Green Coaches News

Over two years of green Saturdays

2012-01-13T07:46:00.000-08:00

We all wear different hats at different times. In my case, in addition to the 'sombreros' I get to wear as gardener and small organic grower, there's a third option in my hat rack: I manage the Alliance for the Arts' GreenMarket on Saturday mornings.

A bit of history: the GreenMarket started in 2009, with a mission to support local growers

and bring the highest quality foodstuffs to the

public. Founding members included an extraordinary Swiss lady with a passion for fine cheeses and preserves, Caroline Hostettler; the late Sally Maitland, progressive activist and part owner of Andy's Island Seafood in Matlacha; Lydia Black, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Arts; and organic farmer Ken Ryan, who briefly served as Market Master before passing the torch to me in September 2009.

The GreenMarket has been, and is, an adventure, an experiment, a way to try and put the beliefs and convictions of a bunch of people into practice: to try and do something, however insignificant, to make the place we live in more sustainable now, not in some future utopia, but right here, right now.

There's been highs and lows. At times, the

community showed amazing support, shopping for locally grown, for environmentally friendly, products and services. Other days, it seemed that everybody was at the big supermarkets and had forgotten about us. We fought like crazy to survive and to establish a green toehold in our community. We organized recycling drives and blood drives. We brought musicians and artists to perform for visitors. We put together free gardening classes, open to the public, by some brilliant growers and educators, like Andrea Guerrero and Ben Pino of Heartland Gardens, Kara Alfaro of Elata Natives, Frank Oakes of Food and Thought, Debbie Hughes and Todd Roy of the Edison Estates Gardens, Unruly Gardener Millisa Bell of the Holton Eco Preserve, and more. Above all, we had to make sure the GreenMarket would have a good selection of local food, consistently, every week. We never tried to be a big market, and are quite comfortable with our current size of about 20 to 30 vendors, but we had to make sure the quality was there.

The GreenMarket operates on a cooperative basis, and big decisions are made by all. An example: during our first year, we had to decide whether to remain open during the summer, or not. A majority voted yes. The summer season presents many challenges in our part of the world: there's much less locally grown produce, so we decided to allow our big local grower, Brittain Farms, to bring produce grown in South Carolina in addition to their Alva production. We had to reach a compromise there, because customers really, really want their tomatoes, summer and winter. Our citrus vendor, Sunrise Farms, is of course not present during summers, so we tried to focus on tropical fruit, some of it very unusual - mangoes, lychees, tamarind and such.

Another drawback of the summer season is that there's much less visitors, as a significant part of the county's population is seasonal, only here for the winter - we call them 'snowbirds', and they take their business elsewhere in the hot months. So we focused on the locals, by offering added attractions besides the shopping: music, art, kids' activities. Some wonderful chef friends started doing live 'cooking with local ingredients' demos, taking advantage of the fact that they have a bit more time to spare in the summer: Heath Higginbotham and Reiner Drygala of Bistro 41, and Eric Truglas of Lush French Bakery. When the weather became too brutally hot, we moved under the shade of the old trees in the Alliance's campus.

Now in our third year, we have reached a balance, and cater to a core group of supporters that shop with us consistently. We have become a bit of a social hub, too, where like-minded people come to meet each other, enjoy the music and the cooking, surf the free wi-fi, walk the dogs. We have a steady lineup of vendors that cover the range of locally grown food: a part-commercial, part-organic produce farm; a USDA Certified organic-only farm; a seasonal citrus farm; organic sprouts and herbs; honey; seafood; breads and other baked goods; and preserves.

This main group of vendors is complemented by a wide range of others, some of which are permanent, and some seasonal or depending on availability. Everything from soaps and essential oils to plants and gardening supplies to arts & crafts is represented, and let's not forget one of a kind items like quails and quail eggs, hydroponic lettuces, or heirloom, open-pollinated veggie seedlings.

Our friends in the media deserve a special thank you, because over the years they supported our little outfit so much, giving us a voice, allowing us to survive without a real advertising budget by informing the public of who we are and what we do, as in this, this, or this story, and many more...

To me, the GreenMarket has been, and continues to be, a wonderful experience, another environment where I can put together work and idealism, an arena to battle for a greener, more sustainable SW FL, having a lot of fun in the process, meeting old and new friends every Saturday, learning from farmers and gardeners and artisans, sampling delicious food and getting to know the history and the lore of the place.

Edison-Ford Estates horticulturalist presents free Edible Landscaping workshop at the GreenMarket

2011-10-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

A great garden doesn’t have to be ornamental; it can be beautiful and edible too. That's the message that Master Gardener Todd Roy will bring to the Alliance for the Arts' GreenMarket next Saturday, Oct 22nd, at 10 am. His presentation is one of the FREE gardening workshops that the GreenMarket has been hosting for the community.

Mr Roy will talk about ways to get the most out of your yard. He will discuss some of the many fruit trees and shrubs available to grow here in SW Florida. He will address some varieties and options for container gardening, as well as utilizing the vertical spaces in your yard. This talk is meant to give ideas for using your yard in more productive ways.

Todd grew up in a small mid-western town in Michigan with one traffic light, a working wheat mill and a community involved in 4-H and agriculture. He remembers some of his family being involved in dairy farming and raising corn, while others in his immediate family were very much into vegetable gardening. Todd also remembers many trips with his grandparents to the fields and orchards to pick fresh peaches, cherries, pears, plums, blueberries, strawberries and apples. He also helped them tend and harvest a large vegetable garden. Todd’s grandmother would can and freeze many of the fruits and vegetables that they harvested, thus enabling them to enjoy fruits and vegetables throughout the year.Todd attributes his interest in plants and horticulture to being raised in an agricultural and self-sustaining environment. He began gardening at home, but soon became involved with the Master Gardener program. Upon completion of the program he began doing volunteer work with the horticulturist at The Frederik Meijer Gardens. From there Todd’s garden began expanding and it was soon featured on the yearly tour of gardens. Being an artist himself, he also enjoyed painting the flowers he grew and invited other artist friends to paint in the garden too. Todd relocated to Florida in 2004 and was very excited to see all of the new plant options that he could grow. He eventually found a position with The Edison & Ford Winter Estates gardens that he had frequently visited and admired. Todd is now one of the horticulturists there and has since completed the Master Gardener program here in Florida. He enjoys working with plants, talking with others in the industry, as well as, a continued desire to learn more about the plant world.

Todd has enjoyed working with all varieties and facets of horticulture, but his passion has been that of sustainability, organic gardening and the edible landscape. He hopes to teach others the knowledge he has acquired and share any new information that he continues to gain.

So if you have an interest in growing at least part of the produce your family consumes right in your backyard, don't miss this FREE gardening class on Sat, Oct 22nd, at 10 am at the GreenMarket, corner of McGregor & Colonial in Ft. Myers.

Why I garden

2011-08-27T05:51:00.000-07:00

I was a city boy, not a country boy. I grew up in downtown Buenos Aires, a huge city of many million people, in an apartment building. I had a balcony in my room, a small balcony with iron railings, of a style popular 90 years ago, which was the age of the building. As far as I remember, I always kept plants there, along with some caged birds. The flat was right above a busy corner in the historic San Telmo district, with many lines of very noisy buses constantly driving by, sending up clouds of smoke and waves of noise that rattled up the old building. There was a bar downstairs that never closed, it was open 24 hours a day every day except Christmas. Patrons included taxi drivers playing dominoes and chess, families, bohemians and artists, druggies and drunks, whores... it all depended on what time of day, or night, it was. Three old Spaniards had owned it for decades, and they waited on the tables. Three shifts, with no days off. No days off except once a year, for Christmas. They really loved their jobs! They could have retired years ago, they were rich already, could have gone back to Spain or whatever, but no. They kept serving their customers, year in, year out.

So my balcony was far from an urban oasis - the vines I had planted may have been growing on the iron rails nicely, and once in a while I'd get a tomato or some basil, but there was always the roar of those old Mercedes Benz buses downstairs, or a drunken fight outside the bar. The police station was a block away, too, so they added their patrol car sirens to the cacophony.

Other than the balcony, the closest I came to experiencing 'country' life was on summer vacations, when I traveled to a small town to visit my cousins. There, I would marvel at the fact that we could ride our bikes everywhere, without parents being in the least concerned, as the town was really safe. I would enjoy finding hidden spots with my cousins, where we could light fires, steal peaches or sunflowers, tell tall stories and play. They had an older relative there, a teenage kid, and we all looked up to him, as he had rifles, a moped, fishing equipment, and great knowledge of the surrounding farms, woods and rivers. He also had a lot of stories. Most of them, I now realize, must have been bullshit. But when the town priest had to clear the church's bell tower of a bat infestation, he was the one tasked with doing it, and he went up there and did the job. That's the kind of kid he was, so us youngsters really admired him.

In the summers, I also traveled with my grandparents and younger cousin - different cousin, different side of the family - to a lovely resort in Cordoba province, a mountain area heavily settled by Germans, full of pine forests, Swiss-style chalets, and clear streams. My grandparents were young and very fit when I was a kid, and we would go on these long hikes that took most of the day. We had routes that we hiked every single summer: the waterfall, the tea house in the next village, Cabeza de Indio (a big rock shaped like a native's head), the cemetery, the dike we kept reinforcing every year to create a bathing pool, and the most challenging, mount Wank (pronounced 'Vank', in the German fashion), the tallest peak in the area.

My grandfather was the single most important influence of my childhood. He had grown up in Yugoslavia, in a wealthy Macedonian Jewish household, and sent to study in Greece and Switzerland before World War Two started. Then, he went back to his old country and joined the Resistance, taking to the mountains with Mashal Tito's partisans. He was strong, so he had to carry his unit's heavy machine gun in endless mountain treks, in stifling heat or freezing cold. He shot Germans, and was shot at - he had a huge bullet hole, and scars, above one of his knees. Many Jews perished during those years under Nazi rule, but by taking to the mountains and fighting, he survived. Eventually, he was able to escape to Italy, which had been liberated by the Allies, and there he married my grandmother. My dad was born in Rome, and they lived there a few years before emigrating to Argentina.

He was a giant of a man. Not in the physical sense, as he wasn't very tall, but in how tough he was, how smart, how determined, how charming and genial and with such a great sense of humor. He had this keen appreciation for nature, and we were lucky, my cousin and myself, to spend many summers with him in the mountains, drinking deep from him: his war stories, his jokes and songs, his commentary about everything under the sun, as he was very opinionated, an avid reader, and not in the least modest or shy. We would walk and walk, many kilometers, many hours, and talk. He always wore shorts and sandals, a little hat for the sun, and a small pack with some water, a Swiss army knife, and a few apples or nuts to share with us when we stopped to rest. He carried a golf club during our walks, and now and then, he would send us boys to collect a few pine cones, line them up along a ridge, and swing at them as he told us his stories and we watched them describe an arc and then tumble downhill. For the most part, we kids were happy and looking forward to our days trekking the hills, but now and then, especially as we grew older and entered our teenage years, we would be bitching about it, wanting to stay back at the hotel to watch TV or whatever. He had no patience for that crap, would kick our butts and get us going, with a smile or without. After a while, us boys would be happy again, glad to be in the woods with Gramps yet one more time, stopping to appreciate a bird's nest or a discarded skin some snake had writhed out of, drinking from clear streams, resting in the shade of old stone fences, jumping into deep pools at the foot of the waterfalls. We miss him. I miss him.

Anyway, except for the balcony, and for vacations, I was a city boy, so it's kind of surprising to me that I have developed such a passion for nature, and aspire to be a farmer. I can't think of anything more valuable or more deserving of respect and admiration than being a good gardener, a good farmer, a good beekeeper. I enjoy big cities, and have been able to visit, or live, in several. They are compact, serviced by good transit systems, and thus, energy efficient. They offer many cultural attractions, theatres, museums, bookstores and so on. You can sit at a coffeshop and read a book, meet people or just watch them go by, relax, think about the history and circumstances of the place, whether you're in London, Toronto, Guadalajara or Athens.

Despite being fond of cities, and keen to visit some more of them in the future, if I can, I know, as I approach middle age, that I'm the happiest in a country setting. Ideally, in a small farm that is within a reasonable distance to some urban center where one can go to stock on supplies and bring produce to market, but not in it. Outside. And not a huge town, either. I think I'm tolerably close to that ideal now, with my small homestead in Pine Island. Time will tell...

As I approached manhood, I enrolled in college. I consider that one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Perhaps not going to college per se, but the studies I chose: some vague, vapid thing called mass communications: some sociology and linguistics, some writing workshops, a bit of history and politics, a course or two about graphics production, TV and radio, a sprinkling of computers and design. Nothing, in a word, that would have required me to attend classes for several years to learn, nothing that you'd need to show a diploma of in order to prove that you were proficient at it. I should have stayed clear of wasting time with such a thing, and had I really wanted to attend university, should have studied biology, like my younger sister. But she's smart. Much, much smarter than me. And a harder worker.

