The Huffington Post has published an article about Stan Brown who runs Brown’s Bee Farm in North Yarmouth Maine.
Stan Brown of Cumberland, Maine, is nearly 93 years old, one of America’s oldest registered beekeepers. Brown, who turns 93 on October 13, has kept honeybees on the same one-quarter mile of road since 1931. Semi-retired, he maintains 55 hives and produces around 1900 pounds of honey a year with the help of his assistant, Karen Thurlow-Kimball.
Taste, Memory: Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors and Why They Matter, a book by Portland resident, local farmer, and expert on heirloom fruits and vegetables David Buchanan, is being launched later this month.
In his Forward for Taste, Memory Gary Paul Nabhan writes,
Taste, Memory may well be the most beautiful book ever written about food biodiversity and how it has “landed” on earth, in our mouths and in our hearts. Once you have read and digested David’s book, you will never again regard this two-word phrase as an abstraction, but as a essential element of our common food heritage, one that continues to nourish and enrich our lives. In turn, we must nourish it, or it will surely fade away. As Poppy Tooker famously says, “You’ve got to eat it to save it.” Taste, Memory offers the rationale and the inspiration you need to embark upon your own voyage of food discovery.
SPACE Gallery is hosting a launch part for Taste, Memory on October 24.
We’ll set up cider pressing equipment and taste a variety of apple blends, as well as samples of hard ciders from David and Eli’s fermentation experiments (feel free to bring apples if you’d like to press some of your own). David will read passages from his book about collecting rare fruits and working with Eli, and the movement to preserve biodiversity and traditional foods. Acoustic live music by Jake Hoffman and Tyler Leinhardt of Sugar Shack.
A pair of excepts from the book (Seeds of an Idea and The Cider Tree) are available on the publisher’s website.
The New York Times has published an article about last weekend’s Common Ground Fair in Unity Maine.
Organic food may not be feeding the world yet, but it was feeding thousands of people at the Common Ground Country Fair last weekend.
They lined up at 10 a.m. to pay $4 for Steve’s Organic French Fries, made with organic potatoes fried in cold-pressed safflower oil for the vegetarian crowd. Although “beef tallow is better,” said Steve Aucoin, 61, who has been selling fries here since the first fair, in 1977.
Today’s Press Herald includes a front page article on the Food Science program at the University of Maine,
At a time when enrollment at UMaine is down overall, a record number of students is enrolling in the university’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition.
advice on how to best store your growing home wine collection,
How should you store the wine you keep at home for dinner parties or your own drinking pleasure? Do you really need one of those wine refrigerators that are so popular these days? And when should you take the leap to a real wine cellar?
and an article about a documentary on MOO Milk.
In a film that is at turns humorous, heart-wrenching and very humane, Pingree and Mann follow three farm families in Aroostook County and Downeast Maine as they and seven other farms strike out on their own to create Maine’s Own Organic Milk Co., better known as MOO Milk.
Maine a la Carte reports that Fishbowl Farm will be exiting the Portland Farmers Market at the end of this year.
Once these summer markets close up shop around Thanksgiving, Fishbowl Farm intends to change its business model and focus on wholesale accounts for salad greens. The plan calls for selling greens from early spring through late fall.
Today’s Press Herald includes an article about the 2012 apple harvest.
Here in Maine, some growers are reporting yields coming in just a little bit early. But there’s no question that by this weekend, the apples will be ready to go — whether you pick them yourself or buy from a local farm stand.
At Rollins Orchards, a Garland farm that’s been in the family since 1821, owner Jean Rollins has been stocking her market for a while with help from her son, Ernest, and his wife, Andrea.
“We’ve been picking for three weeks,” Jean Rollins said. “That’s early. It’s a pretty good crop this year; overall, it’s about average.”
The Forecaster has published an update on Alewive’s Brook Farm’s use of Kickstarter to raise $60,000 to build a new farm stand.
“It’s like a barn raising, but we’re calling it a market raising,” said Caitlin Jordan, manager of the farm and daughter of owner Jodie Jordan. “We’re asking the community to go one step further in their support for our farm. We’re not asking them to lift the beams, just to buy them.”
So far 42 people have pledged $4,345 towards the goal.
MPBN is reporting that the 2012 Maine apple crop is “off by as much as 30 percent”.
The first hint of trouble for some orchards came back in March, when temperatures rose into the 80s in some parts of the state, shattering records. Apple trees started to bloom.
“And this was before the danger of the last freeze, so while they were in full bloom, or just around the time of full bloom, there was an event that killed flower buds,” says Renae Moran, tree fruit specialist at the University of Maine.
Today’s Press Herald includes a front page article that examines why people buy organic in light of a recent study that found no difference in nutritional value,
“I tend to buy organic because of the impact conventional farming has on the environment and the pesticides that are in a lot of conventionally grown food,” said Anna Korsen of Portland, who shopped Wednesday at the farmers market in Monument Square with her 2-year-old son, Arlo Korsen-Cayer. “I don’t want that in my body or my family’s bodies.”
Today’s paper also contains a report on last week’s Portland Brew Festival, and a review of Joe’s NY Pizza.
For additional reporting on the organic foods study listen to this report from MPBN.
The Maine Sunday Telegram includes an article about the 2012 potato harvest.
This year, the farmers are struggling with the opposite extreme: too little rain, which is stunting the potatoes’ growth and will hit farmers’ wallets hard this fall.
Like the corn crop in the Midwest, Maine potatoes are withering, but they’re underground and out of sight, so how poorly they’re doing is a bit of a guessing game.