When Chard is Not the Only Gift

By Maggie Kolk, SuSol Board Secretary

Maggie Kolk is our board secretary, and she and her husband, Jack, oversee Avant Garden in Benicia. Maggie is currently working on her Master Gardener certification, and wrote this blog for the UCCE Master Gardeners’ Under the Solano Sun, where it was first published. We loved this story of connection at Avant Garden so much that we are republishing it here with Maggie’s permission. We join Maggie in inviting you to visit Avant Garden!

“I would love to have some of that beautiful chard” a small voice called out as I was locking the shed at Avant Garden, where I volunteer as the garden coordinator. The sun was setting over the Carquinez Strait, the infamous Benicia wind was picking up as the temperature was quickly dropping. I wanted to lock up and get home. When I looked up, I recognized a slight, elderly woman pushing her poodle in a dog stroller. I had seen her many times before and always smiled and said hello, but she never acknowledged my greeting. “I would be happy to gather some for you,” I called out as I walked toward the garden fence to talk with her. She shook her head and touched her right ear. As I got closer, she said, again pointing to her ear, “I can’t hear, I’m deaf.” Well, that explained why she never returned my greeting! Leaning over the fence, I was close enough for her to read my lips. I again offered to gather some of the garden’s chard for her. I explained that at Avant Community Garden, in addition to individually “owned” members’ raised beds, we also plant a “share plot” where we grow veggies for the Benicia community, and she was more than welcome to share in our bounty. She gladly accepted and I gathered a bunch of beautiful crisp red and yellow striped chard, bagged it, and handed it to her.

In a lovely British accent, she then proclaimed that what I had just done by giving her the chard was the highlight of her day. “You see, what is happening in Ukraine has brought back so many terrible memories.” With tears in her eyes, she went on to explain that as a child in London she lived through the Nazi bombing known as the Blitz and had spent days underground with her family trying to survive. She was about to celebrate her 89th birthday and she could not believe that she lived to see the horrors of war in Europe again. But the beautiful chard … she would go home and call her family in the UK and tell them what a wonderful gift she had just received. As she parted (yes, I had tears in my eyes now) with her little dog and bag of Swiss chard, I asked her name (Julia) and assured her that any time she saw me in the garden she was welcome to stop by for a chat, chard or any other goodie we might have growing at Avant Garden … and she does! That day, Julia herself was a gift to me. For the last five years that I have been volunteering as garden coordinator, I never know who or what gift will present itself, but I know I will be surprised and grateful.

The share plot soil has been prepared and amended, the tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, eggplant, and basil planted, the drip lines secured and the timer set. It won’t be long before the zucchini is ready for harvest and we can begin sharing the summer bounty with Julia and the others in our community. Avant, one of two Benicia Community Gardens, is located on First & D Streets in Benicia and welcomes visitors to stop by to enjoy our lovely garden, relax under the oak tree and chat with our neighbor’s very friendly chickens.

Outgrowing Chicken Tenders

By Cecilia Abiva, St. Patrick-St. Vincent Catholic High School Graduate

Cecilia Abiva blossomed week after week in our six-week culinary class at St. Patrick-St. Vincent, gaining confidence, having fun and, as a senior in the group, stepping up as a sweet-natured leader bringing the boombox with music every week and oftentimes staying late to help with the dishes with her crew of friends. In the SuSol Youth Cooking Program, we seek to create spaces for young adults to explore their creativity in the kitchen while developing culinary skills they can use to feed themselves and their community. The program is rooted in the fresh food available from our local food system, and promotes health and community culture. Not every student will choose to become a chef, but we hope, like Cici, they will walk away empowered for their future path with a deep respect for where food comes from and an affinity for vegetables.

Cecilia Abiva, third from left, during cooking class

Like most kids, my diet consisted of only the crème de la crème: dinosaur chicken nuggets slathered in ketchup, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and pineapples cut by my mom (and my mom only). While such comestibles provided adequate nourishment for a child whose days were filled with endless hours spent outside playing hopscotch in the warm sunshine or building castles in the living room with couch cushions and pillows, the contents of my stomach became a concern when my juvenile palate neglected to mature with the rest of my body. I was an 18-year-old who scoured every menu for anything that consisted of or bore a resemblance to chicken tenders.

Unfazed by the criticism of my family, who always managed to point out the contents of my plate during family dinners, I did not make any drastic changes to my diet until recently. Following the flurry of events that transpired during the first semester of my senior year, I found myself with an abundance of free time. Finally unfettered by the stress of finals, college applications, and being a candidate for homecoming royalty, I decided to add a new skill to my repertoire: cooking! I joined a culinary class offered by my school with a few friends. And as you can imagine, it was no easy feat. Although I had found success in the classroom as I am the valedictorian of my graduating class, being a student in the kitchen was a humbling experience. The extent of my culinary expertise at the beginning of my cooking adventure was limited to the use of a microwave. However, I faced an even bigger dilemma: Would I actually be eating the food that I was cooking?

