Urban Chickens Class May 5 at Imago Earth Center

Want to add a little protein to your great CSA greens and vegetables? Raising fowl—chickens or ducks—might be just the answer. They don’t need much room, and they are usually the only type of farm animal allowed in urban settings. “I got chickens because it seemed like one more step toward sustainable living,” said Nancy Sullivan, a CSA member and resident of the Enright Eco-Village near the Imago Earth Center.

It’s true—you can keep chickens and ducks in Cincinnati and many nearby communities. And people are interested in learning how, so Imago Earth Center in Price Hill is offering a class taught by an urban chicken expert, Heather Redden from Nature’s Harbor Farm. Heather will cover the basics of keeping chicken in the city, including topics such as housing, care and feeding, choosing breeds, keeping peace with neighbors, the biology of egg laying, the benefits of producing your own eggs, chicken behavior, and much more.

Chickens eat grass, bugs, and kitchen scraps, but most enthusiasts supplement the leftovers with chicken feed, at about $1 a day for a half dozen chickens. In Cincinnati, you must have some kind of enclosure for chickens and follow general health department regulations. If you add in costs of building a coop, you may not be getting “free” food from your chickens, but the eggs taste great—and you know exactly where they came from and how the chickens are treated.

The “Backyard Chickens” presentation at Imago is scheduled for Saturday, May 5 at 2:00 pm, and the instructional time with Heather Redden will be followed by a chicken and duck tour of the Enright Ridge Urban Eco-Village, where class participants will have the opportunity to see different backyard arrangements and talk with owners about their experiences keeping chickens and ducks in an urban setting.

The cost is $10 per person for Imago members and $14 for nonmembers. You can preregister online, by email, or by phone at (513) 921-5124.

Every Day Should Be Earth Day

Happy Earth Day 2012! It’s the 33rd annual celebration of Earth Day today, and of course the Enright Ridge CSA helped celebrate. Thanks to Enright CSA members who have been out and about spreading the word about urban agriculture at Earth Day and wildflower events around town in the last week or so. Nancy, Suellyn, Michelle, Jim, Deborah, Emma . . . your advocacy work is appreciated by the everyone in our CSA, and we all hope we raised a little consciousness out there, too.

The Enright Orchard Project, spearheaded by Suellyn Shupe, also got some nice press in the Green Issue of CityBeat that came out last week, just in time for Earth Day. The elderberry trees and currant bushes have already been planted, with more native fruit and nut trees to come.

But wouldn't it be great if people thought of every day as an Earth Day? We don't have to make a big fuss every day, but there are a lot of little things we could do. For example, think about growing some of your own food . . . it’s a good place to start. If you have a little space in your yard, plant some easy-to-grow vegetables, such as zucchini or just a row of leaf lettuce. Or, if you aren’t ready to make the plunge into dirt farming yourself, find out more about a community garden near you, the Enright Ridge CSA, the Hillside Community Garden at Mt. St. Joseph College in Delhi—there are lots of possibilities.

Or take a look at what’s growing in your yard right now. Chances are a lot of the shrubs and flowering plants, maybe even the trees, are non-native species. Pick a corner of your yard, eliminate the invasives, and plant some native species instead this year. You will be providing a habitat for pollinators and other “good” insects, helping to preserve species that could eventually be crowded out by non-natives, avoiding the use of pesticides (and perhaps fossil fuel in your lawnmower), and you will probably like the results, too.

If growing your own food—even with the help of the Enright CSA—seems like too much of a commitment, maybe that native plant garden is just the right thing to help you keep Earth Day in mind all year round. Or, if that seems like a lot of trouble, there are other, smaller steps you can take. Compost your food scraps. Take your bike to the store. Ride the bus to work. Every little bit helps, and together, all these little steps might just add up to a movement.

Enright Ridge CSA—Part of an Urban Farm Revolution

I read a statistic once that said as much food was raised in Victory Gardens during World War II as was produced by commercial agriculture. That is, during the war, half of all the food consumed in the United States was raised in people’s backyards and in community gardens. The Department of Agriculture estimates that 20 million Victory Gardens were planted and more than three times that many people farmed them.

Twenty million backyard gardens raising half of America’s food—wouldn’t it be amazing to see that again, but without a war? And it is happening, little by little. Next month we’ll collect the first harvest of our fourth growing season at the Enright Ridge Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) project in Price Hill.

We’re already working in the greenhouse on Enright Avenue that serves as the CSA’s headquarters, and on Saturday, April 7 (9 am to noon) we'll begin preparations for the Enright Orchard at the Terry Street garden, which will have native species of fruit and nut trees. Seedlings are sprouting, and onions have already been planted. The first harvest last year included several kinds of lettuce, vitamin greens, spinach, and green onions.

Right now, besides preparing garden beds and starting seedlings, we’re also looking for new members to join the Enright Ridge CSA. We get some grants, but we’d like to expand to make the cooperative self-supporting. If you or a friend are interested in joining the CSA, you can find information about the cost and amount of work involved in different shares is available on the Enright Ridge CSA website.

