by Sandy Johnson I have the perfect recipe for pesto. It came, quite insistently, from my friend Don. We were friends for 29 years: two generations of journalists working for The Associated Press in Washington. After a chance collaboration when the Soviets shot down a civilian Korean airliner in 1983, Don pretty much adopted me [...]
by Sandy Johnson At the corner of Ocean and Arizona streets, as waves from the Pacific crashed to the shore below us, my sister Sara and I turned to our left. We stopped dead in our tracks and fell uncharacteristically silent. Behold, the magnificence of the Santa Monica Farmers Market. We slowly walked its length, [...]
by Sandy Johnson I was drawn by her name. Juliet. A flirty name for a tomato, especially compared with he-man varietals like German Johnson or Beefmaster or Big Boy. I had grown tired of straight-up grape tomatoes and didn’t want a cherry (so 1980s) so I took a chance. And swooned for Juliet. Is it [...]
by Sandy Johnson Turns out there is a museum for everything. I decided to blog about carrots and wanted a snippet of history so, of course, I googled “carrot history” and discovered the Carrot Museum. Now I’m wildly overeducated and can tell you, with some authority, that the modern carrot originated in Afghanistan 5,000 years ago [...]
by Forrest Pritchard My heart goes out to my fellow farmers who live within the drought stricken region that now stretches almost nationwide. As you can see from the map, my own farm hasn’t been immune to the lack of rainfall (most of Virginia is currently experiencing ‘abnormally dry’ to ‘moderate drought’ conditions), but my [...]
by Sandy Johnson We didn’t plant any squash this year. It takes up too much room, the yield is either irritatingly small or aggressively large, yada yada. But in the normal course of events, Mother Nature gave us a volunteer. We watched it set blossoms for weeks, then months, before it finally revealed itself: Zucchini. [...]
by Sandy Johnson It’s illegal to raise chickens within the city of Alexandria. Yet, there they are, a beautifully colored flock of birds, maybe a dozen in all, living large in the city limits. They make me smile every time I see them. For contraband, they’re brazen – they’ve been pecking away alongside a well-traveled [...]
by Charles R. Raasch Raising tomatoes is a wonderfully frustrating hobby. If you expect perfection, it’s not for you. But the payoff is incredibly enticing: To me, there is no greater difference in the food chain between the taste of a home-grown tomato and the mass-produced red orbs you get at the grocery store. We [...]
by Forrest Pritchard Customers at farmers market are often surprised to learn that our farm is only sixty miles from Washington, D.C. We’re part of the ‘green belt’ that surrounds the city, a circle of agriculture that begins when the suburbs finally run out of momentum. It’s no coincidence that housing subdivisions stretch about 45 [...]
By Amanda West/ Photo by Brian Widdis for The Wall Street Journal Recently the Wall Street Journal covered a plan in Detroit to use large pieces of land in the city that have been abandoned by de-urbanization and population loss consolidated into urban farms. As a veteran in community revitalization and an urban farming advocate, this [...]
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