A village on the western fringes of Hampshire is well on the way to becoming the first in England to defy the power of the supermarkets by achieving communal self-sufficiency in food.

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New recipes using one or more ingredients from Eve Fox’s CSA produce box each week in the hopes that this will help others cook more seasonally and locally.

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from Pete’s Greens latest newsletter

Late blight-the name has haunted the dreams of northeast vegetable growers for the past 6 weeks. The scourge that caused the Irish potato famine and that in most years exists in the northeast but at a relatively minor level is widespread this year. Supposedly widely dispersed on tomato plants that were sent to a few big box stores, it has thrived in this summer’s cool, moist conditions. It forms nasty looking brown lesions on both potatoes and tomatoes and can level a whole crop within days. Worse yet, it can infect the potatoes while still in the earth, causing them to store poorly and rot prematurely. We have been justifiably concerned with our 5 acres of potatoes that we sell every day of the year. We don’t have markets that will allow us to sell our crop quickly if we fear it will store poorly – and you our eaters, depend on us for potatoes all year.

We discovered our first late blight yesterday in a portion of the potato field. It was a small area and I ripped out all the blighted plants and burned them. We are spraying the field with organically approved Nu-Cop, a copper based fungicide that does not stop late blight but can help to slow it. We expect hot, dry weather later this week that will also slow the disease. I think we will be ok. Apparently the tubers are only infected if you allow the disease to infect the stems and fully destroy the plant. We plan to mow the field or otherwise destroy the plants before that occurs. The goal now is to keep the potatoes blight free enough to keep growing for another week or two as they are adding 700 lbs. of potato weight every day in hot August weather. We have not yet seen the disease in our tomato greenhouses and hope like heck it stays out. Send your happy blight free thoughts our way! ~Pete

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The challenge of growing twice as much food by 2050 to feed nine billion people—with less and less land—is everyone’s problem. But scientists are hard at work fomenting a second green revolution.

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recipe at this primal life

trying to avoid the salt laden cream of mushroom soup and stuffing of the traditional casserole (which tastes oh so good), i found this which sounds good…looking forward to trying it

http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2009/07/tex-mex-squash-casserole.html

In a move that surely had a few fish doing backflips out of the water, the world’s largest contract caterer, the Compass Group, has heeded the advice of the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) and banned 69 different fish species endangered by overfishing. The Compass Group supplies thousands of restaurants across the U.K. and Ireland with fish for their menus, so this ban will  effectively eliminate these recently banned fish from over 6,500 restaurants being supplied by Compass. That’s a lot of fish left in the sea.

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