All I wanted was something easy, that required next to no effort from me, leaving me more or less free to follow my true inclinations at the time: chase girls, do drugs, and above all, take time off to travel. Much, much time off. The first years of college, 3 or 4 months out of every year, during the Southern Hemisphere summer break. Then, whole sabbaticals. My last few courses, and my thesis (yes, you have to write a thesis to graduate from that dreck. No, I'm not kidding) were handled from far away. From Santiago first, and La Paz later, as I was living in those cities, having followed a woman there, who was finishing her own studies in Chile before moving to Bolivia. In mass communications too, if you must know. It seems the damn thing was en vogue during the 90's.

By then, I had been working in that field for a while. I had been doing advertising, and editing a couple of smallish magazines, back in Buenos Aires. In Bolivia, thanks to this woman's contacts rather than to any talent of mine, I had landed an exciting job with a political campaign, and after that, a gig with a newspaper, with my own office and whatnot. But I already knew, deep inside, that such a lifestyle didn't really bring any fulfillment to me. Didn't, as Marley had phrased it, 'satisfy my soul'.

In the course of my travels and adventures, I had experienced other lifestyles, had followed other routines and had had glimpses of what it meant to be close to the land, to be a steward of the land, to plan and work and pray for a bounty from the land. The most important of those experiences, I think, was a period of several months that I spent as a volunteer in an Israeli 'kibbutz', or collective farm. There, I worked long hours in the avocado groves, fixing irrigation lines, weeding, but mostly, picking, picking, picking perfect avocados for export to Europe, in the company of other volunteers and some hired Thai workers. I recall the desert sun filtering through the dense foliage, the ocassional chamaleon staring at me from a tree branch, the attack helicopters flying overhead, laden with missiles, towards missions bombing Hizbollah positions in Lebanon. The whole thing was surreal. I had arrived there with a fellow I had just met some weeks before, in Greece, and who would become one of my closest friends. We shared a rustic cabin in the 'volunteer village', just behind the kibbutz's cemetery and an abandoned orange grove. The orange trees still produced, by the way, and us penniless volunteers laboriously hand-squeezed the fruit at the end of the day, to combine with cheap vodka for cocktail hour.

There were many other experiences, in different parts of the world: homemade meals in an Italian homestead, prepared the same way and using the same ingredients for hundreds of years. The sights and sounds and smells and flavors of Mexican village markets. Andes highlands peasants preparing chuño, the freeze-dried potatoes that would feed them in the winter, and butchering llamas to make jerky. A stint working with some Germans in what they claimed was their organic farm project in the hills of Samothraki... in fact, all they wanted to do, I found out after a while, was drink and smoke hash all the time, while I painstakingly hoed the field, until the neighbor, a bona fide Greek peasant, picked a fight with us, irritated (rightly, I think) by our intrusion, by the loud Pink Floyd music, or by the fact that we ate one or two of his goats. Fed up, I grabbed my backpack and left. Of that, I remember a cool stream, shaded by old platana trees on its way to the Mediterranean, dotted with small cultivated fields on the banks. A sight, I daresay, that hadn't changed much in four thousand years. Four thousand years.

Chance, luck, or fate, brought me to Southwest Florida as I approached my 30th birthday. A friend had a coffeshop in Fort Myers Beach, and I tried to figure out the seasons here as I prepared lattes and toasted bagels, looking out the window now and then, checking out the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Still flat. Always flat, it seemed, except when we got those awesome tropical storms. So unlike other beaches I had seen, where the sound of the surf was a constant companion, and the water cool and refreshing. The town worked hard to accomplish a laid back, relaxed beach village look. But it didn't really work. This is America, after all. Maybe it was the local Hooters that ruined it for me. Or the hellish traffic on the main - on the only - drag, Estero Blvd. Or the many tourist traps, crammed full of Chinese junk.

Anyway, long story short. I met a woman, got married, kids followed. What to do? It was time to move out of Ft. Myers Beach and into Ft. Myers proper. Get an apartment. Get a job. I was getting older, had responsibilities now. The Clinton era was at an end. Gore hadn't gotten enough votes. Hanging chads. Then, 9/11. Time to hunker down. No more fun and games, no more travels and mushrooms and tacos at the village market du jour.

I looked for a job doing more of the same, and landed the marketing office of a personal injury lawyer firm. Those ambulance chasers. Horrible. Sucked my energy dry every day, I don't know exactly how. Maybe it was the necktie. Or the shameless lying on an everyday basis, to get folks who had just had an accident to 'let us take care of you'. A few years of that. Watch TV at the end of the day, drink beer, get a bit fat. The babies are growing up. Then, thinking I'd move up the foodchain a bit, or at least be able to come to work wearing shorts, I signed up with an advertising agency. More lying, more endless hours in front of a screen, figuring out ways to make people buy cars they can't afford and don't need, for the wrong reasons, and never reading the proverbial small-print disclaimers they should be paying more attention to. More wasted time in front of a screen at the end of the day, more 'Law & Order' and 'Chappelle's Show', as the beer and the bad food really started to make an impact on my waist (welcome to America!). Kids walk now, talk, surprise me every day with their questions. We get away whenever we can, to the beach, camping, but it's never enough time. I'm chained to those screens, I have to go back to them soon, or else... besides, my marriage is falling apart. I discover my wife likes church and the mall. I hate church, and I hate the mall. Her friends are royal bores. Are we royal bores, too? Oh, the conundrum. The dilemma. What to do?

One fine morning, destiny, or God, or the business world, or someone, decides for me. I'm summoned to the boss' office, given some explanation about business being way down, and let go, with a bit of severance money and best wishes. In fairness, I must say it was probably justified: I hadn't really been giving the job my all for a long time, fed up with the routine, with the long and arbitrary hours, with the sheer idiocy of it all. But that paycheck every two weeks kept me going back to the nondescript office park, kept me drinking the bad coffee and laughing at the same old jokes, thinking, 'this is life, after all, this is what responsible adults do... I'll hang another year, another month, two more weeks, until the next paid vacation'.

I didn't do anything for a few days. Weeks, months. I just thought and thought. I picked my children up from school, made them dinner, waited for the wife to arrive from her job. I stopped watching TV. I started writing down my ideas. I went back, way back, into my memories, into my life experience, looking for answers to the old questions: who am I? What do I want? What is life all about?

I thought of my room's balcony in the old Buenos Aires flat, of the pleasure it gave me to sit down there and putter around with pots and plants and a bag of store-bought soil. Of the excitement when a seed I had planted finally sprouted, of walking back from school quick to see how much it had grown that morning. I thought of summers long ago, of riding my bike and looking at endless fields of sunflowers and corn on both sides of the road, of the smells of fruit orchards in bloom, and the liberating feeling of not having to go to school or do anything other than roam the countryside for weeks. I remembered my grandfather, happy, smiling, sweaty, shirtless, walking briskly as we boys tried to keep up with him, stopping to point to a magnificent old oak, or to admire the garden of a mountain cottage. Was it childhood, that happiness I remembered, was it being a boy? Or was it being outside? Out of doors? Walking the land, smelling the pines, laughing at a cow farting in her pen? Both, maybe. Childhood, alas, was lost. But being outside? Out of doors? The doors of perception suddenly opened, and I had my epiphany, my moment of truth. No, let me capitalize that. My Moment of Truth.

I'm going to use the f word a lot in this paragraph, so if you're offended by it, skip it. I won't use it after this, I promise. I decided I wasn't going back to 'mass communications', whatever the fuck that is. I was not going to be involved in any more marketing, editing, or creating fucking ads in front of a fucking screen. I was, I am, going to spend the rest of my working life, or of my life, period, working outside, planting trees and peppers and feeding chickens, weeding, hauling manure, sweating, being bitten by gnats and mosquitoes, stopping to admire a bald eagle or a pileated woodpecker and then going back to fixing the water pump, going back to watering the avocadoes, going back to whatever I'm doing, but not going back to a cubicle or an office, so help me God. My childred won't starve and I won't starve, even if I have to eat pinto beans with an onion and a bit of sausage for the rest of my life, drive a piece of shit and mend my underpants rather than buying new ones. I'm turning that fucking TV off and I'm taking the damn thing to the curb. I'll only use a computer if and when I feel like it, but never too much. I won't, will NOT, darken the door of church or mall ever again. I will somehow make a living working outside, gardening, farming. I'm old enough to do whatever I fucking well please, and that's what I want to do, and that's that. Final. Non-negotiable. Damn the fucking consequences.

It felt great, I have to tell you. Everyone ought to have one or two Moments of Truth in their lives.

Of course, a nagging, irritating inner voice started torturing me at once: 'But you don't know enough, you're too old to learn, you're a city boy, who are you kidding?'. I just ignored it. Ignored it and went forward and got started. You have to get started somewhere. So I got involved with things. With people and places I had had no time to check out when I was chained to the screens and the offices. I discovered a fascinating side of this part of the world. I started going to rural areas and talking to farmers. I started volunteering at school gardens and community gardens and beach clean-ups and grassroots organizations. There was no money in it. Didn't matter. I made friends with an older organic farmer with some health issues who could use the help. And going to his farm to help, and to learn. Two, three times a week, for a year, then for two years. I can't remember how many gardens, community or otherwise, I helped get started. Some prospered, some didn't. At some point, I felt confident enough in my skills to offer a service that few others had thought of, creating custom food gardens for people. Surprisingly, customers appeared. A trickle at first, more later. The US Census Bureau hired me for a few months, during the summer, which is a bad time for gardening here anyway, so I made a bit of money with that, and met a lot of interesting folks, going door to door with my forms. More garden work materialized. Someone thought of me to run a small farmers' market part time, and I took that gig, too. Met a lot more farmers that way. Nursery people, gardeners, poultry people, bakers, tropical fruit people. My marriage ended, on good terms, but ended. I pestered my folks back in the old country for a small loan, and found some cheap land in Pine Island. Bought it, put a trailer in it. Started farming it. My kids come on weekends. They love it. I think they love it. We don't have a TV here. The rooster wakes us up at 5:30 every morning. I let them sleep a bit more as I drink my hot mate tea and consider the day ahead. Every day is different. Every garden is different. Every season is different. The chores are many. The work, hard. Sometimes I have to work at other people's farms and gardens, others I can stay and work on my projects here. Everglades tomatoes. Chickens, ducks and quail. A few fruit trees. Stuff breaks down all the time, and needs to be fixed. I use a lot of recycled materials, try not to buy anything. I barter a lot. I help my friends, and my friends help me. I'm outside. I'm out of doors. Most of the time, I'm out of doors. I'm writing this outside, by the fire I built to keep the skeeters away. The south end of Pine Island is really dark tonight.

I love it. I love being outdoors, and watching things grow. That's why I garden.

Cooking local with Chef Truglas

2011-08-11T07:59:00.000-07:00

The GreenMarket at the Alliance for the Arts (Colonial & McGregor - Saturday mornings) continues to offer the community tools to be more sustainable in their everyday life. On Saturday, Aug 13th, starting at 10 am, the GreenMarket will welcome Chef Eric Truglas, owner of French Bread Oven and partner at Lush, who will give visitors a gastronomical guided tour of delicious dishes to prepare using fresh and local ingredients. The results will be available for everyone to sample, free of charge.

Chef Truglas is a classically trained chef and master baker, who studied at the Culinary School of the University of Versailles in France before holding the position of Executive Chef at several high end restaurants, including, in this area, the Bonita Bay Club and Sanibel Harbour Resort. Active in the Slow Food movement, he specializes in using seasonally available local produce for his creations. He has authored the book “Southwest Florida Cooking With a French Flair.” 'I enjoy cooking at the GreenMarket because it allows me to improvise and be creative, and have fun with visitors and vendors', Chef Truglas explains. 'There's so much one can do using ingredients that didn't have to travel a long distance to get to market, so many interesting culinary combinations. And everything is fresher and tastes better!'

On August 13th, Chef Truglas will have different local ingredients in his culinary palette to choose from, including free range chicken and quail eggs, fresh produce, locally caught seafood, high quality olive oils infused with locally grown herbs, honey and preserves, organic microgreens, and of course, traditional French baked items, all available from local sources at the GreenMarket.

July: Free Gardening Classes at the GreenMarket

2011-06-28T11:41:00.000-07:00

Every Saturday in July, the GreenMarket at the Alliance for the Arts (McGregor & Colonial, Ft Myers - Saturdays in July at 10 am) is offering free gardening classes by expert gardeners and farmers, who will present a subject and then answer questions, perhaps help you get better at understanding our challenging summer gardening scenario. So, if you have some time and want to exercise your green thumb, here's the schedule. All presentations are free, just make sure you bring a notepad and pen:

Sat, July 2nd, 10am: Edible Landscaping. Millisa Bell is a Master Gardener who has been gardening in the area for a number of years. She currently manages the Holton Eco-Preserve, whose mission is "helping people steward our earth through classes and events which promote sustainable lifestyles and enhance the native habitat of our community". She also volunteers with IFAS Extension Office to help promote sustainable practices in the community. Recently, Millisa has started keeping bees, and incorporating apiculture into her food garden projects.