On the first day of class, I cooked tofu stir fry with rice. The preparation of the meal went rather smoothly. Other than a few near mishaps with a knife and the flame on the kitchen stove, everyone walked out with all ten fingers and eyebrows intact. I sat at the table anxiously awaiting our meal. There was not a chicken tender or bottle of ketchup in sight. But the moment that I picked up my fork and reluctantly shoveled the concoction of onions, carrots, spinach, and celery into my mouth, my mouth curled up when I began to chew. It was pretty good! With just a little taste, my love for cooking came to fruition and it provided a new outlet to relieve my stress. And with a little bit of practice and patience, however, cooking became less daunting and more enjoyable. Being able to cook my own food and making an effort to eat sustainably also had a positive impact on my health. I also shared my affinity for cooking with my family as I became in charge of making Saturday night dinners. The sly looks that I once received at the dinner table were replaced with hearty laughter and the sound of our mouths voraciously eating our food.

Discovering this appreciation for cooking not only expanded my taste for food, but it also fostered an appetite for adventure and service for others … two traits that I hope to explore more at UC Berkeley. If admitted, I plan on continuing to nurture my culinary skills by joining the Cal Cooking Club while also exploring new ventures like taking part in the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the Red Cross. I look forward to trying new things, ketchup or no ketchup.

Reflecting on the Youth Cooking Program

Lauren Gucik, Program Manager

As SuSol’s first year offering a Youth Cooking Program comes to a close, we can surely say that many meals were shared, lessons were learned, and the farmers and specialty crops of Solano Country were celebrated! We facilitated 5 unique courses with St. Patrick-St. Vincent (2 sessions), the Girl Scouts, 4-H of Solano, and the Benicia Teen Center. We spent hours in the kitchen developing culinary skills and exploring easy ways to enjoy healthy fresh food. During our farm field trips, students met with farmers and land stewards and saw firsthand where our food comes from and what it takes to feed the community. And at our final session, students planned and cooked for their own families, serving multiple dishes in a family-style gathering.

In the kitchen, students met regularly with local chefs to develop comfort preparing fresh easy recipes. We began with kitchen safety and knife training and introduced students to simple preparations such as sauteing, steaming, roasting, and making a simple vinaigrette. Each technique was paired with recipes that highlighted local foods grown in Solano. As the seasons changed, so did the recipes. Many students said their favorite part was working with the knives and learning the different ways you can cut and chop and how what lends best to different preparations. It was very inspiring to see how students blossomed throughout the course, gaining more confidence in themselves and their abilities in the kitchen. Their openness to trying new things was an inspiration.

At the close of each class, we dressed the tables with fabric and flowers and shared the meal they had just prepared, experiencing how everyone had the same ingredients but each group’s final dish tasted a little bit different as inevitably one group cooked the onions a little longer or someone was feeling extra spicy and added more pepper flakes. Even the shyest of students opened up around the table when our discussion turned to the food system at large. We spoke of the economic, ecological and community health benefits of supporting local farmers and shared maps of farm stands and CSAs available in their neighborhood. These conversations set the stage for our farm visits, where students picked strawberries in the field, hung out with chickens and lambs, and ate a farm fresh lunch outside with produce harvested right before their eyes. They had the opportunity to see firsthand the challenges and rewards of being a small scale responsible farmer in Solano County. One student even said “This is the best field trip of my life!” right before we encountered three large snakes on our path to the bus! The youth are as brave as they are inspiring!

In these classes, we focused on creating a future of health and wealth in our communities and for our planet. In addition to cultivating comfort in the kitchen for high schoolers, we aim to strengthen relationships between farmers and their communities and foster an authentic, lasting appreciation for fresh local food. By the final cooking session, students were ready to step up to plan the menu and cook for their friends and family members. They stood tall in their responsibility; providing for their community. It is our hope to expand this program to continue to instill this understanding of local, seasonal food in Solano youth, with the possibility of supporting a healthy meal service to bolster our local food economy and our collective immune system.

We are currently pursuing funding to continue working with youth in the kitchen and on the farm. Please contact lauren@sustainablesolano.org if you’d like to connect about future partnership opportunities.

Regenerative Agriculture: Health for the Land & People

By Sustainable Solano

Event speakers (from left) Harald Hoven, Michael Wedgley and Rose Curley (fourth from left), speak with Scott Dodson, Elena Karoulina and Priscilla Yeaney at the Pleasants Valley demonstration site

“Regenerative Agriculture.” It’s a buzzword, but just what does it mean?

