possible, we’re working with our regular farmers to bring in even more of their goods than in previous years.
Generation Farm (Concord, NH) salad mix will be in higher volume this year, so we should have it in the produce case all week.

Kearsarge Gore Farm (Warner, NH) will continue provide us with some of the most beautiful greens in the state, including their unmatched dandelion greens. (Hooray for the dandelion-pumpkin seed pesto that nutritionist Traci Komorek got us all addicted to!!)

Look for The Vegetable Ranch (Warner, NH) van with its cartoon farm animals printed on the side. We will continue getting wonderful produce from them as well as eggs and some meat products new to the Co-op this year.

We expect a high volume of beautiful broccoli to come from Harvest Hill Farm (Walden, VT) this year. 

We are also very excited to be expanding our relationship with Fred’s Farm (Alexandria, NH). They will provide us with some amazing lacinato kale and will also supply us with carrots deep into winter.

Unfortunately, this summer we will also bid adieu to our awesome Produce Manager Shawn as he follows his dreams to move back to his former home in Maine. He will be a department manager at the Gardiner Food Co-op, a new Co-op opening in June. He is excited to have the opportunity to help it get off the ground and help build the local food community in that area. They’ll be lucky to have Shawn, and we’ll miss him!

Please welcome Jay as he steps into Shawn's role as Produce Manager. You'll already recognize Jay as he has worked as both a produce clerk and in our marketing department prior to taking on the management role. He was eager to step up to the plate, and we're glad to have him!

Co-operatively,
Paula Harris

A little rain and help from Volunteers at Shaker Organic Gardens

An update from the Co-op Organic Gardens Manager, Stacey Cooper at Canterbury Shaker Village...

"Crops are looking great. Some initial pest pressure is starting to ease off as the plants are sizing up and able to hold their own for now.

Intermittent rain has helped cut down on irrigation time.

Zukes have set fruits, ancho peppers have set fruit, scallions are sizing up, kale and chard are almost in full swing.

The fields are about 95% full of crops at this point with just a bit of space for lettuce and bean successions.

Next week we will have available: parsley, basil, green kale, red kale, chard, lettuce, radish, beets, beet greens, arugula, and spinach.

We have good crops of dry, shell and fresh beans germinated.  So far, no one is eating them =)  A few of the kale on the orchard end have been nibbled (deer), but nothing serious so far.

Kenn, our new volunteer helped me fix the walk behind tiller and we were able to till between the crop aisles.  The fields are looking pretty tidy at this point.

I was able to rake up the field that Ray mowed last week and then collected the hay and used it to hill the potatoes and mulch the kale and chard rows.  Very helpful for weed suppression and moisture conservation.  It would be great to grow a grain crop in the empty portion of the field next year for this purpose, grain threshing and then use stalks for mulching.

I've been using fish/ kelp emulsion on some of the plants that are getting plagued by early fungus and pest problems, it seems to be fortifying them and making them a nice dark green.

I consolidated the compost piles at the hoophouse and turned them over.  It helped to tidy up the front of the hoophouse."

Fresh Produce Arriving from Canterbury Shaker Village

Stacey delivering Valentine radishes to the Concord store.
Find them in the fresh produce display and take some home!

Here is the latest update from Co-op Organic Garden Manager Stacey Cooper...

We have 95% of the rows planted at this point with a few open for lettuce/ pac choi and herbs and fresh bean successions.

I had to improvise and revise our crop map this week as the nut sedge has germinated in full force. I will be leaving some areas fallow and utilizing successive tilling to keep the tops down. From what I've read, we can aim for 80% eradication if we can keep it below the soil surface for one year. Only one portion of the plant can overwinter and it develops in the late summer into fall. By keeping the plants cut down/ tilled in all season, they hopefully won't have enough reserved energy to form new tubers and overwinter. Unfortunately the only way to accomplish this is to not plant anything, including cover crops.

We still have enough room in the smaller plots for a good diversity of crops. I have seeded some broom corn and ornamental corn in the non irrigated plot for fall décor.

Eric is excited to use fresh produce from the
Co-op's Organic Garden at Canterbury Shaker Village.

All of our pumpkins, winter squash and first waves of cukes and summer squash are in. Tomatoes, peppers, dry beans, shell beans are in. I still need to pick up our eggplant from Dave Trumbell of Good Earth Farm.

Ray, Alberta and Richard continue to help me out in the garden, usually on Thursday. (If you would like to volunteer in the garden send a message to outreach@concordfoodcoop.coop, Stacey is looking for reliable people who can commit to one day a week)

I've set up a sprinkler in the hoop house, which is helping to cut down on watering time for me each morning.

We have kale and chard almost ready to harvest and some of the beets are sizing up.

Best,
Stacey Cooper

Organic Certification Progress at Canterbury Shaker Village

Co-op Organic Garden Manager Stacey Cooper has been busy these past few weeks tilling the fields, transplanting seedlings and getting an irrigation system set up at Canterbury Shaker Village. Among other things she has been going through all the steps to have the fields pass their organic certification.
While Stacey is already using organic practices on the land to nurture her plants, there are a few tests that need to take place before the USDA give her the ok to use their organic brand on the label of the produce she will be providing us.
Watch the video below...


Some of the produce Stacey has been able to pick so far that you can find at the Concord Food Co-op is mizuna, radish's, beet greens, spinach, and arugula. Look for it in the fresh produce displays.
Stacey also planted potatoes last week along with parsnip and green beans. Looking toward the future she also planted for this fall pie pumpkins and squash.
If you have any questions for Stacey, leave her a comment below.

