Lorina is the most cheerful & creative gardener we know!

This Sunday, May 18th, she will be doing an herb presentation on the patio at Hula’s burger joint, on hwy 120 at David Ave. in Escalon from 10:30 am ~ 1:30 pm.

Keep your ears and eyes open… Lorina’s Edible Garden has a lot of fun things going on this year at her farm. The farm will be open seasonally offering summer and fall events, gardening classes & demonstrations for students and clubs. She has a great line up of herbs and seeds in her nursery and will also come to you with her expertise to help you get your garden started!

Lorina is planing to start a small scale CSA project and looking for interested people and families who would like to plant a garden and enjoy the harvest. Awesome… you all know how I feel about the CSA, don’t miss this opportunity for fresh home grown eats!

To chat with Lorina or receive her fun newsletter check out her darling site lorinasediblegarden.com.

It was our first fair display with hopes to make some sort of educational impact on the benefits of organics in this small community. Our display was set up on an old chuck wagon in the entrance to The Henry Miller Petting Zoo. We showcased pictures from a few of our farm and ranch visits, literature on organics and a CSA box. Kat has been running and organizing this zoo for many years and decided
Local Choices should make an appearance since this years theme was
“Celebrating Our Farmers”, so to the fair we went!

As Kat managed her zoo, I manned our space greeting and handing out cards to any one who would stop to view. Believe it or not it was mostly children, they gravitated to our basket of beautiful fresh produce like bees to a cherry tree, having questions such as…. Is this real? what is this? can I have some? Their curiosity was endearing, as they tasted (some for the first time) strawberries, snow peas and sweet peas. Adults of course were more interested in information on the CSA memberships, our photos, who we are and what exactly is this blog about.

It was a fun and profound experience for me. I left that fair with a good feeling of teaching young & old their local healthy food options and knowing we did make an educational impact, not only about organics but the importance of our
Local Choices mission… supporting our local small farms.

Our next outing will be at Merced County fair in Merced, July 15-20.

We invite you to stop by the Old Mcdonalds petting zoo to meet us, answer any questions you may have and see all the awesome farm animals!

This by far has been the most amazing farm visit we have had,

who knew…

our organic dairy and chicken farm visit would end with a safari!

Lloyd and Babette Pareira along with their children Jared, Regan, Isabella and Gianna maintain an organic dairy, organic pasture chickens and exotic animals from around the world in Snelling, California.

As we begin our tour we are surprised with a greeting from the family pet camel. Charlie begins to stroll our way and as the kids feed him a handful of grain, one by one miniatures start to show up, a donkey, a pig, a goat, a sheep and the list goes on!

After all the miniature introductions, we move past the organic grass fed dairy cattle and the clucking of chickens start to fill the air. Babette tells us how she started this organic chicken operation with Red Sexlinks, then eventually adding Leghorn chickens to the flock. They roost and lay their many eggs in a mobile chicken house that is moved every 4 days from pasture to pasture allowing them a natural grass and bug diet. They are supplemented with an organic mash from Black Rock Milling and have unlimited access to fresh pond water.

These chickens are not bothered as Babette and the girls carefully move them out of the way to collect eggs, putting them in a wire basket. The high quality large fresh eggs are sold to Dean & Deluca in Sacramento, the Culinary Institute in Napa, locally at The Vineyard Farmer’s Market in Fresno, also providing to a new restaurant in Oakdale, The Local Harvest.

Our last stop you have to see to believe. Beautiful exotic animals roaming freely in a pasture thick with trees and a year around running creek. Lloyd’s father began this collection with the American and Water Buffalo, over the years the family has added Ostrich, a Llama named Fancy Pants, a very gigantic Gir, a heard of Watusi & Long Horns, Highlanders, a Belted Gallaway, Yaks and a few off springs here and there.

What an extraordinary experience, we would like to thank the Pareira family for their time, hospitality and personal tour of their beautiful Ranch!

The Pareira’s can be reached at (209) 722-1149 or ovdairy@elite.net.

Emily Lindsey grew up on a farm in Merced California with dedicated parents Stewart and Susanne Sorensen raising grass fed sheep. She participated in 4-H and FFA for many years showing and breeding, improving the quality of their flock over the years. After graduating from the University of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Emily and her husband Robert returned to Merced, to continue the family tradition of breeding sheep. They are the next generation along with their children Steven and Morgan and have focused their efforts on raising pure bred Romney Sheep.

The Romney traces it beginnings to the marshy area of Kent in England. Known for their delicate taste, this high quality lean meat is fine, tender, low in fat, high in beta carotene and antioxidants. For century’s it has been the the main meat in the Mediterranean Diet along with fish. Romneys produce a strong-wooled heavey fleece ideal for hand-spinners and weavers. Lanolin is also derived from sheeps wool and can be used as a topical ointment.

