The Avalon Organic Gardens, Farm, and Ranch Report

The summer solstice has come and the abundance of summer vegetables are arriving, one after the other. You should have a wonderful selection and variety now and soon there will be eggplant (next week), okra, cucumbers, pole beans and, yes, tomatoes, and more. Many of you have been asking us about some of our greens mixes and we have been experimenting with different combination. For some of you they turned out be too spicy, so we are sending them now seperately for your convenience. Thanks for the feedback.

We are all adjusting and so are the plants to the more constant heat. Like we all need to wear hats and drink more water so do the vegetables. The hats are the partial shades either from their own leaf structure like summer squash or by planting under sunflowers or amaranths; tall plants. We encourage you all to start at least a little garden and experience the seasons that way. Its good to see you all each week and those we miss have a great meal or two or three or…; you might have noticed that the article below is a continuation of the series by the Breaking Through Concrete team; there are doing some great work; enjoy..

VERDOLAGA CON QUESO (with cheese)
1 quart purslane including stems; one-half cup cheese, shredded
Use purslane, including the stems, and carefully rinse. Gently boil for about two minutes or until tender. Drain the water and chop the purslane into smaller pieces. Return the purslane to the frying pan and shred the cheese over it. Keep the purslane in the pan just until the cheese melts. Be careful not to over-melt the cheese. Serve warm.
PICKLED PURSLANE
1 quart purslane stems and leaves; 3 garlic cloves, sliced; 1 quart apple cider vinegar (or old pickle, jalapeno juice,etc.); 10 peppercorns
Clean the purslane stems and leaves by rinsing with fresh water. Cut into 1″ pieces and place in clean jars with lids. Add the spices and pour the vinegar over the purslane. Keep this in the refrigerator and wait at least two weeks before using. Serve as a side dish with omelets and sandwiches.
VERDOLAGA CON HUEVOS (with eggs)
2 cups purslane, with stems, diced; 6 eggs; 1 cup onion; Butter
Carefully clean and rinse the purslane. Add the diced onion and purslane to a heated and buttered cast-iron skillet. Cook for about five minutes. Add the eggs and cook omelet-style. Serve with a tomato slice.

Sustainable Agriculture News: A return to the land, fresh food, in the backyards of the Delta.

Frank Simpson and Dorothy Gradey-Scarbrough in Dorothy\’s backyard garden.(Michael Hanson photos)

We drive south down Route 61 (aka The Blues Highway) in Mississippi, finding Dorothy and Owen Gradey-Scarbrough after church and Sunday Supper.

Dorothy and Owen stay beside Country Road 32, a half-mile and one left turn out of downtown Shelby. They live in a simple one-story ranch house with similar homes on either side. Yellow-green coco grass covers the front yards, with the greater landscape a mono-color green of soybean or corn. This is the Mississippi Delta, home of the Harvard of high-tech agriculture research stations (the USDA’s Delta States Research Center in Leland/Stoneville), and to the highest rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease in the nation.

Dorothy believes one of the solutions to these communities’ health issues lies in the backyards and side-yards and churchyards. Behind the Gradey-Scarbrough’s house lies part farm, part folk-art installation. On one acre, Owen and Dorothy raise rabbits (in cages suspended over a compost pile), chickens, and a few goats that climb up and down the upturned baptismal tub that welcomed both Dorothy and Owen into the church as infants.

Peaches, plums, apples, and pear trees offer occasional shade and their trunks support a series of life-size hip-hop celebrities (50 Cent, Beyonce, Eminem) on wood paintings salvaged from a shuttered juke joint. There are rows of okra, butter beans, squash, cucumber, spinach, watermelon, grapes, lavender, lemon balm, oregano, basil, sage.

“Back in the day, you could find tomatoes out there in the cotton fields,” Owen says. “You just go pick you a tomato, brush it off, and eat it right there. We used to pick okra in the middle of the cotton field. They’d just grow wild. Now they’re spraying this stuff and killing it out. I used to like walking through those fields.”

Dorothy and Owen, like most Delta residents over the age of 50, grew up on sharecropper farms. They chopped rows of cotton for 12 hours a day and made $3 to $12 for the work. The families never got ahead. That’s just how it worked until they started leaving for city jobs in the north.