The DARK Act, GMO Labeling, and How You Can Take Action

Reprinted with permission from Ken Davis & the Co-op Food Store Co-op News

Murky debate, GMOs. Few food topics arouse such acrimony and zeal, even though the jury is still out on how noxious and harmful the things even are.

At the Co-op, we believe what most Americans do: consumers have the right to know the source of their food. That’s why legislation that threatens to undo hard-fought-for GMO labeling efforts gets our attention. Learn more and find out how you can take action.

 

What Are GMOs?

When we alter the genetic material of a living thing so it can do something new or different, we create a genetically modified organism or GMO.  A GMO may be a bacteria that puts out human insulin or an insect-resistant corn plant.

 

What’s So Bad About That?

Life-saving insulin. Disease- and pest-resistant crops. What’s not to love? GMOs have undeniable advantages, or they wouldn’t exist in the first place. But there is also a big, whopping unknown—and that’s what worries people.

Human meddling to modify nature is nothing new and often innocuous. Farmers for centuries have been tweaking breeding methods to produce greater yields, grow larger plants and animals, and so on. But these historical practices relied on the natural reproductive processes of the organisms themselves. In the case of GMOs, labs create things that nature cannot. Critics contend that unforeseen consequences are inevitable and potentially dire, with health risks to humans that may include exposure to new allergens or the transfer of antibiotic-resistant genes.

 

How Would Labeling Help?

Labeling doesn’t put an end to GMOs, but it does identify them. Mandatory labeling of GMO foods would, at the very least, give consumers the ability to know what they’re eating so they can make informed choices.

It’s an idea that has overwhelming, widespread support. In 2013, a New York Times poll indicated that more than 93 percent of respondents favored GMO labeling, and by 2014, 24 states were considering broad, sweeping legislation to label GMO foods. Vermont’s legislature led the way, passing the nation’s first law in 2014 mandating the labeling of genetically modified ingredients in packaged products.

 

Latest Legislation: The DARK Act

Introduced by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), HR 1599, the “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015,” allows for a national labeling system without actually requiring it—and therein lies the problem.

“Not a single company has ever voluntarily disclosed the presence of GMOs in its food,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, an environmental think tank and advocacy organization. “Voluntary labeling does nothing to solve the confusion consumers face at the supermarket, nor does it provide them with the information overwhelming numbers of consumers clearly want.”

Known by detractors as the DARK Act (Deny Americans the Right to Know), HR 1599:

• blocks state labeling laws.
  While a uniform national labeling standard is simplest to enforce, the lack of such a standard prompted several states to develop labeling laws of their own. This bill prevents states from establishing future labeling laws and blocks any existing laws, too.

• closes the door on a national GMO labeling standard.
  The bill not only eliminates state labeling laws, it also restricts the FDA’s ability to mandate national labeling laws—an authority the FDA currently holds.

• muddies the “natural” label.
  As if “natural” wasn’t bewildering enough, HR 1599 requires the FDA to define “natural” in the next two years, and GMOs just might be covered in the definition. HR 1599 also blocks any state provisions that make it illegal to label foods containing GMOs as “natural.”

• establishes a weak review process.
  HR 1599 establishes guidance for reviewing the safety of new GMO products, but the bill includes loopholes to automatically approve products that aren’t assessed by the FDA within 180 days.

 

What Can You Do?

Take Action
E-mail or call your legislators today and tell them to oppose HR 1599, or the DARK Act. Find your legislators here.

Get Involved
Join the New England Farmers Union and advocate for a transparent and sustainable food system. A special membership discount is available to members of food co-ops that are part of the Neighboring Food Co-op Association. Join here.

 

Resources

Just Label It
NH Right to Know GMO
Vermont Right to Know
New England Farmers Union
The Neighboring Food Co-op Association

Thanks to our friends at New England Farmers Union and the Neighboring Food Co-op Association for contributing to this post. Ken Davis is a writer for the Co-op News. Contact him at kdavis at coopfoodstore dot com.

First Harvest for 2015!

by Stacey Cooper, Co-op Organic Garden Manager

We have transplanted our first seeded flats into the hoop house raised beds at the Shaker Organic Gardens, in addition to the direct seeded crops. I have utilized floating row cover to help conserve moisture in the beds as well as buffer the plants from extreme heat during the day and cold at night. The spinach is finally germinating.

We harvested our first crop last week, being pea tendrils. Having clipped them about an inch from the soil surface we should look forward to a second crop soon. Look for them in the produce section of the Co-op's Concord store! I will then incorporate the remaining tops and root systems into the soil to help build organic matter and return nitrogen to the soil.

Watch the video below...

I have started to harden off some of the seeded flats to prepare them for transplanting into the outside raised beds. I have removed the row covers, lessened watering, and I am putting them outside for a few hours each day to expose them to direct sunlight. Often if crops are transplanted directly from inside to field conditions, the sun is too strong and scalds the plants.

We should have pac choi, spinach, scallions and arugula ready to transplant outside this week.

The fields have been tilled once and are looking good. The relatively dry weather has allowed us access to the fields earlier than I would have anticipated, which is giving me a chance to break up the weeds. I will amend the field soil based on soil test results and then we will till a second time to break up the clumps of soil and weeds.

A good portion of the field will remain in cover crop the first season to help break up the weed regime as there is significant yellow nutsedge established in a portion of the field. This section was seeded to white clover last week.

I hope to be able to use white clover in the sections of the field that are transplants, as opposed to direct seeded, as an in row cover crop. This will hopefully help to reduce weed pressure in newly turned soil as well as reduce compaction.

To read more from Stacey and her developments at the Canterbury Shaker Village hoop houses click here.