As money pours in to buy 120 acres of prime farmland by a Jan. 31 deadline, Grow Food Northampton founder Lilly Lombard is still waiting to exhale. NORTHAMPTON — When Munroe Street resident Lilly Jeffs Lombard adopts a cause, watch out. A longtime advocate for the environment and urban agriculture here, Lombard has a reputation [...]

NORTHAMPTON — Grow Food Northampton, a non-profit organization formed earlier this year to encourage local agriculture, announced yesterday that it has signed a purchase-and-sale agreement with the Trust for Public Land to buy 117 acres of the sprawling Bean/Allard farm between Spring Street and the Mill River. The Trust is working with the city and [...]

Eggplant Salad – The Greek Way Aubergines to the French, Melazana to the Italians, eggplant traveled from the Iberian peninsula to Sicily, southern Italy and finally Greece. This little bunch was purchased on Saturday morning in Greenfield. The following dish is interpreted from the Greeks from Patience Gray, who wrote “Honey from a Weed” while [...]

About a month ago a guy who has a paper route mentioned to me that he had seen some funny spots on a person’s upside-down tomato plants. Later in the day, a woman who lives in Florence said that she saw the same thing on one, just one, of the leaves on her tomatoes. She [...]

NORTHAMPTON — At 10 in the morning on an intensely hot Friday, I walked into Halo Couriers, Brion Stracensky’s new bike shop at Roundhouse Plaza downtown. While he does sell bike gear,  Stracensky’s bread-and-butter is a messenger service. I had never met a bicycle messenger. In fact, I was under the impression that they had gone [...]

“The leaves that develop from the red protrusions grow more than a food in length and contain a toxic amount of oxalic acid, a substance that can cause illness if ingested. (This fact always impressed me.)” Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart Living, May 2010 I was given a nice bunch of rhubarb from the guys at [...]

Promising “Oddball Farmers, Free-Range Children, Jaw-Dropping Flowers, Hard-Working Musicians” and wholesome locally-grown food and produce straight from the abundant farms of Western Massachusetts, Tuesday Market opens May 4 for the 2010 season. The market is held every Tuesday between 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. in the brick area next to the city’s parking garage and behind [...]

The band played on through the end of summer at the Amherst Farmers’ Market on South Pleasant St. to a very appreciative crowd. There has been a surge not only in farmers’ markets in general, over 100 in this region, according to CISA, but in music at markets as well. At the winter farmers’ market [...]

Hadley grass, so prized, so loved, so chronicled in the Valley that some folks can actually taste on which side of the river it is grown. Like with wine, terroir makes a difference. This time of year there are recipes galore for this New England perennial. In one, the asparagus is transformed into ice cream (!) and then piped into the beginning of the season, keep it simple to best taste this shining star of Hadley, lo these many decades. Recipes [...]

We came home this afternoon to find the bees in the early stages of swarming! Swarming is a natural reaction to favorable conditions by bees. They create a new queen and about half of the bees leave the hive with her to form a new colony elsewhere. This may be good for the bees, but [...]

Fiddleheads are in the shy stage of life pausing before unfurling into ferns. Ostrich fern (atteuccia struthiopteris) fiddleheads are edible, forragable, and pretty much free, if you know where to look. They come up in April and May and like alluvial, sandy soil. In western MA, they have been known to grow near the oxbow [...]

I met my wife Priscilla at the Woodstar Cafe on December 27, 2008, when I needed to plug my laptop in next to her table. It was then that I saw she was reading a reprint of the 1966 Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Plan. As both an urban planning and zoning geek and a librarian I [...]

I shot this at Tabella’s Restaurant in Amherst last night. I was impressed. Really good food, and a firm commitment to real farm-to-table politics. The menu changes according to what is available that week. They are all local all the time. I spent about three hours in the kitchen and these guys were pumping out [...]

How a Hadley spelt, Polish-distilled vodka won a “Double Gold” award in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition Over the weekend, when the rest of us were relaxing in the beautiful weather, a panel of hard-working spirits experts convened in San Francisco to taste vodka. This contest, for which it takes more than a passing [...]