Market Is Open

ALFN Members,

The “market” is open and busting with spring energy! As most of you know, the market will be open for orders from Sunday at noon until Wednesday at noon. Early orders can grab items that are high in demand or low in quantity. But don’t worry, every time I get on the market Wednesday morning, there is still an abundance of produce and high-quality items.

Upcoming Events

Make sure you mark your calendar for April 2nd. The Southern Center for Agroecology will be hosting a Spring Planting Festival with plant sales as well as speakers discussing seed saving, composting and planting for pollinators. The event will also host a seed exchange. The event will take place at Fletcher Library as well as on the premise of Little Rock Urban Farming down the road from Fletcher. For full details and schedule, go to their facebook event page or to the Southern Center for Agroecology Website.

Related to seed saving, I’m sure many of you are making preparations for a veggie garden this year. I’ve always enjoyed looking through seed catalogs. The variety, color and uniqueness of various breeds always entice my vision of what is possible and cultivate my curiosity. However, there is also a resilience in using saved seed as well. When we save our own seed, we winnow generality into local opportunity. ALFN takes pride in providing local food to local consumers. But can you imagine not only local food economies, but a local farming culture that grows local varieties specific to our own bioregion? When we save seed, we encourage breeds from catalogs to adapt to our own particularity whether it be humidity, heat and drought or specific local diseases. By selecting seed, our food base becomes more robust. I’m a fan of Carol Deppe, an author, gardener and promoter of saving seed. In one of her recent books, she provides the broader reasons for saving seed…in this case corn seed:

“Corn is at the core of modern agribusiness, the most important food crop in North America. In no other crop are the values of modern commercial agribusiness as thoroughly embedded. There is nothing we can do that is ultimately subversive – there is no act of gardening that is so profound a rebellion, there is no act of eating that is so potent a blow for food quality and food system sanity – as to take back the corn crop in our own backyards, and grow, breed, eat, and save seed of corn based upon an entirely different set of values.” (from The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times)

Doesn’t Deppe make you want to put a bandanna on and get out in the garden? Plant away!

All the best,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager