Urban Acres brings fresh food to City Dwellers

E coli tainted spinach, Mad Cow disease in our burgers and now smelly girl scout cookies – we can’t even imagine what horrors await the Foodies among us! Concerns about the industrial machine that creates our food have led some Dallasites to make a change in their eating and shopping habits. That is exactly what motivated the guys who started Urban Acres.

Urban Acres is a CSA (community supported agriculture) of sorts. A traditional CSA is when several families buy a ‘share’ of a particular farmer’s production. Every week the farmer divides what he has grown into a container for each family and they ‘share’ of the bounty of the harvest. During okra season, that means lots of okra! Generally CSAs offer seasonal produce of all kinds but not items like meat, dairy or baked goods.

Urban Acres was born of this idea, but with a twist. The owners of Urban Acres forage for exceptional local farmers: producers of not only produce, but honey, meats and poultry, bread and other artisanal items. Their focus is on fresh, local and organic foods. Members buy a share (a onetime fee of $72 then $50 for a full share, and $30 for a half share) and pick up their share at one of 4 drop off locations across the Metroplex every other Saturday morning. Each share has a selection of produce items included in the share price. If members want to add in fresh baked bread, local honey, milk or host of other offerings, then they simply order them from the website by Wednesday the week before pickup.

Each week the share is different depending on what items are harvested from the farms during that week. Fresh. Seasonal. Locally grown. CSAs and businesses like Urban Acres are good for the farmers because they allow a security net; the farmers know how much they can sell to the CSA so they can better plan their plantings and harvests. It is also good for members who get first shot at the freshest produce without dirtying their fingernails. No industrial machine here, just a friendly over the fence transaction between farmers and those of us who work in a cubicle.

Vermicomposting - Overview

Our normally warm inviting earth is now covered with a thick layer of snow, so gardeners all over the metroplex are curled up by the fire. Is there a better time to learn about vermicomposting? We can start now and once we get it all figured out, the snow will have melted and we will be ready for our new project.

Vermicomposting involves keeping worms at the house to eat your kitchen scraps. After the worms eat the organic material you feed them, they poop - creating a potent organic fertilizer. Your family’s uneaten spaghetti and cucumber scrapings go through the worm and what the worm excretes is referred to as castings – or worm poo. This worm poo is great for your plants, both indoor and outdoor.

Most of the gooey things that you are now throwing into the trash are perfect feed for your worms. This week we have fed our worms a wide variety of stuff from our kitchen: scrapings of veggies after salads were made, an old wrinkly apple, ½ a loaf of stale bread, moldy spaghetti sauce, stale crackers, spaghetti, egg shells, and coffee grounds. The only things we try not to feed our worms are diary, meat and anything too greasy.

But where do these voratious, slimy little critters live? In a bin, of course! Bins are made of all kinds of containers, plastic storage bins, wooden bins, really anything solid, empty, lidded and not chemically contaminated will do.

The best worms for garbage eating are red wrigglers. Red wriggler worms don’t live in the dirt as much as in the litter on top of the dirt. This means you can create a great place for your worms to live that doesn’t involve a bucket of dirt. What you will need is a damp sub straight (worms can dry out) like straw, shredded paper or torn strips of newspaper.

Since we have just recently set up our new worm bin, I am going to follow our new bin step by step, but remember this is just a guideline. Part of the fun is being creative about making your worm habitat!

To recap; worms live at your house in a bin, among dampened paper and you feed them kitchen scraps and they poop plant fertilizer. COOL!

Home Chemical Collection Center

A shout out to the City of Dallas for providing us the Home Chemical Collection Center – a place to take all the icky things we don’t want in our landfill. The center is at 11234 Plano Road which is north of LBJ on Plano Road, past the intersection of Miller and Plano Road, just over the railroad tracks. The hours of operation are a bit strange but you can call to confirm they are open when you can get out there – 214.553.1765. Be sure you take your TDL and water or utility bill to prove your residency. You don’t have to live in Dallas, but you do have to give them your address.
They are open Tue- Thur and the 2nd and 4th Saturday of each month.

Tue 9am – 7:30pm
Wed 8:30 am – 5 pm
Thur 8:30 am – 5pm
Sat (2nd & 4th) 9am – 3 pm

You can take all kinds of things to the Collection Center – old paint, auto fluids and filters, lawn chemicals, aerosol cans, pool chemicals, household cleaners, gasoline, light bulbs, batteries, computers and peripherals, cell phones, and cables and wiring.
There is no limit to how much you can take, I have taken a pickup bed full of odds and ends (when we moved from our home of 13 years we had lots of old chemicals in the garage). If I get real organized, I let my neighbors know I am going on a particular day and they bring me their old chemicals to take at the same time.
If it sounds easier to just throw these chemicals into the trash, remember that whatever goes into our landfill is very likely to make its way into our water system. So dedicate a bucket in the garage for these items and when the bucket is full, make a trip to the collections center. You pay for this Center with your tax dollars, so you should take advantage of the service!