Sat, July 9th, 10am: Organic... what does that mean? An introduction to organic food production. Farmer Ken Ryan, of Herban Gardens, has been growing food for decades, first as farm manager in the Boston area, and in SW FL for the last 15 years. Ken specializes in microgreens, herbs and produce, and counts the area's best restaurants and chefs as loyal customers. A board member of Slow Food SW FL, Ken will be guiding you through the complicated matter of what's organic and what isn't, the complexity of USDA organic certification and why some growers don't pursue it even though they don't use chemicals in their operation, how to live without pesticides, and much more. Don't miss this opportunity to hear what a true gardening and farming pioneer has to say about this complex matter.

Sat, July 16th, 10am: The path to self-sustainability. Andrea Guerrero, Chief Operations Officer of Heartland Gardens, will offer some insights about how to minimize the pressure of the economic recession by teaching residents how to become more self-sustainable. She will be talking about current projects you can get involved in, and what concrete steps YOU can take to start growing your own food.

Sat, July 23rd, 10am: Gardening with natives: an introduction. Kara Alfaro, owner of Elata Natives, will guide us through the ins and outs of incorporating local, storm-resistant plants that require minimal watering and fertilizing into our garden project. Elata Natives is always striving to meet the needs of the Florida environment, and prides itself on creating outdoor spaces which enliven the senses and compliment the existing attributes of each site.

Sat, July 30th, 10am: Rainbarrels and rainwater collection and use in the garden. Master Gardener Todd Roy is a horticulturalist at the Edison & Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers. He will be giving us an introduction to rainbarrels, tips on how to use water wisely for gardening in SW FL, and will talk about his latest project, a solar-powered rainbarrel irrigation system.

Slow Food Ortiz Market guided visit

2010-11-09T06:57:00.000-08:00

Slow Food Southwest Florida Invites you on a culinary journey

What: Explore the fascinating foods at the Ortiz Flea Market with Santiago De Choch

When: 8 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 14

Where: 1501 Ortiz Ave., Fort Myers

Cost: $10 donation, benefits the Slow Food Southwest Florida community garden grants program

RSVP: slowfoodsouthwestflorida@gmail.com

Details: Santiago De Choch, an Argentinean-born world traveler, owner of Green Coaches and a Slow Food Southwest Florida board member, will lead this unique field trip at Lee County’s longest-running flea market, where the primary language is Spanish and the ambience resembles that of a south-of-the-border market. The tour will focus mainly on edible goods, examining what’s local and what isn’t, how it is grown and by whom. Learn about nopalitos, the edible pads of the prickly pear cactus; fruit known as quenepas; sugarcane and Mexican ice cream, among other things. Sample tacos al pastor, pan dulce and purchase fresh corn tortillas. You’ll also have a chance to shop at stands offering sombreros and boots, plants and piñatas, religious items, CDs and a host of other items.

Don’t delay! This event is limited to the first 20 people who sign up. We expect a waiting list and Santiago has graciously volunteered to conduct additional trips in the next couple of months, if demand warrants.

SW FL ready to lead in biofuel production

2010-06-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

As the terrible, ongoing BP Deepwater Horizon spill painfully reminded us, we've played sorcerer's apprentice too long when it comes to fossil fuels. We've based our entire lifestyle around them, starting with coal during the Industrial Revolution, and getting addicted to cheap, plentiful oil in the 20th century.

This addiction has gone out of control. The environmental consequences are nothing short of catastrophic. Geopolitically, we're bogged down in long, costly wars that only the criminally naive believe are motivated by vagaries such as 'bringing democracy to the Arab world'. We are in bed with hostile, backward regimes, such as Saudi Arabia's or Nigeria's, because we need their light sweet crude. And above all, as the reality of Peak Oil becomes more and more apparent, we are realizing that hey, the stuff is running out anyway, and no amount of 'drill, baby, drill' is going to change that.

That's why it makes me so proud to see glimmers of the old American can-do spirit in local entrepreneurs Harold 'Lee' Crews and Susan MacFarlan, who are working hard to make our part of the world a leader in biofuels research and production.

A quick note to explain that biodiesels are different from ethanol in many respects. They are made from dedicated crops - thus, not competing with food crops such as corn or sugar cane - pressed rather than distilled, and their oils used on a wide range of diesel engines.

Lee and Susan, along with Extension Agent Roy Beckford and others, have been researching biofuel crops, including Jatropha Curcus, Pongamia Pinnata, Camelina, Canola, and others, for a long time, and are now moving out of the research phase and getting ready to go into production, as the $3M processing facility behind the State Farmers' Market on Edison proves.

In addition to the machinery and storage tanks there, you'll find rows of experimental crops in different stages of development. Local producers of organic fertilizers, like Bob Donnelly and Billy Sol, have teamed up with Lee and Susan to make the unthinkable happen: growing our own energy in an environmentally friendly fashion, locally, and processing it right here. Many area farmers are starting to dedicate part of their acreage to this project, as Lee Crews manages a difficult act - finding the funding for the facility, making sure the necessary crops will be there when we need them, exploring potential markets, and much more.

Lee Crews and Susan MacFarlane are in tune with the future, and are true visionaries that deserve our support. I encourage everyone who is 'mad as hell' at the BP spill to redirect their energies in a positive way - for example, by getting interested in what's going on with biofuel research right here and supporting Lee and Susan's work in any way you can, by volunteering, by helping them find local farmers to grow the stuff, by promoting them, by putting whatever skills you may have at their disposal.

Susan's website, Agri-Fuel Feedstocks, is here. Florida Department of Agriculture's website is here, or you can email Lee at crewsh@doacs.state.fl.us or call 239-332-6910. There's a few pictures of my visit to the facility here. I must thank these friends for taking the time to show me around, answer my questions, and even giving me some Jatropha plants to grow at my farm.

An island, revisited

2010-04-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

One of the things I remember from my younger years is being obsessively into Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), best known for his novel Brave New World, a dystopia of control over the individual and crass commercialism. The fact that The Doors of Perception was a companion of many travels, tucked inside my backpack, should say something about my interests back then. But there's a third book by this great author, Island, that hasn't received as much attention as the other two I mentioned.

Island was published in 1962, shortly before Huxley's death. It deals with ecological problems, like pollution and overpopulation, and proposes ways by which an enlightened, truly free people could overcome them. In that sense, it's about balance, making the right compromises between technology and respect for nature, personal freedom and the welfare of the community, the ying and the yang.

Balance is what came to mind when visiting Michael Wallace's Pine Island farm again, a few days ago. The right compromises. A lot of the work is done by hand by Mike and a handful of volunteers, but there's an orange Kubota tractor parked somewhere, ready for action. Most of the produce is grown using organic methods, but seeking an USDA certification would impose such an effort on the small farm, that it's not even discussed. Fine, one of a kind gourmet herbs and vegetables are grown, but without forgetting our tropical staples: sweet potatoes, peppers, mangoes, papayas. And so on and so forth.

Island, the novel, had a lot of Eastern, Oriental elements to it, as does Island Botanicals, the farm: from farmer Mike's fascination with design elements from the Far East, to the large Ling tree and clusters of mature bamboo everywhere, used for trellises and light construction.

In another post a while ago, I mentioned how much I respect Mr Wallace's approach to growing food in this part of the world, and what a great place his domain is; I won't go there again, but I wanted to add that Mike Wallace is one of the few local farmers I know who is making a serious effort at widening the range of what can be grown here in the summer, a tricky season in South Florida. Efforts have been underway to increase the area under shade, new and old crops are being tried, and hopes are high for the upcoming hot months.

Island Botanicals brings vegetables, herbs, fruit, microgreens and fresh eggs to the GreenMarket every Saturday morning, and has built a loyal clientele that keeps coming back for more. So there's another ying and yang there, I guess: making a decent living and conducting a business successfully, without losing touch with the soil, the ultimate realities of toiling under the sun to slowly create a meal out of a seed or a cutting... and keeping a healthy sense of humor in the process. Hard to achieve all this, but not impossible, as this Pine Island farmer proves Saturday in and Saturday out.

Don't forget to check out some pictures of Mike's farm during a recent visit here, or to visit the Alliance for the Arts every Saturday morning to see what's growing in Pine Island.

GreenMarket News

2010-04-26T16:38:00.000-07:00

Exciting things happening at the GreenMarket! The GreenMarket at the Alliance of the Arts will stay open through the summer, offering fresh local products to residents and visitors, including: locally caught fish, local honey and eggs, fresh fruit, herbs and produce, bread and baked goods, plants, organic fertilizers and garden supplies, organic skin care products, non-toxic household cleaners, gourmet cheeses, chocolate, and coffee, as well as t-shirts, pottery and handicrafts.

New summer hours starting in June will be 8am to 12 noon. The GreenMarket provides plenty of shade under the old mango trees, it's kid friendly, with many free artistic and educational activities oriented towards the little ones, and pet friendly as well. Live music is played on select Saturdays, and customers are welcome to visit the art exhibits at the Alliance of the Arts building and the various shows and activities at the amphitheater area, on the other side of the main building.

We're proud to announce that all 4 farms with a presence at the GreenMarket plan on bringing fresh, locally grown produce, herbs and fruit during the difficult growing season of the Summer, in the months of June through September. These are all bona-fide growers, receive periodical inspection visits and have been bringing 100% locally grown veggies, some of them using organic methods, although not USDA organic certified.

In addition to seasonal Florida staples such as avocado and mango, the GreenMarket growers plan to have a variety of produce available: heat-resistant Everglades tomatoes, egglplants, peppers, okra, zucchini, yams, leaf vegetables, Muscadine grapes and more, in addition to a variety of herbs both freshly cut and potted. Microgreens (sprouts) are available as well. For a limited time, the GreenMarket will allow some non-local produce, clearly labeled and not imported, to supplement any shortages of locally grown staples. The main focus of the GreenMarket continues to be providing a suitable venue for connecting local farmers with socially and environmentally-conscious buyers, as well as fresh food enthusiasts.

The GreenMarket continues to spearhead efforts to turn Lee County's attention towards more sustainable practIces, encouraging the recycling of used cell phones and printer cartridges as well as paper and plastic, glass and aluminum containers.

Another area the GreenMarket is bringing innovation is in the availability of 100% organic worm tea as a bio-fertilizer. The compost tea is safe to use on any plants, both on roots and as a foliar, even during the rainy season, when City and County ordinances prohibit the use of chemical fertilizers. This bio-fertilizer increases growth and yields significantly. This compost tea is locally produced during the week, and customers are very welcome to bring their own gallon or half-gallon reused milk and juice jugs - this ensures a lower price for the product, and limits the proliferation of plastic containers, in however limited a capacity. Local gardeners and farmers strongly endorse this product, and everybody is encouraged to take home free samples of the compost tea and check out the results for themselves.

Finally, Sloan-Greaner Enterprises, GreenMarket's authorized Wow Green environmentally friendly cleaning products vendor, announces USDA Organic certification for its line of organic skin care products. With the use of these gentle and minimally processed creams and ointments, you leave a number of noxious chemical out of the equation of personal and skin care. All organic skin care products are available as samples in small sized containers, ensuring the customer has the ability to select what works best for her.

Sunrise Citrus joins GreenMarket

2010-01-05T05:33:00.000-08:00

I'm looking at a press clipping from 1978 that features Bob ("a farmer from Arkansas") and Anna ("a Boston college student") Waite, then spending their second winter in SW FL, growing and selling citrus. Amazingly, they have changed little since then. And they are still growing and selling citrus, plus avocados, tropical fruit, and vegetables, 30+ years later.

Navel and red navel, Hamlin, AmberSweet, Pineapple and Valencia oranges; Fallglo, Dancy, Sunburst and Punkan tangerines; White, Pink, Ruby Red, Asian Pummelo, and Star Red Ruby grapefruits; and Mayer and Bearss lemons are part of what Sunrise Citrus (and associated growers, as they are a co-op) are bringing to the GreenMarket. You may be interested in seeing some pictures of their operation here.

Journalist Drew Sterwald of the News-Press wrote a story recently ('Tangerine Tango', 12/2/09) that presents a nice overview of the citrus industry in SW FL, including a bit about history, recipes, etc, focusing on tangerines. About the Waites, he says that "since they bought their land in 1983 and turned it into a farm, they've lost half of an annual crop to hurricanes, survived the threat of citrus canker and seen acres and acres of SW FL farmland swallowed by development."

Haven't we all seen so much good land swallowed by 'growth'... that's one of the reasons it's so important to support local farmers, to make it worth their while to farm, creating long-lasting relationships with the land, knowing that they and their families will still be there 10, 20, 30 years from now.

Talking heads and free market hacks talk about protectionism like it's a bad thing, but I think there should be a lot more tariffs and taxes for imported goods, especially imported fruit and produce.

