High-tech meets local & sustainable food

If you don't know what that odd symbol at left is, you probably don't have a phone or tablet or index finger implant that will scan it. But for those of you who do scan these codes wherever they appear nowadays, this one takes you straight to the Enright Ridge CSA website, where you can find out more about our community-supported urban agriculture project, get an application for membership this year, and see why the Enright Urban Farm Project is a pretty cool idea, right here in Price Hill.

The symbol is a QR code (I now know that QR stands for "Quick Response"), a two-dimensional matrix code that is readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera, and smartphones. It doesn't do a lot of good here on our blog, but we'll use it in other places in coming months, such as flyers and displays that will help us get the word out about what we are doing at the Enright Ridge CSA as we encourage new people to sign up for the 2012 season.

For now, it's just a cool graphic to go with this blog entry, but I suppose if you wanted to try it, you could scan it from the screen and go to our website. Where there is a new direct link to the blog at the top left of every page--so you could get sucked into a never-ending circle, going back and forth from website to blog to website to . . . well, that's enough technology for today.

Enright CSA keeps busy in the off season

There is snow out there this morning. I see it on my neighbor’s roof, and on my back porch rails. Hard to believe it was 72 degrees on Tuesday, isn’t it? Well, it’s November in Cincinnati, so you never know what the weather might bring.

We do know what tomorrow will bring, though. It’s supposed to warm up again, at least into the 60s, and the work continues at the greenhouse. There will be a “Learn and Do” Composting Class on Saturday, November 12 at 10:00 am, and participants are needed to bring nitrogen sources from Enright to the Terry Street composting center. If you still need hours, this is a great way to get some in and learn about composting, too.

If you can’t make it on Saturday, there are also bags of leaves that need to be organized in neat windrows and, if you have leaves in your yard and can bag them up and bring them to the composting site, they would be appreciated, too.

Another CSA project that is heating up right now is our efforts to create a dedicated Enright Ridge CSA website to help communicate better with our members. Our Technology Committee is also meeting at 10:00 am at the greenhouse to discuss getting a basic website up and running. We’ll keep you posted on the progress. If anyone out there knows more about websites and HTML code than us (which would not be hard) and needs some hours, please let us know at farm@pricehill.org. We can use all the help we can get--we can make arrangements for hours worked to apply to this season or next season, whatever works best for you.

As the winter proceeds, you can check the Enright CSA Facebook page or this blog for occasional updates on off-season projects. We’re also currently tabulating the information we collected from the surveys, and we’ll get some of those results posted, too.


On a completely unrelated subject, did anyone see that moon last night? Shinin’ like a bright new dime, it encouraged rustication on the back porch even thought it was darn chilly. I didn't think to get my camera out, though; this photo of the moon is courtesy of my Uncle Charlie. Hope you had a little CSA garlic left to ward off the werewolves.