One Day Dallas

Residents here in Dallas are lucky enough to have a curbside recycling program in place for residents (not for businesses) and our fmaily has been an increasingly dedicated participant for several years. We love the service and are glad to pay for it through our taxes. I have had an issue with the service. Our trash is picked up twice per week (grey roll cart) and our recycling is picked up once every 2 weeks (blue roll cart). I am sure it is different for other households, but we can barely fill our trash roll cart once a week, let alone twice. And every other week we put out our blue cart of recycling and an additiona couple of bags of recycling.
The good news is that Dallas will be changing the schedule of pickup beginning March 1. To roll out the new scheduleing change, called One Day Dallas, the Department of Sanitation is holding meetings. I attending one of the first meetings at Stonewall Jackson Elementary and Keri Mitchel was nice enough to quote my synopsis on The Advocate Blog.

The Director of Sanitation Services for Dallas (Mary Nix) gave the presentation. Starting March 1, the City will be picking up trash and recycling one day a week. Right now they are picking up trash twice a week and recycling once every two weeks. This change was planned in 2004 and has been piloted since then as a way to encourage Dallasites to recycle. The pilot results in the Northern part of Dallas have been very successful. This is the final phase of implementation, which will involve the last 180,000 households in Dallas not currently using this schedule.

The audience seemed to favor the change for the most part. This particular roll-out also involves changing many households from alley service to curb service, involving the homeowner using a roll cart at the curb where they were previously using bags in the ally. This particular issue generated more questions that the change of scheduling.

I also learned that three sizes of roll carts are available – every home is originally given large, 95-gallon roll carts; blue for recycling and gray for trash. If the 95-gallon trash roll cart is unwieldy or simply too large, you can request a medium roll cart (60-gallon) by calling 311 and they will bring it right out. Also, if you want an even smaller roll cart (45-gallon), call 311 and one can be special ordered for you.

If you feel like you have more trash than can be hauled once a week, you can ask that an additional 95-gallon trash roll cart be delivered to your house. You will pay an additional onetime charge of $10.50 for the trash roll cart. You can get as many recycling roll carts as you want. Mary asks asks that you try out your current roll cart situation until after March 1, and see how it works before you call in to make a change of any kind.

Caramel Nirvana

One of my favorite yummy things to buy at the White Rock Local Market is a decadent product with a boring name. CARAMEL MILK SPREAD from Lucky Layla Farms is a luscious, flowable carmel confection that needs a re-name. My vote is Caramel Nirvana which more closely describes this all natural indulgence. I must admit, I’m not a big caramel lover, and I originally bought my first tub of Caramel Nirvana for my holiday favorite, pumpkin flan. I am now officially a Caramel Groupie!

For those of us looking to support reputable local producers, Lucky Layla is a very good choice. Lucky Layla has a dairy of about 100 Jersey and Guernsey cattle in Plano Texas and a production facility in Garland, so this product is as local as it gets. Their products are all natural and hand created using milk that is rBGH free. You can visit their farm (and on-site farm store pictured above)at Parker and Jupiter in Plano.

Lucky Layla also make cheeses and butter – and did I mention their Caramel Sauce??? You can buy an 8 oz tub for yourself at the White Rock Local Market for $3.50. The Green Spot carries Lucky Layla cheeses, but not the caramel, so you will need to stop by the market to get your fix.

White Rock Local Market closed for winter

I've just heard back from Sarah Perry over at White Rock Local Market and the rumors are true - the market is closed for the winter. So sad. But there is a bright spot on the horizon at The Green Spot (yes, pun intended!). The White Rock Local Market will open again in March ... and ...drumroll please ... they are looking at TWO markets per month starting in March!!! See, we knew 2010 would be a banner year! The website for the market is experiencing a reboot, but I'll list the address here if you want to check in later for updates www.whiterocklocalmarket.com

In the mean time, you might be able to find some of your favorite products at the Green Spot. Some of the vendors are also in the Bishop Arts area. Check back with me and over the next few weeks I'll be waxing poetic about some of the great products I have bought at the Market. It will give us some inspiration to keep busy with while we wait for March.