During my travels when I was younger, I had an opportunity to see some agricultural practices in Mexico and elsewhere, and they are dismal, with no regards for workers' rights or the environment. If we let all that produce into our supermarkets to pay a few pennies less and make the fat cats a big profit, then we need to understand that there's hidden costs to cheap asparagus and oranges: near-slavery conditions, polluted land and streams, and unhealthy produce that tastes like cardboard from being picked too early.

And it works both ways: farmers in Central America who have been growing corn and beans for the local markets, using organic methods and heirloom varieties for many generations, get pushed out by the subsidized, cheap prices of giant industrial agriculture concerns in the US and their Monsanto genetically modified frankencrops. A whole way of life is lost forever, just like a way of life is lost here in Florida every time some greedy moron decides to bulldoze a citrus grove to build a gated community or a shopping plaza.

It's happening everywhere, and it's our responsibility to do what we can to stop the trend. One thing I found I have in common with the Waites is that we are all former kibbutz (Hebrew word for “communal settlement”) volunteers. They spent time in Kfar Blum, in the Golan Heights, I was a volunteer in Yakum, near Netanya on the coast, and an Israeli friend tells me that real estate deals and the older generations passing away are slowly putting an end to the whole kibbutzim dream. To think of the avocado and citrus groves where I spent some of the happiest moments of my youth being replaced by shopping and factories is beyond sad.

So I guess in that sense I'm a conservative: I want to keep whatever's good that previous generations have left us. Fruit groves are unquestionably good. They are good in Florida, good in Israel, good in Brazil. It's true that sometimes it makes more economic sense to raze them to the ground and build Chucky Cheeses in their place; that's the more reason to not let economics rule our lives. We need a more holistic approach, one that incorporates not just what's good for the economy, but also what's good for the land, and what's good for future generations.

I'm very happy that Bob and Anna's Sunrise Farms have joined the GreenMarket at the Alliance for the Arts, and wish them much success there!

At the drive-in

2009-12-25T05:21:00.000-08:00

The flea market at the drive-in in North Fort Myers is and isn't like a lot of Third World open-air markets I visited in Latin America. It is a lot like them in the random assortment of merchandise on offer, the crowds, the hustling and bustling. There's differences, too: you won't find vendors casually offering handguns and assault rifles in Guadalajara, La Paz or Valparaíso.

Strolling around, looking to meet with a citrus grower I want to do business with, I noticed another difference with the markets I remember from my youth. It's kind of hard to explain, but I saw a lot of tough faces and hard stares there. Market days in Latin America are joyous events, and I don't mean to say that everybody is laughing all the time, but the atmosphere is usually relaxed and laid back. Vendors hawk their wares with musical, outlandish, funny-as-hell claims and rhymes, 'if you like the good stuff come see here, if you don't, don't', 'hurry up and get yours before my wife kills me for selling so cheap', 'ladies, these pumps will make your ass look like Shakira's!'... you get the picture. If you understand the language, you have to smile as you walk by, booth keepers smile right back at you, and when you're interested, you ask, 'how much?' and start haggling right away. You never pay the asked for price, that's rule number one, and you bargain with a smile, trying to outwit the vendor, which is never an easy thing to do.

Anyway, the point is, that is not the vibe I got from this particular market, on the contrary, I saw a lot of anger there. As in, 'why am I reduced to being here trying to sell my collection of NASCAR model cars and the jet-ski I got when I refinanced?'.

In my experience, the markets where poor people congregate are always the best, the most lively and interesting. The poor in Latin America have been poor all their lives, dating back generations. They have learned to make do and get by with very little, and a lot of times they are no less happy about their lot in life than better off people. One of the happiest persons I've ever seen was a toothless old Indian woman in a market in Oaxaca that I bought a bag of roasted, salted chapulines (grasshoppers) from, years ago. I ended up sitting with her all morning, being introduced to all the other vendors, sharing my snack with them and being offered endless cervezas by people many degrees poorer than I was.

In contrast, a lot of the poor at the drive-in fleamarket have only recently become so. A few years ago, work clearing land for new developments or hanging sheet rock was plentiful and well-paid, the value of houses kept creeping up month after month, and opportunities for refinancing one's mortgage and take some cash for new toys were everywhere. A lot of those toys are on sale now, at places like the drive-in, craigslist and e-bay.

This is all very commonplace, and has been said a million times by much better writers and observers of reality. I guess my unique approach to the subject lies in noticing the lack of joie de vivre I saw at this market, compared to the rancheras and jokes and smiles in markets where even poorer people congregate. I guess it will take some time for us here in the U.S. to re-adjust our expectations, realize a lot of our wealth wasn't real but imagined, and discover that you can still live a happy life with a lot less material posessions.

Here's what worries me: I look right, there's a bunch of people with long faces, stressed out about unpaid bills, jobs lost and mounting debt; look left, there's the fellow selling shotguns and pistols. Enough said, right? And I'm a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, don't take me wrong. But isn't it time someone took a break from receiving peace prizes and playing golf with bankers, and went on national TV to explain that the good times are not coming back, that a new New Deal is in the works to put people back to work building rail lines and solar panels, and that we should tighten our belts and act like adults about it? Instead of propping up the Wall St. greed machine and priming it for the next bubble of imaginary wealth?

I'll just leave here with a very striking image that I think describes the drive-in flea market perfectly, one little vignette that speaks louder than the fruit and gun and golf ball vendors, or the faux cowboy wearing big sideburns and crooning Johnny Cash songs to a karaoke machine, or the preacher hoping to bring some souls to salvation next to a table laden with rusty tools and odd bits and ends for sale: there's this fellow, right. And he's a big fellow, 300+ lbs at least, big frame, long blonde hair and beard, probably in his mid-40's. And he's brought something to market, and is sitting right next to his truck. His truck is a Dodge Ram 3500. 6.7 L Turbo Diesel engine, with a payload of over 5,000 lbs (about 2 and a half tons), and a towing capacity of about 17,000 lbs; let's not even go into the fuel economy of this monster, it's too depressing. But what is this guy selling from the back of his mighty truck? Chinese-made toy cars. He has a few boxes of Chinese battery powered little cars. And he's mad he's not selling any. They go for $4 each, or 3 for $10. He has a few on display on a folding table, and my kid approaches to check them out. 'Don't touch anything, kid', he says, and shoots me an evil look. I grab my kid and give the guy the evil eye, too, before walking away. I don't buy Chinese junk, anyway, on principle. Least of all, from overweight clowns hoping to be yet another middleman profiting from slave labor and lax environmental regulations a world away. You want to bring something to market? Go make something yourself, grow some tomatoes, bozo.

Sustainable Initiatives

2009-12-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

Last Dec. 4th, the usual suspects got together to check out what's being done to improve sustainability locally, and listen to some amazing presentations by very smart people, including Dr. Harold Wanless, University of Miami (Sea level Rise, Changes in Florida’s Coasts), Tom Champeau, Regional Director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (Habitat & Species on the Front Line of Climate Change), and Dr. Heike Lueger, Chief Scientist, Carbon Solutions America (The Future of Carbon Trading & its Impact in Florida Economy), among others.

The speaker I was most interested in, though, was Roy Beckford, UF/IFAS Agriculture & Natural Resources Agent, who talked about "The Prospects of Jatropha curcas & Sustainable Biodiesel". Years ago, I was working on some projects around a farm I owned at the time, and needed help and information. I wrote to Roy, and he wrote right back, sending along a ton of useful info that I was able to put in practice immediately. I've been a big fan ever since. And after meeting a number of local farmers and gardeners, it seems to me that each and every one of them has something good to say about this helpful and good-natured guy. Oh, and of course I also appreciate the work of Martha Avila, his sidekick at IFAS, so I wouldn't have missed his presentation for anything.

Mr Beckford has been on the forefront of groundbreaking research on Jatropha curcas as a biodiesel feedstock in Florida and other tropical environments for a number of years now, and his work is starting to gain momentum, as data accumulates, and plots planted with Jatropha that he's started on several fields and farms reach maturity.

In fact, I had just been planting some potted young Jatrophas of his just a few days prior, in one of the plots he's monitoring, to replace ground-planted plants that had died. This particular experiment of his, at Ken Ryan's farm in North Fort Myers, I believe has to do with the hardiness of the crop, as the plants there are pretty much left alone, not fertilized, watered or helped in any way.

Roy's presentation was very interesting, he gave a packed auditorium an outlook of current research and some insights about where we're headed with biodiesels in general and Jatropha in particular. This is a man whose work has to be followed closely, as he truly is on the cutting edge of a hugely important area of research that is bringing him continued and increasing national and international attention. We are fortunate to have him here in SW FL, and I encourage readers to support him and his work. A good place to start your research if you want to find more about him and his current projects is his IFAS page here.

Besides Mr Beckford and the other speakers, a number of local green entrepreneurs were there, including of course yours truly, there to promote edible gardens and the GreenMarket. Talking about the GreenMarket, our Salvadoran fair trade coffee guy (who also has a thousand other projects), Billy Sol, was in charge of caffeine trafficking at the meeting, and the local household products division of WOW Green of Jonathan Nemath was represented as well. Last but not least, Bob with B&B Organics was there, promoting his worm castings 100% organic fertilizer, and learning about other alternative garden products.

Dan Moser, longtime Lee Co. Bike and Pedestrian coordinator and Florida Weekly columnist, among other things, was there, chatting with commissioner Ray Judah about the Complete Streets Resolution and other issues.

I met Faye Najar of Recycled Plastic Factory LLC of Englewood, who is as enthusiastic as I am about the future of this industry - producing 100% recycled plastic lumber. Maintenance free, heavy duty, doesn't rot or splinter, and above all, environmentally friendly and finds a second life for plastic, a material that while undoubtedly useful, has become a huge problem as it doesn't degrade and is choking everything from waterways to landfills to the ocean.

Event sponsors also included Carbon Solutions America, Waste Management, Empower, the Florida Bicycle Association and Charlotte County's Green Building Program. I uploaded some pictures of the meeting here, and would like to thank IFAS Extension for keeping the discussion open, and constantly providing venues and forums to get together and search for better, greener, more sustainable ways to do things here in SW FL.

An island within an island

2009-12-02T13:38:00.000-08:00

Island Botanicals, located near Bokeelia in Pine Island, truly is an island of sustainability, sound agricultural practices and smart, diversified production. Owner Mike Wallace was inspecting some onion starts he was about to put in the ground today as I arrived, and was glad to give me a tour of his 4+ acres, where he grows a dizzingly diverse variety of crops, ornamentals, exotics and natives, fruits and herbs. If you're interested in seeing some pictures of his place, you can find them here.

We actually started inside, as he was cooking some bacon for his dogs - yeah, that's some pampered dogs he has there! I checked out his Pine Island digs while he finished cooking, a typical house on pillars in the island style, beautifully blending with the vegetation all around it, and decorated with much taste inside, in an Oriental style, with many objects brought from Mike and his wife's travels around the world.

As Mike guided me around his property in his usual laid back style, we picked a healthier breakfast for ourselves, a couple of ripe bananas from one of his trees. We discussed the fact that commercially grown bananas are very prone to getting contaminated with pesticides, because of the porous nature of their skins. And what a shame it is that more bananas are not grown in SWFL instead of being imported. Put two green guys together, a rant is sure to follow!

Food production is the main focus of the place, from basic staples -sweet potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peppers, onions- to tropical fruit -mangoes, bananas, papayas, starfruit-, greens -lettuces, bok choi, mustards, chard, arugula and many others-, and herbs -basils, cilantro, kafer lime, used for the fragrant leaves and not for the fruit.

There's also room for ornamentals -palms, bromeliads, orchids- and one of a kind specimens: Madagascar chestnut, Ling Ling, which is the national tree of Thailand, very fragrant, smells a bit like a gardenia, also called golden shower tree for the cascading yellow flowers it produces, different kinds of ginger, passion fruit, bamboos... most of it keeping with the Oriental theme, as you can see!

There's several Moringa trees spread around the property. This is a "miracle" tree that could solve the problem of hunger, especially in Africa. According to treesforlife.org, the leaves of the Moringa tree contain 7 times the vitamin C of oranges, 4 times the calcium of milk, 3 times the potassium of bananas, 2 times the protein of yogurt... you get the picture. Mike says they are very easy to grow, literally just put a branch in the ground, and it will start a new tree. He showed me a tree on a corner of his property that he tried to eliminate on several occassions, and it kept coming back. The nuts of the Moringa are also edible, and it has many medicinal properties as well as the nutritional value, according to ancient Vedic and African lore. If you look at the map of world malnutrition, it coincides almost exactly with the tropical range where this incredible tree can be grown. So I think this is one of the examples of areas where our humble local farmers can be on the cutting edge of contributing to the solution of massive problems, Mike experimenting with Moringa trees is one case, just like Ken Ryan of Herban Gardens in N. Ft. Myers trying to grow Jatropha for biodiesel with the help of Roy Beckford of IFAS Extension is another.