“There was no option but to work in the fields,” Dorothy says. “That’s why a lot of people left the south — to get away from the fields.”

“To get away from this,” Owen holds out the hoe he’s been leaning on. “I did. Moved to New York and didn’t come back ’til I met this lady.”

Dorothy has been backyard gardening for almost 20 years. What began as a gift of chickens from Heifer International to Dorothy and Shelby has become the next satellite demonstration garden for a national movement aimed at teaching individuals about backyard and community gardening. In a town as small as Shelby, people notice and people listen to someone as strong, proud, and rooted as Dorothy, especially when she speaks through the 10 churches in town. But even the churches hesitated back in the mid ’90s.

“The churches weren’t ready [for farming/gardening],” she says. “Our minister said, ‘Isn’t that what we’re getting away from?’ I said, ‘We’ve already gotten away from it.’ It’s been a lost art. I tell them now it has nothing to do with sharecropping. It’s for you. It can save you money and can make you money when you sell at market. This isn’t working in the fields. This is bettering your family and your health. People are getting into it.”

And Dorothy’s ripples reach outside of Shelby. Will Allen of Milwaukee’s Growing Power organization, a national leader in the urban farm movement (see Grist’s coverage), has christened Dorothy and her MEGA operation (Mississippians Engaging in Greener Agriculture) as its first Regional Outreach Training Center in the country.

We meet Richard Coleman, the county supervisor, at his ranch house in town. The family crowd is just leaving from their Sunday supper — a big one since there was a birthday.

Richard shows us his plot out back, about 120 feet by 50 feet and full of okra, squash, butter beans, peas, tomatoes.

“I just sit indoors in an office,” he says. “I didn’t know what sweat was. So it’s a twofold thing for me — it provides vegetables for my family and a pastime for me. I’ve already lost ten pounds this season. And you have to travel to Cleveland south or Clarksdale north to get what you need and that gets expensive, just with gas bills. It’s no comparison to get it right here.”

About 20 yards away, a smaller plot of the same produce thrives in a small square amid the coco grass. A dozen kids stay cool in a large inflatable pool nearby. Sean Jefferson walks over.

Sean’s 32 years old and lives in the trailer next to Richard’s home. He works at Nature’s Catch, a bass-raising plant in Clarksdale, 20 miles north. His wife and four kids stay in the trailer with his mom and stepdad.

“My grandfather used to raise food,” he tells us. “I was about 11 or 12 when I had my first garden. I try to grow one every year. I usually just shovel it out but this year I tilled it. It cost me about $7 or $8 for seeds plus one bag of fertilizer. I grew it all from seed except for the tomato plants — bought those at a nursery.”

He tends to it every day. Comes home after work and chops a little bit, does it all by himself.

We visit a few other gardens. Louise, Dorothy’s sister, shares a long row with two other gardeners. She describes some of the local lingo: “choppin’” means weeding down the rows with the hoe. “Rippin’ and runnin’” means staying busy and getting things done. Nearby we see the Shiloh Baptist Church’s garden, where members of the church work a rotational schedule to grow produce that’s available for pick-up from the church fridge.

And our final stop takes us to Cornelius Toole’s rambling property down in Mound Bayou, five miles south of Shelby. It’s like the backyard, down-home version of Stoneville’s Big Ag experimental research station.

Maybe an answer to the Delta’s and the nation’s food deserts lies somewhere here among Toole’s mad-farmer-scientist laboratory of tilapia tanks, hand-built backyard irrigation pipes, chicken coops, greenhouses, and one huge, faded-green John Deere sinking into the weeds.

The Breaking Through Concrete team is taking a 21st century road trip to document the American urban farm movement. Driving across the country and back in a biodiesel-fueled, Internet-enabled short bus we’ve nicknamed Lewis Lewis, we’re visiting 14 diverse projects that are, in distinct ways, transforming our built environments and creating jobs, training opportunities, local economies, and healthy food in our nation’s biggest cities.

CSA Newsletter #9: Back to the Land in the Delta, Featured Vegetable: Purslane / Verdolaga

Sustainable Agriculture News: A return to the land, fresh food, in the backyards of the Delta.

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