Rose Curley asked this question of about 30 people gathered for the regenerative agriculture event that was part of the Solano Local Food System Alliance‘s quarterly meeting. The event brought together three speakers to cover different sustainable agricultural practices. Rose is a GrizzlyCorps fellow with Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) in the organization’s Ecological Farming Program.

The crowd did its best to answer the question. Regenerative agriculture is ancestral traditions, self-sustaining, biodiversity, organic, no waste, healing, no till, place-based, nutrient-dense, abundant, soil-building, interdependence … the list had more than 25 suggestions.

The range of answers “speaks to how broad this term is,” Rose said. “You see it on farms, the produce section of large grocery stores, and tacked onto restaurant menus.”

Rose then went over some of the basics of regenerative agriculture and its intention to return health to the land while growing nutrient-dense food and building overall resilience for farmers and our communities. She brought a chunk of soil from the farm where she works to talk about the makeup of healthy soil and maximizing biodiversity above and below ground, and some cover crops that cover and nourish the soil. Regenerative agriculture asks for an emphasis on a more holistic approach to farming, but that can be gained through a variety of practices, she said. (On the topic of nutrient-dense foods, she said you can learn more about how healthy soil creates healthy food by reading some of the research that has been done at Singing Frogs Farm in Sebastopol.)

One of the most important parts of the conversation around water and soil health and conserving natural resources is the wealth of knowledge that farmers can offer to each other to build resilience, she said. This support is particularly important because of the barriers to farming in a regenerative manner: the higher financial investment needed, the time it takes to see returns and improved health in the system, and social and cultural barriers.

The conversation pulled in much of the audience, with observations offered about how the term “organic” has lost its meaning, the use of hydroponic growing that doesn’t use or return anything to the soil, how to better promote and support growers using regenerative practices, and the idea of making Pleasants Valley a demonstration corridor for different regenerative approaches to build more public interest and understanding.

The event was held at the farm site of Pleasant Valley School, with the seating and presentation area carefully arranged and decorated with spring flowers and sporting a table of Solano-grown food for the attendees (and eyed appraisingly by the three resident donkeys). Sustainable Solano is creating a demonstration permaculture site on the property in partnership with Pleasant Valley School, which will also pursue a biodynamic garden on site in accordance with Waldorf educational principles. The event had speakers on both approaches to the landscape.

This is a new scale of project for Sustainable Solano, which has not worked on a farm property before, noted our executive director, Elena Karoulina. The hope is to plant the seeds through the foundation of the permaculture site so that the school community can continue to grow it in scope and vision over the years.

Property owner Shea McGuire said the hope is to instill stewardship in the Pleasant Valley School students, giving them an understanding that they are part of the ecosystem and to “keep the noise of the world out of childhood.” Elena and Shea signed the partnership agreement for the demonstration project at the beginning of the meeting. We invite you to join us for a public planting day on Saturday, May 28, to create the foundation for this permaculture site.

Solano Gardens Program Manager Michael Wedgley, who is designing the demonstration permaculture site on the farm, spoke about permaculture. Permaculture is a way to grow plants in a harmonious way with nature, guided by principles that can be applied to everything from a landscape to how an organization is run. Recognizing the relationships of everything in the system, including the relationships of the plants to one another, is vital to the design, he said.

Michael addressed questions and conversation around a good introductory permaculture book (Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway), taking fire into account when designing in a fire zone, and the dangers of introducing non-native species to an area.

Harald Hoven, a retired biodynamic farmer who still consults regularly on the practice, talked about the history of biodynamic farming as it arose nearly 100 years ago. A main focus of biodynamic agriculture is building vitality into the system that then translates into the food we receive from the system – vitality that is often lost in today’s agricultural practices. Biodynamics also focuses on relationships, with plants and livestock kept in balance on the site to yield land fertility. Sometimes, things have to be brought onto the site, such as manure or compost, to build that fertility, but ideally everything comes from the land itself, he said.

Just as we are always developing and becoming something new, so the land grows and develops with our help and guidance, Harald said. Gradually, it all works toward the greater health of the land.

From all of the talks and conversation it was clear that these different approaches have the same objective: health, both for the land and for people who consume what that land yields.

Our next big event, Bounty of the County at the Solano County Fair on June 18 will recognize that yield through the produce of Solano family farms. You also can learn more about the Solano Local Food System Alliance at the event. Alliance members will be there to hear about your vision for local food and your commitment to supporting the local food system. Another opportunity is at the Alliance’s quarterly meetings, which are always open to the public. The next one on Aug. 4 will focus on ways to buy local food, from purchasing directly from Solano farmers to Cultivate Community Food Co-op and other retail locations.

Pleasants Valley Demonstration Permaculture Site Installation

Join us on Saturday, May 28, to learn about sustainable landscape design and help install a demonstration site based on permaculture principles at a Pleasants Valley farm!