As for techniques for growing the more traditional herbs and veggies Michael brings to the Green Market at the Alliance for the Arts every Saturday, he employs organic and pesticide free methods, including crop rotation, fallowing, planting in many small plots where pests can be isolated and controlled without spreading to other areas, Diatomaceous earth — also known as DE, TSS, diatomite, diahydro, kieselguhr— a naturally occurring, soft, chalk-like sedimentary rock that is easily crumbled into a fine white to off-white powder (according to Wiki) for slug control, composting, manures and even hair from local salons as fertilizer, really a wide variety of sustainable methods for growing healthy, delicious food locally.

Island Botanicals is also one of the few local growers that consistently delivers during the summer months, making it a valuable assett for keeping residents supplied with locally grown produce year-round.

Plans for the future include intensifying the production of sprouts with a partner, and introducing escargot (edible) snails to an area of the property.

I have to apologize if I'm missing something here, as Mike's beautiful dog Ramsay took advantage of a moment of distraction while I was checking out the cashew tree and tried to eat my notes (and my clipboard) for lunch! See, the "my dog ate my homework" excuse is true after all, in some cases!

We're very proud to have Island Botanicals at the Green Market, Mike always brings interesting stuff and is very knowledgeable, customers love him, he's a one-of-a-kind fellow, and I was very impressed at his wonderful groves, grounds and gardens.

After visiting him, I still had time to stop at Andy's Island Seafood for a locally caught lunch, and at Billy Sol's place to check out his experiments in vermiculture (worm produced fertilizer), edible flowers, and the production of Neem. But those stories will have to wait, as they both warrant blog posts and photo galleries of their own.

“We want to stay small and support local farmers and growers.”

2009-11-18T03:39:00.000-08:00

November 18, 2009

Lee, Collier, Charlotte county farmers markets bloom with produce  

by drew sterwald dsterwald@news-press.com

Emily White clutched a bouquet of yellow roses in one hand and a bag of potatoes and bell peppers in the other.   She’d just made the rounds at the Chamber of Commerce farmers market in downtown Cape Coral. With friends Marianne Masterson and Joann Hasselbeck, she drives every week from Sanibel to shop the aisles of produce, fresh seafood and bakery goods at the market.  “It’s less expensive than the store, and it’s fresh,” she said. “We come every Saturday and then go out for breakfast. We make a day of it.”  Weekly farmers markets like the Cape’s are multiplying like mushrooms. Coconut Point in Estero launched a new one last week. After a test run last spring, Sanibel’s market is celebrating its first full season.   

Turf wars are even erupting. Two markets in Bonita Springs are feuding over competing on the same day, and insiders at more than one market claim managers try to poach better vendors.  All this over fresh veggies.  These open-air markets can feel like traveling fairs. Vendors drive from one market to another like gypsies, selling their wares in tents. Musicians strum guitars and sing. Shoppers stroll with dogs on leashes.  When high season kicks in, about 7,000 people shop at Cape’s Saturday market, according to manager Claudia St. Onge.

Most come for the produce, which may be grown locally or in such Florida farm strongholds as Immokalee, Plant City and Ruskin.  “Those guys are our ‘anchor stores,’” St. Onge said. “Produce really carries the market.”  Produce also is the backbone of the almost 20-year-old Bonita Springs Lions Club’s farmers market/flea market at The Promenade, said manager John Elliff.  “The biggest draw is fresh vegetables and fruit,” he said.   

Shoppers at farmers markets in Southwest Florida now see only the season’s first offerings — the early bloomers. Growers will have greater quantity and diversity as they get deeper into the season.  A tour of markets last weekend turned up interesting food findings:

• Kumquats, white chocolate bread and fried cheese curds (Cape).  

• Dried carambola stars, locally smoked pepper bacon and pretty pink salad turnips (North Naples).  

• Gourmet cheese, pulled pork barbecue and hot peppers in shades of red, gold, purple and green (Alliance for the Arts, Fort Myers).  

At the Alliance’s GreenMarket, Jennifer Rogers of Inyoni Organics in Naples sold arugula, bok choy, red-leaf lettuce, mustard and collard greens under the generous shade of a sprawling poinciana. Greens cost $2 a bunch; squash and cucumbers were $1 apiece or three for $2.  A month from now, she should have onions, carrots and beans, too. Planting just started in September.  “You never really know what you’re going to have from week to week,” Rogers said. That frustrates some shoppers, especially during fallow summer months, according to Santiago De Choch. A native and organic landscaper, he oversees the GreenMarket, visiting farms to ensure vendors use sustainable practices or practice organic methods.   

De Choch also educates consumers about the seasonality of crops and the benefits of eating food that hasn’t traveled far from the field. As soon as a vegetable is picked, it begins to lose nutrients, moisture and flavor. The less time spent on a truck or shelf, the better.  Buying locally also supports the hometown economy and the future of farming. “We’re trying to focus on local food,” De Choch said. “We want to stay small and support local farmers and growers.”  The Egg Lady vendor, for instance, had flown the coop Saturday. Her “girls” weren’t laying, De Choch said. “We’d rather not have eggs than go to a supermarket for them,” he said. “That’s what sets us apart.”

Additional Facts

Weekly farmers markets

These are some of the weekly farmers markets in Southwest Florida; it is not comprehensive and does not include single-vendor markets open daily. Many markets are open seasonally.  Wednesdays  • Worden Farm Greenmarket:  9 a.m. to 1 p.m. January through March at Fishermen’s Village, off Marion Avenue, Punta Gorda.   • Bonita Springs: Locally grown produce, fresh seafood, potted orchids, cut flowers, potted plants, Florida citrus and much more. 7 a.m.-1 p.m. 27300 Old 41 Road, south of Riverside Park.  Thursdays  • Downtown Fort Myers: Fruits, vegetables, fresh flowers, local seafood, plants, palms, fruit trees, flowering shrubs, and doggie treats are available. 7 a.m.-2 p.m. at Centennial Park under the Caloosahatchee Bridge. 321-7098.  • Coconut Point, Estero: Fruits, vegetables, baked goods, fresh fish, plants and flowers, jams and chutneys, local honey. 10 a.m.-2 p.m. in the parking lot adjacent to Panera Bread. 249-9480.  Saturdays  • Alliance for the Arts’ GreenMarket: Fresh vegetables — most locally grown and some organic — as well as fresh fish, natural salsas and chutneys, locally produced honey, bakery goods, native plants, gourmet cheese, 9 a.m.-1 p.m., 10091 McGregor Blvd., Fort Myers. 939-2787.   • Bonita Springs: Fresh cut flowers, folk art, collectibles, fresh local produce, fresh off the boat seafood, local artists, baked goods and crafts. 7 a.m. to noon at The Promenade Shoppes at the northwest corner U.S. 41 and Bonita Bay Boulevard. Sponsored by the Lion’s Club, the market has also just expanded to Wednesdays.  • Cape Coral: Fresh fruits and vegetables, Gulf seafood, baked goods, native plants and trees, Wisconsin cheeses, fresh roasted nuts and more. 8 a.m.-1 p.m. October through May at Club Square off S.E. 47th Terrace and S.E. 10th Place. 549-6900.   • North Naples Green Market: Fresh local produce, organic fruits and vegetables, herbs and plants, gourmet breads and pastries, fresh flowers, seafood, meats, tropical fruit jams and salsas, local honey, personal chef creations and a unique selection of upscale artisan items. 8 a.m.-1 p.m. at Collection at Vanderbilt, corner of Vanderbilt Beach Road and Airport Pulling Road. 249-9480.  • Third Street Farmer’s Market: Fruits, vegetables, breads, pastas, sauces, cakes, pies and other pastries, cheeses, fresh crab, and prepared foods, flowers, plants, soaps, shell mirrors and frames, woven coconut frond hats and baskets, dog treats and accessories. 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. behind Tommy Bahama in the Neapolitan parking lot between Third Street South and Gordon Drive.  Saturdays and Sundays  • Pine Island Tropical Fruit Market: Tropical fruit, plants, organic vegetables and greens. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday (also 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Fridays June-September). Stringfellow Road at Ficus Tree Lane, Bokeelia.  Sundays  • Sanibel Island Farmers Market: More than 30 vendors will have local fruits and vegetables, flowers, plants, seafood, bakery items, cheeses, jams, nuts, pasta, dog cookies and other products from 8 a.m.-1 p.m. Tahitian Gardens, 1975 Periwinkle Way, Sanibel. 691-9249 or 218-1055.

The Archaic Revival

2009-11-04T18:29:00.000-08:00

I borrowed the title for this post from one of Terence McKenna's books. I'm sure Terence wouldn't mind. He passed away a few years ago, but left a body of work and a number of deep, original ideas, to justify his time on this Earth, and that of several thousand of his contemporaries, left and right. Actually, just the other day I was looking for skeletons in closets, and a letter from him appeared. From the late 90's. Happy that his work was being published in South America.

Old Terence McKenna, on his soap box, a soap box of the intellect really, and of deep spirituality, railing against the sprawl, the materialism, the mega-malls, the turning of our backs to Nature.

This is where Nick Batts' farm, Inyoni Organics, appears in the narrative, because.... I mean just look at the pictures here. All this, with chicken manure, and soap water, and an old John Deere tractor and some very dedicated hands. Just look at the scene. Doesn't it awake something in you? Something long forgotten, something that you may never have experienced yourself but is in your jeans-genes? That's right. A patch of land, surrounded by forest on all sides. Human toil, sweat, the uncertainty of the floods and the locusts and all the biblical stuff. To eke, to coax something out of the Earth. The Archaic Revival.

Right off the bat, let me say that Mr Nick and his people deserve all the support we can give them, so if you happened upon this and you live in this part of the world, please show up every Saturday morning, from 9 to 1 (although I hope he runs out of stuff to sell before closing time), buy some of their produce, be their friend. Support them, like I said. Colonial and McGregor, the big park around the Alliance for the Arts, you can't miss it. So that's that.

It seems that all I say, and all I write about, is about how we've become so out of touch with the realities of the land, and of Nature, and how we need to start paying more attention to how our food is grown and what compromises we make regarding this, and all that. So I won't say anything about that now. Except that Inyoni Organics doesn't make any compromises at all, and I saw it myself, and it's not bullshit. A lot of people have PR departments working on making them look green and sustainable and whatever. Mr Nick & Co. are the real deal, period.

I will talk about how it feels to be driving on Immokalee Rd, and this happens every time I'm in that area, in fact I have a friend that lives near those parts too, who raises chickens and is the most knowledgeable guy about local insects and plants, but to be driving along that road, and one whole side has been colonized by aliens. I mean on one side of the road, East I guess, the sun was coming up that way, you have a reality one can make sense of: Florida pine forest, nurseries, farms, some scattered houses. Like I said, it makes sense. We can live with that. It's not an Eden. It's not the primeval forests that Terence spent half his life wandering into and about. It's a compromise. The US Mail gets there. You can mail-order seeds or shells for the shotgun or a subscription to Vanity Fair. You can have a kick-ass organic farm there, too. You can raise some chickens, like my friend B, and go to work elsewhere every morning if you need to. You can get cable TV, if you care for that.

But the other side of the road has been colonized, razed, it's become a caricature of paradise, a completely unsustainable distopia of golf course after golf course, all greedy and thirsty and hungry for pesticides and fertilizers and cheap illegal immigrant labor, for gas-guzzling leaf blowers and lawn mowers and all full of desperate signs, "NOW DOWN TO THE LOW 200's", etc, you get the picture. And next to the golf courses, McMansions. All built in haste to milk the bubble. All made of cheap vinyl and faux stuff and Chinese drywall, all built on a little plot carefully poisoned for generations before the foundation is laid (they do that, you know... it's not a figure of speech), all with generous foyers and family rooms and granite countertops and garages big enough for the Pathfinder and the Patriot with room to spare for the jet-ski and the ATV.

Good farmland razed for this. Native forest razed for this. Charming country lanes, old homesteads, bald eagle nests, citrus groves razed for this shit. It makes sense, if you can only measure life in cold hard dollars. If you measure life that way, you're a poor cretin. I don't want to meet you or talk to you or be your friend. Because, look at what you're doing. Just look for a second.

OK, what I'm trying to say here is that all that land would have been much better off had it been left to the care of the likes of Nick. Or Horace. Or Ken. Or any farmer with an old pickup truck, a shotgun on a rack and a confederate flag (and I hate those, the flags I mean, not the shotguns, they're OK in the hands of decent adults)

Will we see an Archaic Revival, with the whole fucking bubble deflating and losing steam? Will we see Suburbia reconverted to farming? Will our current Gulf Coast Town Center shopping extravaganza be the last one built, ever? Will we have to suffer yet more golf courses and McMansions for graying people who can't think of anything better to do than to hit a little white ball on a chemical lawn and then drive the Caddy to Carrabba's for early bird dinner?