Our tour of the Sorensen Farm began with an introduction to Melek, the family Anatolian Shepherd Dog. This intelligent breed originates from Anatolia (central Turkey), bred for guarding flocks of sheep. Melek takes her responsibility very seriously, spending all her time with her sheep protecting them from wild dogs, coyotes and other predators.

As we walked out to the pasture with the sheep, Melek and the family, the pride and commitment they have in natural farming is evident. The grass is green and rich in nutrients. The sheep are healthy animals that are occasionally supplemented with organic feed when needed and never forced to lamb out of season. Their belief is all natural all the time… because they wanted good clean lamb for themselves, their friends and to supply their local community and restaurants such as Cafe Sol in Merced.

We had a great time learning about Romney sheep, Melek and the entire family. They are gracious and willing to share their knowledge and passion with anyone who is interested in learning, so visit Merced County Fair, the theme this year is “Rock the Flock” and Emily will be providing shearing demonstrations at the Old MacDonalds Farm.

Sorensen Farm is another example of what true farming is all about. Loving what they do, doing it for the right reasons and sharing good clean healthy food with their community….

What are you doing to preserve our planet?

Let us know!

Here is what Eco Moms Alliance group is doing, spreading the word on composting.

Their mantra is:

Sustain your home

Sustain your planet

Sustain yourself

from blip.tv posted with vodpod

“A History of Earth Day”

Among other things, 1970 in the United States brought with it the Kent State shootings, the advent of fiber optics, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Apollo 13, the Beatles’ last album, the death of Jimi Hendrix, the birth of Mariah Carey, and the meltdown of fuel rods in the Savannah River nuclear plant near Aiken, South Carolina — an incident not acknowledged for 18 years.

Participant in Earth Day, 1970. Photo: EPA History Office

It was into such a world that the very first Earth Day was born.

Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, proposed the first nationwide environmental protest “to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda. ” “It was a gamble,” he recalls, “but it worked.”

At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Environment was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.

Earth Day 1970 turned that all around.

On April 22, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. Denis Hayes, the national coordinator, and his youthful staff organized massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.

Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders. The first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species acts.

Sen. Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest honor given to civilians in the United States — for his role as Earth Day founder.

As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders asked Denis Hayes to organize another big campaign. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting the status of environmental issues on to the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

As the millennium approached, Hayes agreed to spearhead another campaign, this time focused on global warming and a push for clean energy. Earth Day 2000 combined the big-picture feistiness of the first Earth Day with the international grassroots activism of Earth Day 1990. For 2000, Earth Day had the Internet to help link activists around the world. By the time April 22 rolled around, 5,000 environmental groups around the world were on board, reaching out to hundreds of millions of people in a record 184 countries. Events varied: A talking drum chain traveled from village to village in Gabon, Africa, for example, while hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., USA.

Earth Day 2000 sent the message loud and clear that citizens the world ’round wanted quick and decisive action on clean energy.

Now, the fight for a clean environment continues. We invite you to be a part of this history and a part of Earth Day. Discover energy you didn’t even know you had. Feel it rumble through the grass roots under your feet and the technology at your fingertips. Channel it into building a clean, healthy, diverse world for generations to come.

Written by Daniel Imhoff author of …

Posted in Los Angeles times and Modesto Bee

If you’ve ever driven through the San Joaquin Valley in September, you’re familiar with the grids of lint-strewn cotton fields that blur by for hours. You might even have pondered the wisdom of planting such a thirsty crop as cotton on a million acres — an area larger than Yosemite National Park — in a state dealing with a water crisis. Then again, you might ask a similar question about the half-million acres of rice, a grain adapted to the monsoons of Asia, in the Sacramento Valley.

Cheap irrigation water is part of the equation, but there is another common denominator. It’s a massive federal legislation package passed every five years known as the farm bill, which House and Senate members are scrambling to reauthorize by Friday’s deadline.

Over the last decade, the farm bill has allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to shower tens of billions of dollars in subsidies on the nation’s cotton and rice farmers (along with corn, soybean, wheat, sugar and milk producers). These subsidies flow whether growers need them or not. They flow even as they damage the environment and our nutritional well-being. They flow, all the while enabling the biggest farms to consolidate into megafarms. Continue Reading »

We are making progress on “The Pick & Gather”, working hard to bring our community a successful farm event.

We would like to offer local farmers, ranchers, artisans, chefs, business’ and non-profit groups the opportunity to participate!

If you are interested in joining in the fun,

please click on comment below to ask your questions and we will respond ASAP!

Happy Farming,

Kat and Anna

For supporting Local Choices!