Learn more and register here

2022 Fairfield & Vacaville Demonstration Food Forest Tour: Featured Gardens

Scroll through the list below to read about the Fairfield and Vacaville gardens that are featured on this year’s Demonstration Food Forest Tour!

Gardens will be open from 9 am-1 pm Saturday, June 4. You can pick up your itinerary for this self-guided tour at a permaculture demonstration farm site in Vacaville from 9-11 am. And don’t miss these special additions:

  • 11 am: Greywater talk and laundry-to-landscape greywater system tour with Greywater Action at Healthy Futures garden
    • Greywater installer Andrea Lara will be on-site to give a talk on using your laundry water to irrigate your landscape and will give a tour of the laundry-to-landscape greywater system.
  • 10 am-12 pm: Expert advice on chicken-keeping and food forest plant selection at Mangia garden
    • Master Gardener Tina Saravia will be on-site to answer questions about backyard chickens and food forest garden plants that thrive in Solano County.

Register for the June 4 tour here!

Fairfield Demonstration Food Forest Gardens

Magical Garden

This garden was a front lawn conversion in 2019. It is filled with vegetables, fruits, herbs and more, building healthy soil and harvesting water from the roof.

Home to hummingbirds, bees, ladybugs and other beneficial insects, the garden sparks conversation with the neighbors and offers bountiful produce to share.

Learn more

Mom’s Delight

Installed in 2017, this backyard food forest has 21 fruit trees pruned annually to 5 feet, making it easier to access the fruit. The majority of the trees are watered by rain funneled into a swale, while others are watered from the laundry-to-landscape greywater system. An automatic drip system is used during the dry periods. All the fruits are shared with neighbors, friends and family. Additional plantings of salvia and calendula draw in honey bees and hummingbirds.

Learn more

Vacaville Demonstration Food Forest Gardens

Blooming Beneficial Biome

This food forest garden was a front yard lawn conversion and displays what can be accomplished in less than 18 months.

Building healthy soil and harvesting rainwater in an in-ground swale, the garden supports fruit trees, asparagus, pollinator plants and more.

Learn more

Healthy Futures

This garden has eight thriving fruit trees in a small front yard, as well as a plethora of herbaceous and shrub plants. The vegetation is watered through a combination of swales that collect rainwater, greywater from the laundry, and (rarely utilized) drip irrigation. The yard has, like any good forest should, taken on a life and energy of its own, constantly changing and morphing year over year, but never failing to provide the residents, neighbors, and several local food banks with fruits and vegetables.

During the tour Andrea Lara from Greywater Action will give a talk at 11 am on greywater and tour the existing laundry-to-landscape system. There will be time for questions.

Learn more

Vacaville’s Westgate Wonderland Neighborhood

(These next three gardens are within walking distance of each other)

Mangia

This three-year-old front yard garden welcomes the neighborhood to pick as they please. The yard extends to the backyard with pollinator plants intermixed with edibles, chickens, repurposed items, a native sedge field and so much more. This yard integrates systems to benefit the whole property.

During the tour Master Gardener Tina Saravia will be on-site to answer questions about backyard chickens and food forest plants.

Learn more

Our Shepherd’s Heart

This newly established front yard garden was installed in May 2021 with the focus on growing food and a desire to share with neighbors. A large swale in the front wraps around the yard and supports fruit trees and pollinators.

Learn more

Orchid Lily

This small, beautiful, low maintenance front yard garden offers easy access to culinary herbs and three fruit tree guilds supported with yarrow, comfrey and borage.

Learn more

We are incredibly grateful for the generous support of our funders. The Solano County Water Agency continues to support the Sustainable Backyard Program throughout the county. Solano Sustainable Backyard Program short videos: Waterwise and Building Gardens and Community. Occasionally we combine funding from other programs to make larger projects possible.

Rossini’s Garden Drink

Photo credit: Unsplash

Ingredients:

8 large ripe strawberries (plus 2 smaller ones for garnish)
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup simple syrup (a complementary infused or flavored one is okay)
1/2 cucumber minced (reserve 4 strips (not peel) for garnish)
1 Tablespoon parsley leaves
Optional – pink sugar to rim glass
Sparkling water (for mocktail)
Prosecco or Sparkling Rosé (for cocktail)

In a cocktail shaker or pitcher muddle strawberries. Add lemon juice, minced cucumber, simple syrup and parsley. Muddle all ingredients. You can also puree them in a blender if desired.

Optional: rim champagne flutes by moistening with lemon juice and dipping rims in pink sugar.

Divide muddled ingredients into 4 flutes. If making a mocktail add sparkling water; if making a cocktail add sparkling rosé or Prosecco. Garnish with a strip of cucumber and half of a strawberry on a cocktail pick.

Makes 4 drinks.

Recipe courtesy of Chef Lisa Núñez-Hancock

Download a printable version of the recipe here

Learn about this recipe by watching the cooking class below