Who knows, and the current administration doesn't have a clue. These guys, starting with the empty suit in chief (and I voted for him, so shut up), are creating Cash For Clunkers schemes with yet more hastily printed money, making all the right noises about "growth" and blowing the Goldman Sachs honchos every night, if you'll pardon my French. When they should be supporting small farmers and manufacturers, thinking hard about how to reconvert our society to something more sustainable that can survive the coming crises, thinking about how to grow our food close to home, invest in rail and bicycles and dense urbanization that doesn't require Mom putting 70 miles a day to drive to work and then drive Bratleigh around for ballet and Cici's pizza in the Suburban. In a word, I don't have a lot of hope anyone has a clue. Except for a few guys here and there. Like Nick, gentleman farmer, who I hope makes a killing at the Market and has a really good season.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm too tired to think straight. It's the best I could come up with, and apologies if any feathers were ruffled. It's all in good cheer.

Good night, and good luck.

Of Markets and Farmers

2009-10-27T18:25:00.000-07:00

Some of you know that I started managing the Green Market at the Alliance for the Arts a while ago. It's something that I'm very proud to be doing, it gives me a lot of satisfaction and pleasure, and a few headaches too.

Being a bit of an oddball myself, a lot of the pleasure comes from working with so many wonderful characters. Very independent-minded people, very proud of their individuality, very hard working, original and creative members of our community. From the farmers to the musicians to the green entrepreneurs to the cooks, they are the grassroots making change happen.

Now, ours is a smallish outfit. We value quality over quantity. But not only that. We have a very clear idea of where we want to go with it. The main thing we're interested in is local production. Buying local is the solution to so many of our problems. Limiting carbon footprints? Check. Reducing dependence on foreign fossil fuels? Check. Stimulating the local economy, reducing unemployment close to home? Check, check.

Of course, we can't be 100% local. Not yet, anyway. We don't produce our coffee here in SW FL, for example. But there's one area where we are very clear we want local, and only local, and nothing but local: fresh farm produce, fresh eggs, fresh fish, fresh honey, fresh fruit. We don't make compromises there. And that's where some of the headaches I was talking about appear.

We Americans have grown accustomed to having what we want, when we want it, no questions asked. At a good price, too. Isn't this what globalization is all about? Well, it turns out globalization has a cost. There's a hidden cost to cheap tomatoes year round: you grow them in Mexico, using human shit for fertilizer and cheap child labor for picking, not caring too much for environmental regulations, and send them over here using cheap fossil fuels. Or you grow them in California, under slightly better conditions, using illegal immigrant labor and tons of chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides. In both cases the end result is the same: your local Big Mart has tomatoes that taste like cardboard and are probably not very good for you always available.

With dwindling oil supplies, the "cheap fuel" part of the equation is about to change pretty radically. The only reason we are not seeing the cost of a barrel of oil shooting through the roof is a widespread global recession that curbs demand. Yeah, there's alternatives to oil. But nothing that can bring strawberries from Chile to the produce aisle and Pacific tuna, whose populations are depleting rapidly anyway, to the sushi counter cheaply and efficiently.

There's more to creating wealth, it seems to me, than video game developers in Oakland hiring software engineers in Bangalore to create the latest shoot-'em-up to be manufactured in China and shipped to our malls just in time for Black Friday and the Holiday Season. That might be a part of it. But how about growing food near where we live? Outsourcing what we put on our table every night to giant agribusinesses thousands of miles away doesn't seem like a smart thing to do. I mean those guys hiccup, we go without dinner. Not to mention their stuff is not very good, really.

Our little Green Market, unlike other markets in this area, makes sure it is doing its part to stimulate local production, supporting local farmers and other food vendors, without false advertising. I'm tired of visiting other markets, and I won't name names here, and seeing the same iceberg lettuces that you can get at Big Mart, the same peaches from Georgia and apples from Argentina. During the summer months, very little can be grown in South Florida, everybody knows that, or should know that. I'm constantly explaining to visitors that our produce offerings are very limited during the summer. But that this is so for a reason. And that, marvel of marvels, people lived with this fact for many generations here in Florida, and in many parts of the world still do. There's mango season, and avocado season, there's some wonderful guys growing stuff in shade houses and hydroponically, there's great locally made pickles and jams and preserves, there's starfruit and fish and chickens... but some stuff is just not available. "You can't always get what you want", like Mick Jagger used to sing... maybe that's a good thing, working on the expectations side of it, not assuming everything has to be there all the time, getting a bit more educated about it. It also helps you enjoy those peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers when they finally show up, they taste delicious, nothing like the cardboard produce at the Big Mart...

So you can see that we are trying to educate the public about local food production, which is what I do with my Green Coaches project too - that's why I think the two jobs work so well together. As the cooler season nears (and it's been a brutally hot and unusually long summer), more produce vendors are joining us. And we make sure that when they say "local", they are local. Tomorrow morning I have to check out a farm, see what's on the ground, make sure it's the same stuff that will be at Market on Saturday. Make sure nobody's buying stuff from a wholesaler and unwrapping it and putting it in crates and boxes that look "rustic" and "just picked", if you catch my hint here. No way. Not us.

And going to farms, learning from farmers, has to be one of my favorite things in the world. Farmers have a great sense of humor. A bit coarse and down to earth, sometimes. Fart and manure jokes are not uncommon. But most farmers are great observers both of nature and of human nature, see right through the BS and tell it like it is.

I'll take farmers over advertising executives any day of the week.

There's this great German gentleman farmer I visited a while ago, with the biggest collection of VW's in the world, 5 cows, many hogs and turkeys and chickens and a pond full of tilapia - he insisted I take some home, fished them right out of the water (with a hook baited with bread) for me while we drank a couple of cold ones. He owns this great restaurant that is a vendor with us, and I'm trying to get him to do some killing in his herds and flocks and put them in sandwiches for our Market customers: "locally raised, locally killed, locally cooked and locally eaten", how about that for a tagline.

There's Ken with his microgreens and gourmet herbs and heirloom veggies, with his great sense of humor and attention to detail, and the encyclopedia-like amount of knowledge he has about his craft. There's Mike with his outsized island style sombrero, easygoing ways from the times he was a wanderer and bohemian in the Caribbean, his gingers and carambolas and yams. There's the women of Rabbit Run Farms with their great eggplants and hydro greens. There's Nick from Inyoni Organics joining us in a week or two, when his stuff is ready, and some others too.

And still, it's never enough in the summer. I always have to answer questions about us not having grapes or lettuce "like the other markets". And I answer them with a smile, as many times as necessary. I talk about all the stuff I just talked about here, and much more. With pleasure.

We have other vendors at the Green Market, with great products, natural homemade soaps and candles, eco-friendly cleaning products, plants and planters and fertilizers and flowers and breads and salsas and jams. We have some arts and crafts, and more want to join us all the time. We have some pretty cool stuff.

But farmers are our best friends. The original markets, back in the day, were by farmers, for farmers. You either bought from them, or sold to them. They were the economic engines of their communities, the people you could depend on to put food on your table.

And at our Green Market we recognize that, and we want to support them as much as we can. I think you should too. Summer's almost gone. Soon, there will be more local produce available. Take the time for a pleasant stroll outside of the Alliance for the Arts this Saturday and every Saturday, see what's just come out of the ground, the beehive, the tree, the Gulf. Check out the great crafts and delicious foods and green products. Let your local dollar stay where it belongs, here. In the end, it will make its way back to you.

An urban community garden in Fort Myers

2009-09-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

When Green Coaches was created, a few months ago, one of the decisions we made was to not advertise in the traditional sense - for one thing, our budget was (and is) too small, but there's other reasons as well. We are drowning, choking, in advertising. Sometimes it seems that we are approaching a sensory overload, where every single second of our lives and every available square inch is taken with a commercial message. The folks at Adbusters have been exploring this subject for a while.

So it was decided to do things differently, away from marketing & advertising: instead of claiming to be good at something, we just try to be good at something and hope that word spreads around. Doing a good job is the best advertising. Also, being reliable and honest, not using pressure tactics to force a sale, that kind of thing. Totally old-fashioned, I know. Besides, not a lot of landscaping companies do edible and organic projects, although I'm sure that's about to change, fast.

But the best thing we are doing so far is getting involved in neighborhoods and communities, volunteering to help with starting community gardens everywhere they'll let us. Community centers, private homes, churches. If they want a garden, we'll help.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to spend the morning helping set up a large community garden on Cuba St, just off of Martin Luther King, Jr, Blvd, sponsored by a great community organization, Quality Life Center. Many volunteers showed up, both from the neighborhood and from groups like SW FL Coalition For Change, to work under the direction of QLC memebers Ms Vonda Curry and Mr James Matthews, as well as local environmentalist and community organizer Kim Trebatoski. 13 raised beds were created, and planted with tomatos, beans, greens, okra, lettuce and carrots. Home Depot donated most of the tools, including two wheelbarrows.

This was so much fun, my mood improved even more in the following days (I say "even more" because I've been pretty happy since I don't work in an office doing graphic design -advertising- all day long anymore, and since I quit smoking several months ago). Someone needs to work on a theory of how doing stuff that you really enjoy can have enormous health and mood benefits; or perhaps it's been done already and I don't know about it.

In any case, there was so much crammed together in one morning that is positive and enjoyable, that I can't think of a better way to spend my time: not just the satisfaction of seeing the garden take shape, but also teaching a bunch of kids how to plant stuff, and learning from neighborhood old-timers that showed up, as well as exercising, cracking jokes with everyone and promoting my business in a sustainable way.

I can't post photo albums here, but if you'd like to see some more pictures from that day, they are here. And don't forget to contact Green Coaches if you have a garden project yourself!

The Whole Foods fiasco

2009-09-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

The other day, I had the opportunity to visit the famous Whole Foods store, the one located in Naples, for the first time. My impressions on it are mixed, but they tend towards the negative.

While having access to products that are produced in a sustainable way is, I reckon, generally a good thing, the way everything is now branded as "green" would be funny if it wasn't so depressing.

I mean, the first thing you see when you walk into this Wal-Mart sized monster of a store is crates upon crates of bottled water. Drinking water in plastic bottles, which has to be one of the most outrageously unsustainable consumer products available. Oh, but this bottled water is "green", see. I can't figure out how or why, as it uses a plastic bottle, just like the other brands at the other stores.

The BS and the hype were everywhere you looked. I had to laugh at the produce section. How is flying "organic" berries and apples from California and Chile "sustainable"? This "organic" label, by the way... it's gotten out of control. I was talking to local farmer Ken Ryan this morning, and he was telling me how it's all a racket, where you have to kick back a percentage of your profit to the certification agency that gives you the "organic" label, where you can actually use some chemicals as long as you purchase them from their vendors list, and similar stories that show you how shady the whole deal has become, a game with words and perceptions, just like the carbon offsets fiasco, and so many other miracles of branding and marketing, where you are allowed to carry on with the old ways as long as you are fluent in newspeak and can convince the public that "my water in a plastic bottle is better than other waters in plastic bottles because there's an 'authority' somewhere that says so".

Take the development at Babcock Ranch, where they are once again razing some of the few remaining untouched natural habitats in the area to the ground, to make way for sprawl and shopping, and calling it a "green community" because they will be throwing in some solar panels and stuff. Another bulldozed forest, and extra pressure on the water resources, plus adding lanes to a bunch of roads, and the whole litany of what's needed for "growth", to build another cluster of McMansions, with their schools and churches and fast-food joints (and Whole Foods stores, no doubt) in the middle of nowhere, and branding the whole project "green"... give me a break... and still people buy it? If this isn't a lesson learnt from Wall Street's creative accounting, bundling, marketing and advertising, I don't know what is...

And the public is only too eager to go along with it. To pay the premium for the label and the peace of mind. It's easier to pay a little more (or quite a lot more, in fact), especially if you live in Naples, Fl, than to ask some hard questions. Like, "why are all the lights on, even next to the windows, in the middle of the day, in this supposedly 'green' store?". Or, "can I live with the fact that some kinds of produce and fruits cannot be available year-round unless you fly them in from thousands of miles away?". Or, "does my produce really need all this plastic packaging?".

Don't take me wrong here. Like I said before, there's some stuff there that is great. For instance, I was able to find some yerba mate, the South American tea, that I had given up trying to find at local stores. The organic and fair trade kind. Great. Not that it tastes any different from the stuff I grew up drinking, although it sure costs more. But after a long time, I'm drinking mate again, and I'm grateful for that.

There were also some crappy products on sale. My wife insisted on buying some organic brown rice that we discovered was completely infested with weevils when we got home, and had to be discarded right away. With the avocado season in full swing here in Florida, their avocados had to be brought in from somewhere far. And they didn't look good either. Ours are not "organic" enough, I guess.

The bottom line is, in my opinion, "local" beats "organic" any day. Consuming locally grown food does more for sustainability than looking for the USDA organic label. Basically, your diet is based on staples (rice, dry beans, pasta), most of them not local but cheap and sustainable to transport and store because of their long shelf life, complemented with whatever's available seasonally. Historically, populations depended on this kind of diet.