As the season progresses, our gardens will yield beets, turnips, carrots, basil, peppers, tomatoes, beans, squash, greens, and other produce. The food is distributed to share members every Saturday morning from mid-May through mid-November, which means we have plenty of fresh, local produce for half the year. And many members preserve the bounty of mid-summer so we have homegrown food even in the middle of winter.

It’s hard to describe exactly how much better food tastes when you know where it was grown, who grew it, how it was grown, and how it got to you. You don’t have to worry about preservatives or pesticides or petroleum costs; what you see is what you get: broccoli is just broccoli, beans are all beans and nothing more, and you have to try a fresh-picked carrot to realize just how delicious it can be.

Join the food revolution and take up farm implements to fight the status quo in America’s food production methods and raise your own local, sustainable, delicious produce. We’re happy to show people what we are doing, and we’re working this year to encourage people to start CSAs in other communities, too. Contact the Enright CSA to tour the greenhouse and see urban farming in action.

Yes, We Have No Bananas, But We’re Working on Pawpaws, Apples, Elderberries, Persimmons, and Nuts!

When we get surveys back from CSA members in the fall, a lot of them ask, “how can we get more fruit?” Apparently the famed Schenk pear tree is not quite enough to satisfy share members’ craving for locally grown fruit.

Well, thanks to Enright Eco-Village and CSA member Suellyn Shupe, in collaboration with Imago and the Civic Garden Center, there are plans underway to add orchard gardens in areas around the greenhouse and the Terry Street Community Garden that are not being used to raise vegetables.

Plans call for planting native fruit-bearing shrubs, fruit trees, and nut trees, and in a few years CSA members may be enjoying pawpaws, American persimmons, elderberries, hazelnuts, peaches, plums, and black currents. The CSA is an integral part of the Orchard Project; Charles will be the orchardist and CSA members will have the opportunity, along with the staff, to learn from Charles about the planting, care, and maintenance of the fruit and nut trees. And members are invited to participate in the preparations being made to plant the native species this April.

There is a three-year plan to guide the Orchard Project, with the following objectives:
1. To increase the availability of locally grown food and make locally grown fruit and nuts available starting with the 2014 growing season.
2. To experiment with a diversity of native and naturalized perennial food sources, to increase awareness of these sustainable food sources, and to begin to restore the health of the woodland habitat in the Imago preserve.
3. To prepare the areas, establish the trees, and carry out ongoing maintenance such as trellising, mulching, fertilizing, pest control, and pruning.
4. To collaborate with Imago to educate CSA members and community volunteers about planting, care, and maintenance of the tree crops in both the garden and the woodland setting.

Work has already begun on the project; two Saturdays ago, volunteers thinned the woods surrounding the rain garden at Imago to accommodate a pawpaw grove, with space for the persimmon trees.

Saturday, April 7, is the next planned workday, when preparations for the fruit trees will be completed and elderberry trees will be planted. Enright Ridge CSA members: you can record work hours for the 2012 season if you come out to help from 9:00 am to noon on Saturday, April 7 at Imago.

First Potluck Scheduled for March 29

The Enright Ridge CSA has potluck dinners throughout the season to meet and discuss work and the organization, to socialize, and best of all, to enjoy and share the bounty of what we’ve grown. The first potluck of the 2012 season is scheduled for Thursday, March 29, 6:00 pm at Imago (back in the woods at 700 Enright Avenue, just about a block from the greenhouse).

The word put-luck first turned up in sixteenth century England. It was used there to refer to food that a host provided for an unexpected or uninvited guest—literally, the luck of the pot. It developed the connotation of a communal meal, where all the guests bring their own food to share with everyone else, in the American West during the late nineteenth century, possibly influenced by Native Americans who often had ceremonial feasts called potlatches, at which the host gave away gifts to all the guests.

Potlucks are a staple of community groups everywhere nowadays, and you never know what you might find on the table. You might find your new favorite food at an Enright CSA potluck this season. Please join us for the first potluck on March 29, meet some of the folks involved in the CSA, and try some of the delicious potluck offerings.

You’ll find the Enright CSA Potluck on the calendar of events we’ve recently added to our website, too.

Have a Hankering for Fresh Greens?

It’s March, it was 70 degrees yesterday, and growing season is just around the corner. But, if you are already yearning for fresh produce, we have news for you! Charles and staff experimented with growing some greens in the unheated greenhouse this winter, and they did well. So there is chard and lettuce ready to harvest in the greenhouse right now, and Enright CSA members are welcome to come and do a little harvesting on their own—please feel free to take what you can use.

We had some of the chard on Saturday, cooked up with sauce and some eggplant I blanched and froze last summer when we were inundated with it, and accompanied by a salad of fresh-picked lettuce. It was one of the best meals I’ve had lately, and of course it had me hungry for more locally grown produce from the Enright CSA. First pickup is just about two months away, but for now, there’s a little CSA lagniappe available with these winter-grown greens.

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.