Staple foods can be transported in bulk with very little cost to the environment - think sailboats and trains. You throw in a little meat now and then, and local produce. That's sustainable.

It's only recently that we have grown accustomed to having organic cherry tomatos and bananas available 365 days of the year. It cannot last. We need to go back to a reliable way to distribute staple foods using very little fossil fuels input, and growing the rest ourselves, within a few miles of our towns.

We don't need a fancy, air-conditioned store like Whole Foods to buy a few pounds of rice, some produce from local farmers, and a couple of fish - a warehouse next to the railroad tracks or the port is enough, or better yet, an open air market, like they have in the 3rd world.

I miss open air markets. You walk around, see what's available, ask questions, meet people, stop for a taco al pastor or a falafel or a mote con huesillo from the guy with the cart, walk some more. There's the smell of spices, there's people selling live birds, there's radios blasting rancheras or whatever, there's old comadres that not only sell you the nopalitos or aguacates but also explain to you how to prepare them. A lot of what you see is local and environmentally friendly, and it doesn't even promote itself as such! Zero hype... that's my favorite part.

WF, on the other hand, is all hype. That, I guess, is my problem with it...

a Green Punk reflects...

2009-08-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

Back when I was younger, people like Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins were my heroes. I was into punk rock. It wasn't just the music and the left-of-center politics. It was this concept, that punks borrowed from tinkerer-dads of the 50's and Popular Mechanics magazine: Do It Yourself, or DIY.

The music industry won't publish anything other than bloated, self-indulgent, more-of-the-same crap like Pink Floyd, Eagles and Elvis in his 19th comeback tour in Vegas? Put together cooperative efforts to make and promote new records without waiting for the big companies, and use word of mouth and alternative channels to spread the message. Do it yourself. You get the idea. Let the rest of the world catch up to what you're doing now, later.

The classic-punk era of Britain and NY in the 70's and the California hardcore of the 80's may long be over, but you can see the legacy everywhere, from anti-globalization protests to the slow-food movement to Naomi Klein's "No Logo". In music, one of last year's biggest hits was British-Sri Lankan avant-garde extraordinaire M.I.A. singing over a sampled Clash track. "London Calling" has definitely aged more gracefully than Elton John, and the urgent message of the Dead Kennedys music is more relevant today than, say, Poison's.

While the System's message seems to be "go shopping or the terrorists have won", people of all walks of life, young and old, Black, White, Latino, Asian and every hue in between, are once again embracing the DIY ethics in their everyday life. I see it more and more, and the economic downturn is nothing short of a blessing in that respect. Why go along with the planned obsolescence of Burberry logos and Chinese-made junk, designed to be replaced next year? "Make it do, or do without" was the mantra both during the Depression and the punk rebellion, and it's here again.

This rather lengthy intro is to comment on the fact that your favorite Green Coach spent a number of hours the other day introducing young citizens from the "wrong side of the tracks" as the cliche goes, to some DIY concepts, including: grow as much of your own food as you can, learn a useful skill and don't waste your time pursuing the chemical mirages offered by the corner dealer and McDonalds, be yourself, it doesn't matter that your jersey isn't P. Diddy's brand if you're gonna get it dirty working in the garden anyhow. The message was "you're young, don't take no shit from nobody, growing this tomato plant to fruition is gonna teach you more about life than countless hours in front of MTV or BET, the mall sucks, and I may be an old fart but I know what I'm talking about here", and generally, I must say it was well received. I felt really good, I felt like some seeds were sown on fertile soil, which is a good description of what I like to do every day.

If people like us, who are social and environmental activists, can learn to reach out and speak the language of 10-year old kids and use it to give a positive message, then there's hope. Never mind the millions and millions of fops and airheads, the Wall St. vampires, the TV zombies and mall rats. DIY is cool. Riding your bike is cool. Not having any money is OK as long as you have friends and skills and a sense of humor. That's the message. The fops and dandies don't have any message other than "be like me, spend all this money buying stupid shit that's not gonna make you happy" - if we old punk warriors can convince a kid, who lives in a different part of town and has a different skin color, that you can create your own reality completely on the margins of what the System expects you to do and be, then we have the upper hand. Then, the torch gets passed to the next generation. That old Black Flag of punk looks Green to me these days, and there's kids out there ready to pick it up. Right on...

Losing it all to sprawl

2009-07-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

One of the strongest impressions on my arrival to Florida almost a decade ago was to see acre upon acre of landscape, sometimes as far as the eye could see, razed down, leveled, resembling something from "Apocalypse Now" or the fire bombing of Dresden described by Kurt Vonnegut, with piles of tree trunks here and there in lieu of shells of destroyed buildings.

To make way for "development" - oh, how I hate that word. And I'm not the only one. Author Bill Belleville describes how his "cracker cottage", a modest house built many decades ago, back when you had to reach a compromise with the environment instead of destroying it, gets surrounded, and ultimately swallowed, by a new shopping mall, with its "parking lagoons" (in the expression of JH Kunstler), its accessory plazas full of pet grooming and nail shops, the big box retailers, and the cookie cutter housing, each unit with its manicured lawn and exotic landscaping, always thirsty, always hungry, demanding huge quantities of water, fertilizers and pesticides. And the road "improvements" and tax breaks necessary for this growth - this cancer.

That Mr Belleville can describe all this with sadness, but not lose his sense of humor, is part of what makes this book great. A dark sense of humor, granted. "... Disston planned to buy most of the soggy interior of Florida for 25 cents an acre and drain it dry in the late XIX century. Disston didn't have the technology we have today, and while he turned miles of pastoral, meandering rivers and streams into arrow-straight canals, he botched his larger mission. Taking his failure to drain Florida personally, he ended up back up north somewhere, blowing out his brains in a bathtub, a method that seems at least considerate of others who had to clean up the mess behind him. Less can be said for his drainage vision - a muddle we have not yet reconciled."

A muddle indeed, a strategy of growth at all costs, and consequences be damned, cheered on by chambers of commerce, politicians and newspapers. The author's is one of the voices that we need to hear if we're going to be smarter about how we do things in Florida. We have done enough damage already. It's clear we have to accomodate a number of pressures, and reach compromises. But nature and quality of life can't always get the short straw against commerce, low wage jobs, and car-centric development.

This book is not just about preserving the environment, but it's more like a picture of what it means to live here at this point in time, that combines many elements and impressions. There's passionate and learned descriptions of nature, scientific explanations of underground water tables and how they get affected by growth and create sinkholes, historic sketches of the Old Florida ("before Disney came and created his World"), interactions with slum lords, retired people, developers, the homeless and many other persons and groups, all with their own points of view. It's a portrait of a place and a time, taking into account where it comes from, what's happening now and where it may be headed if we don't stop, take a deep breath and a long hard look, and think hard of how we inhabit the land and treat nature. I'll just leave you with a couple of paragraphs of Chapter Ten, that show how many different elements are combined in Mr Belleville's writing, and give you a good idea of the style and content of the book:

"Yesterday I saw a man fly through the air. Today, during a bad strom, a live tree toppled over, blocking Sewell Road. The gopher tortoise that once dug a burrow at the edge of my backyard has returned after an absence of more than a year. Termites have continued to make their own tiny burrows into the wood of my house, causing the floor to sag just as my yard now sags with the collapsed veins of the karst below. And someone has sprayed the tree trunks in the woods to the south of me with an aerosol can, leaving each with a stripe of bright fuchsia-colored paint on its bark. At first I thought the spraying was an act of vandalism. Then I realized it was a way to inventory trees in preparation for development of the land.

The flying man, of course, was the most inescapable vision. I was driving the dangerous and congested I-4 back from Longwood yesterday when, less than a quarter mile ahead, I saw a van abruptly careen across three lanes. It then tumbled off the road and down a slight embankment to the parking lot of a rest stop. As it rolled, great gusts of white smoke billowed from its undercarriage, and a middle-aged man wearing dark pants and a t-shirt flew out of a passenger door, cartwheeled high into the air, and then came down hard on the concrete. Blood and bone splattered about him when he landed for human bodies are very fragile creations. He shuddered like a deer might shudder when it is fatally shot, and then did not move. He was dead, and there was nothing anyone could do about it."

Why we will never have universal health care coverage

2009-07-16T17:45:00.001-07:00

Last July 9th, I took my bike, put my youngest kid in the back and rode to the old courthouse in downtown Ft. Myers, where some people were going to demonstrate and make their voice heard in support of universal health care. I was of a mind of doing some demonstrating too, supporting something so basic as government provided basic health care for all.

Alas, that wasn't to be. When I got there, I saw, in a nutshell, why universal health care is not going to happen in this country, ever. Which is a damn shame, really. I'm sure the O administration is going to be able to pass some weak-ass, watered down version of health care reform, as long as it doesn't interfere with the obscene profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. But whatever it is, it's not going to be universal health care, like they have in advanced, first world societies like... Argentina.

That's right, Argentina, South America. The Old Country, in my case. Where, when we went for vacation a while ago, the same little one riding the back of my bike had the bad luck of falling ill. As in, seriously ill, with a respiratory infection that wouldn't let her breathe. You can imagine my grief as I took her to the nearest children's hospital (5 blocks from my mom's place, in fact, near Constitucion train station - Hospital Pedro de Elizalde). Well, she was immediately admitted, no questions asked, no requirement to show an insurance card or a credit card or an ID or anything at all. She was given the best care around the clock. Doctors would check on her on the hour, every hour. Very capable nurses would administer medicines and check on IV drips constantly. The room was clean, modern and well-appointed with all the necessary gear. The only difference I could see from Health Park here in Ft. Myers was that there were 2 people per room instead of 1, and no TV. That's it. The rest was the same.

So anyway, she stayed there a few days, got well, they let her go after making sure she'd be OK. When we were leaving, I mentioned that we were visitors, and inquired as to how to pay for her stay. They just looked at me in a funny way. It just doesn't work that way. Nobody's going to make a profit from someone falling ill, period. It's society's responsibility to care of all. You can choose a private insurance plan, with a private clinic, if for whatever reason you prefer to. Maybe 2 people per room is too much for you, and you want to be alone. Or you want cable TV. Whatever. You have that option. There's no big, socialistic government banning private enterprise in medicine. There's many private insurance companies. With many clients (patients?). But society as a whole will guarantee that everyone has their basic health care needs met. There's no ads on TV about new drugs. A doctor will prescribe what he thinks you need, without you "asking him about...".

Maybe I'm making it sound perfect here, and it isn't. The nurse was telling me of planeloads of foreigners coming from Lima and Miami to get sex-change surgery, plastic surgery, that kind of thing, for free. There's many problems and abuses, sure. But the simple fact is, if you have a health problem, a) you're gonna get treatment to matter what, and b), you're not gonna be in debt forever because of it. Actually, you're not going to have to pay anything for treatment, period. You're supposed to get well and get back to work and start paying your taxes again, so that when somebody else has a problem, he's taken care of as well, just like your daughter was.

Oh, taxes. A sore spot, that. Right off the bat, I noticed that there were about a dozen or so people demonstrating FOR health care, and two dozen AGAINST it. Paying higher taxes was a big rationale as to why the government shouldn't guarantee health care for all, according to the demonstrators against. Well, God forbid you'd have to pay a percentage point more on your ATV, or your Jet Ski, or your cigarettes, or your booze, in order to have doctors treat little girls without coverage, or laid off workers who don't have insurance through work anymore and aren't poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, or old, broke, retired persons. No sir, that's not gonna happen, they kept yelling, right before proclaiming how Christian and holier-than-thou they are. You know the type, the Tea Party people, the ones with the "Don't tread on me" and Confederate flags, that foam in the mouth at the mere mention on Obama or the Democrats.

Well, they should chill out, because Obama and the Democrats, once again, will do nothing. There will be a lot of talk, then some totally meaningless half-measures to save face, then everything will go back to normal. Normal being our current state of affairs, where being uninsured and having an accident pretty much guarantees you'll die destitute in the richest nation on Earth. Heck, even with insurance they'll bleed you dry, these companies employ thousands of people just to look for ways to deny you coverage you already paid for.

Another big point these bozos had was how people from other countries envy our system here, and come to get treatment, how you can't get a hospital bed in Canada and have to come stateside to get treatment, etc. I say, bullshit. That's Faux News and talk radio propaganda, pure and simple. It's just not true. Never mind my little Argentinian example before. I have friends from Canada, Denmark, the UK, Italy, Chile and a bunch of other places, and I know they are quite happy with their system, can get a bed when they need it, and wouldn't dream of coming here to get treatment, unless maybe to see a specific doctor who is the best in his field, in a desperate case, a top doctor that could be here just as well as in Japan or Germany - they would go there to see him too, if the situation was desperate enough. I wonder how many of the guys demonstrating against health care for all know anyone residing in a different country, that could confirm or deny the whole "foreigners envy our system" crap.

Anyway, the reason I say health care reform is never gonna happen, besides the fact of Democrats being just Republicans Light since a long time ago and completely afraid to confront lobbies and interests head-on, despite having a clear mandate to do so, is because anyone who wants to have a rational discussion about the matter is gonna get shouted down by an angry mob, brainwashed by whatever propaganda they listen to in their monster trucks and McMansions, and angry as hell at "liberals" and "minorities" and "entitlements" and "taxes" - when they should be mad as hell at "Goldman Sachs", really, and all the Goldman Sachs insiders in this and every other administration. They are OK with letting someone die for lack of medical treatment, Christians that they are, especially if her points of view differ from their Holy Writ - I mention this because in the camp of those supporting health care the other day, there was some lady with a hat bearing a legend supporting gay marriage. Well, you should see how those counter-demonstrators really went crazy about that. Every time this lady approached them to try and have a conversation and explain her points, they would just shout her down, they wouldn't listen or talk, just ratchet up the decibels. Don't get me wrong, I think gay marriage is a non-issue. I don't care for it. And I think the lady was mudding the waters, mixing one message with another at the demonstration, as if we don't have trouble enough trying to secure some sort of health care coverage for all Americans, without being distracted by other grievances and struggles. But there it is: they are united, they show up in numbers that double ours, and they just scream and yell very loudly, until anyone opposing them, progressives, liberals, whatever, have to back down and retreat. That's the way it is. If big O, fresh from winning a big election, with a clear mandate from the people, can't push effectively enough for the Change he promised, what can we little guys do? It's hopeless. In the end, I didn't even stay there. The kid kept saying, "these guys yell too loud", meaning the anti-demonstration, and "can we go", so we left. No heroic argument, no "let's convince these deluded guys of how wrong they are", no "let's make a stand here". Why expose my kid and myself to some crazy born-again fanatic yelling 4-letter words at us, with a side of spittle, some bozo that has no idea of what's really going on, and doesn't want to learn anything about anything? Besides, even with the 3 dozen people that showed up either for or against, you know, there's what, a million people in greater Lee and Collier counties? I mean, c'mon. No one cares. No one cares.

A piece of advice, if you're uninsured and have a health issue: go to Miami, take a plane to Buenos Aires, and get the treatment you need. Have about a grand or two available, at all times, cash, to cover the ticket and expenses. Try to learn a little Spanish. And forget about the Holy O liberating us from these health care insurance bloodsuckers, because it's not going to happen, not in our lifetimes, not ever. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm afraid I'm not.

Growing Power

2009-07-05T07:21:00.000-07:00

A great, 4-page story in today's NYTimes magazine, about a mythical figure, street farmer Will Allen, a guy with so much good thinking, common sense and simplicity, it's a real pleasure every time I find something about him. I hope to meet him one day...

"In 1993, Allen, looking to grow indoors during the winter and to sell food closer to the city, bought the Growing Power property, a derelict plant nursery that was in foreclosure. He had no master plan. “I told the city I’d hire kids and teach them about food systems,” he said. Before long, community and school groups were asking for his help starting gardens. He rarely said no. But after years of laboring on his own and beginning to feel burned out, he agreed to partner with Heifer International, the sustainable-agriculture charity. “They were looking for youth to do urban ag. When they learned I had kids and that I had land, their eyes lit up.” Heifer taught Allen fish and worms, and together they expanded their training programs."

A vanishing world

2009-07-01T17:46:00.000-07:00

Many things make David Campbell's book, "A land of ghosts", brilliant: the deep knowledge of the author (an ecologist with decades of experience documenting life in the farthermost confines of the Amazon forest) about the cycles of birth and death in this unforgiving land, his captivating style of writing, his dry sense of humor. But what I found most touching is his grasp of the inevitability of the vast changes happening there, and how even the most motivated efforts by individuals and environmental collectives amount to little more than Don Quixote charging the windmills.

The human tide is rising, and no amount of signature-gatherings, fundraisers or fulminations of unsustainable lifestyles and business models will do more than put a temporary stop to the deforestation and massive extinctions going on there and elsewhere. Everybody needs to make a living, he sadly concludes when describing the slash-and-burn techniques used to open fields for cattle grazing and cultivation, fields that quickly become barren and lead to even more terrain being reclaimed by settlers in the same fashion. The issue is not that mankind is inherently evil, although there's quite a bit of that when we read about how the native peoples who were the original inhabitants of the land were hunted to extinction. The issue is that we are not, as a species, prepared to look beyond the very short term. Impoverished laborers have to put food on their families' tables. Corporations have to turn a profit if they are to remain viable. And countries have to be ruthless if they are ever to leave the Third World and join the big players.

The Associated Press reports that Brazilian president Lula da Silva has approved a controversial land tenure law that Greenpeace and others say will lead to even more deforestation and extinctions in the Amazon. And this is Lula, mind you, the darling of Latin America's progressives and moderate lefties, not some ruthless right-wing dictator of years past, a la Stroessner or Somoza. This is a man who grew up poor, who for years fought for the rights of workers as a union leader and community activist before entering politics and winning the presidency. This is a man who went to bed hungry many times, as he has told on several interviews. He's worked hard to get to a position of power, and by all accounts he's doing his best to take his country out of poverty. His are hard choices. Yes, the Amazon is the last big lung of the Earth, home to a mind-boggling diversity of animal and plant species, and it would be wise to leave it alone. On the other hand, its short-term riches are a tempting release valve to demographic pressures and a ticket for Brazil to reclaim its long coveted seat at the world powers' table. Talk about a Faustian bargain.

A bargain that every civilization had to make, when you think of it. Campbell glances over how the Mediterranean looked three millenia ago, rich with marine life, forests and deep topsoil, and how, after many cultures developed and declined around its shores, each making use of its resources with more and more advanced technologies, it now is only a shade of what it used to be, forests gone, topsoil eroded and its waters little more than a toxic cesspool.

Advanced societies in North America and Europe were brutal in their exploitation of natural resources on hand, as well. The U.S. had untold natural riches on its inception; only a small fraction remains today. It is only after two centuries of economic growth, with the resulting rise in standards of living and education, that we have come to understand that our world is a precious resource that needs to be preserved and protected, and have started to take measures towards that end (albeit too little, too late, in the opinion of some). How can we preach our newfound environmental gospel to the BRIC and Third World countries without sounding arrogant or hypocritical? Take China: critics will point to the scale of its environmental degradation, its polluted rivers and smog-choked cities; supporters will point out that this is the price that had to be paid for its masses to escape centuries of serfdom and starvation and rise to the global middle class.

In the end, these complex and apparently unsurmountable problems boil down to overpopulation and economic expectations, the drive of the many to have the comforts and luxuries of the few; what we call a "Western" standard of living. Lula commented, proudly, when offering justification for his approval of the opening of more land in the Amazon for development, on how campesinos and small entrepreneurs now have cars and trucks and air-conditioned homes, after working hard in clearing the forest and raising cattle there, building roads and establishing business ventures and outposts of progress (Joseph Conrad, anyone?). Campbell, who loves this wilderness, who has followed individual trees' growth from seedling to towering giant, who describes the myriad creatures that inhabit the forest with love, wonder and deep understanding, nevertheless cannot raise his voice against the poor caboclos clearing plots with little more than machetes and fire, and escapes the manichean temptation to present the loss of this last sea of green as a clear-cut good vs. evil confrontation. It's a tragedy, in very much the same way as losing those Mediterranean forests was. As a species, we couldn't grasp the consequences of what we were doing back then; we still can't today. In a few decades, we will be trying to restore a small part of what was lost, planting a few trees here, establishing a natural sanctuary there, for the few remaining species, to slow down their disappearance, in what is now the Amazon forest. We can't even begin to imagine what the effects on global climate will be. But we all have to eat. And if some eat meat every day of the week, then why not everybody? And if some have cars and AC units and can take vacations and buy bottled water and live in a rich country, how can they tell others that they can't? The Amazon, as well as the other remaining shreds and bits of our primeval, natural world, is in for big change, pretty soon. A lot will be lost in the long term, so that some is gained today and tomorrow. It's nobody's fault, and everybody's.

A bountiful harvest

2009-06-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

Mango season is here. I always thought that letting those mangoes rot on the ground is a sin. Of course you can enjoy as many as you want fresh and ripe, they are so much better than the store bought ones. But in addition to that, this is a good time to preserve some for later. All you really need is some bulk sugar, a few lemons, recycled jars and a kitchen and some time. Don't let all this fruit go to waste! If you're like me, you have a mental map of where mango trees that are accessible are located. Every time I take a walk, drive my car or ride my bicycle, I keep adding to my map!

If you can't use all the mango preserves you can make, remember, they make great gifts, and also, there's a lot of folks in need in our community. Good hunting!

Short blurb on the Cape Coral Daily Breeze

2009-05-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

First Edible Garden, installed by Green Coaches, will be at 3815 Palm Tree Blvd. Santiago De Choch, owner of Green Coaches, is looking forward to installing more of the vegetable gardens throughout the area. Stop by and have a look. For information, call 839-1239.

La vuelta al mundo en bicicleta

2009-05-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

Spanish language story about an Argentinian cycling around the world.

Articulo publicado por Critica Digital

Pablo García no es un bonaerense cualquiera. En el 2001, a sus 27 años, decidió que quería recorrer el mundo y sin dudarlo demasiado abandonó su trabajo en una agencia de turismo y se despidió de su vida en Buenos Aires para emprender una aventura fantástica y casi literaria.

Desde el comienzo de su viaje atravesó con su bicicleta -de 70 kilos- 61 países, las enseñas de los cuales porta con orgullo en dos mástiles que acopló a su vehículo.

La última banderita que colgó, situada en la posición más elevada, corresponde a Pakistán, país que ahora visita y desde el que próximamente cruzará a la India para proseguir con su itinerario por Asia.

En estos años, García vivió situaciones muy complejas como enfrentarse a elefantes, perderse en el desierto, recorrer 150 kilómetros en plena plaga de moscas tsé-tsé o un ataque a punta de machete de miembros de una tribu africana, según relató.

Hoy, con más de 72.000 kilómetros en las piernas, Pablo partió desde Islamabad hacia la ciudad paquistaní de Lahore para continuar con su travesía por el mundo.

"Voy a continuar hasta haber completado toda la vuelta (al mundo). Me motiva seguir experimentando cosas nuevas", expresó el argentino en conversación con la agencia de noticias EFE.

Cuando llegue a la India, el aventurero se reunirá con su novia, una joven italiana, con quien pedaleará durante unos meses para seguir acercándose a su objetivo de conquistar el globo. Para ello, estima que le restan aún unos 50.000 kilómetros y cinco años de esfuerzo.

Ride of Silence

2009-05-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

Toni Ferrell and Bob Hale led a sizable number of bicycle enthusiasts in a "Ride of Silence", to pay tribute to cyclists killed or injured on the roads. The News-Press has a story and slideshow here.

Petition presented to Commissioner Judah

2009-05-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has faced the dilemmas of sidewalks that end suddenly, distances almost impossible to negotiate without a motor vehicle, and dangerous bicycle riding conditions in Lee County, knows that urgent action is needed.

Last Friday, May 15th, National Bike to Work Day, at the Old Lee County Courthouse, Dan Moser of BikeWalkLee, a coalition working to complete the streets in Lee County, presented commissioner Judah with a petition, endorsed by over 800 residents, for the County to work towards making our streets and roads safer for pedestrians and bicycle riders.

Dan Moser is with the Lee County Health Department in the Injury and Prevention Program as the Bike and Pedestrian Program Coordinator. He is also active at the Florida Bicycle Association. Mr. Moser has been an advocate for more walking and bike-friendly communities for a number of years, and we have a debt of gratitude with him for his tireless efforts. His, however, is just one voice, and we need more citizen involvement and grassroots action to present an alternative to the old tired ideas of the "growth-at-all-costs" crowd: smart, compact, walkable communities, better transit, and real alternatives to just driving everywhere.

In his comments, Commissioner Judah expressed support for the efforts of the group. "You are the mainstream", he told the crowd, as the trend, both nationally and worldwide, is towards a more rational use of energy through better urban planning and use of alternative transportation. He issued a quick recap of things that have been accomplished in recent years, but recognized that much remains to be done.

Every time I see yet another lane being added to the highway, another overpass, or another gas station being built, I can't help but think that in many communities, both in the first and the third world, you can leave your home in the morning riding your bike, get to the train station and onto the train with it, and reach pretty much any destination in a short amount of time. There's a lot of places that have figured out that buying some bread and milk, getting a haircut or taking the kids to school are chores that don't necessarily have to involve driving a car - your own two feet are enough. If they can do it, I know we can do it. In the meantime, let's support the efforts of people like Dan Moser, Toni Ferrell, Darla Letourneau and everybody at BikeWalkLee, to make our own Lee County more bike and pedestrian-friendly.