There’s another AWARE meeting at the Concrete Senior Center on May 15th from 7:00 - 9:00 pm. This time the guest speaker will be Stefanie Johnson of the State Attorney General’s office. The discussion will focus on the PSE-Macquarie buyout and preparations for the public hearing on May 20th at the Bellingham Senior Activity Center.
I don’t know about you, but my seed potatoes are still in a brown paper bag. Last year I planted them in April, the year before at the end of March. Today I can still see the snow level looming in the foothills. It’s going up and down like a set of faulty blinds. Faulty because it’s mid-May and I should be wearing shorts not lohnjohns and certainly not wondering if we’re going to have to start burning next year’s wood already. It’s going to be a short season Upriver this year.
Meanwhile, it’s a good time to sign up for a CSA share. Jericho Farm still has shares. Give Rebecca a call or visit her at the first Saturday Market (Concrete Senior Center) on May 24th. She has full shares, half shares and EBT payment options this year. We were her guinea pigs last year and we’re looking forward to another season of fresh vegetables.
It’s also a good time to go through the freezer and the pantry. Bring the Musgovians forward and finish off last year’s harvest stash! Our Farmer’s Markets are starting up, but they’ll be mostly vegetables starts, a few early greens and asparagus yet. Last month we inadvertantly emulated the fictional family profiled in The Ethicurean’s humorous January post - on April Fool’s Day we shopped for a party and on April 28th I picked up a small bunch of Washington asparagus and some rapini from Mother Flight Farm. This weekend’s bad weather kept the seed potatoes in their bags still, but I got the freezers organized with crates so we might just eat out of the pantry for another month.
Another motivation is the media flurry over the price of food (oil). One important aspect that doesn’t seem to get addressed, however, is the incredible amount of food that gets wasted in the US. This happens on all levels from harvest (~40%) to kitchen (15%-25%). The price of petroleum-based commodities are going up, but Americans don’t spend very much on food. If they did, so much possibly wouldn’t get wasted. While the national average is about 10%-15% and going up, our household spends probably about 20%-25% of gross income on food. That does include dining out, but mostly it’s going to our local farmers and ranchers. Trust me, I’m not about to waste a quarter of my small income! Fortunately, this issue is being addressed in the Wasted Food blog and eventually a book.
Anyway, according to the forecast, summer will be here full force on Thursday so it’s time to dig out the shorts and dig in the potatoes!
Chicken Update
They’re settling in well although still in somewhat temporary quarters. Hopefully by next week they’ll be big enough to fend off the cats and they can begin free-ranging around the yard. Keith is becoming quite the chicken whisperer and the birds are getting used to being handled.
I guess we’ll be enjoying local eggs some time late this summer! We’ve taken the plunge into chicken husbandry. We’ve started small with just two hens (Dorie and Julia) and a rooster (Alton) of the Gold Lace Wyandotte variety. We’ll see how it goes!
Needless to say, we’ve been busy around here building a pen and staring at chickens.
Meanwhile, we’re off to hunt morels this morning. I found one yesterday growing in the driveway of all things.
Another day of cold rain and another day needing a fire, but things are greening up and there have been nettles and Claytonia to munch on. Can planting be too far behind? Patience.
Meanwhile, I’ve found a few things that should be useful for everyone:
An easy-to-use search for things in season right here in the PNW at Seasonal Cornucopia. If you leave all fields blank, you’ll get a lovely long list of all the foods that are best right now. You can also restrict results to certain categories such as fruits, vegetables, foraged edibles and so on. This is a wonderful tool and my hat is off to the hard-working people that took the time and effort to create it.
Slow Food Skagit River Salish Sea finally has a website online. There’s a Skagivore event at the co-op on April 29th which should be a good venue to learn more about the local slow food movement. See you there? 
Craigslist has a Skagit community finally!
In other news, there is now an edibleSeattle publication! Of course it is focused down south, but it might be worth a look next time you’re nosing around Whole Foods or Pcc. Meanwhile, check out their Resources
tab for a great set of links. They also have a blog Fresh Sheet which may prove to be interesting.
Speaking of blogs, I’ve found a few new ones with some local’ish interest:
Eat Local Northwest - Seattle
Wild Food Plants - CA (but we share many wild edibles)
Let me know if you have a local blog and I’ll post it to my blogroll.
Power for the People
Of concern to us all is the pending sale of Puget Sound Energy to the Australian
Macquarie Consortium.
We went to a community meeting (AWARE) here at the Concrete Senior Center last Thursday where the potential for a purchase of Skagit County’s assets with the Skagit County P.U.D. was discussed. Representative Kirk Pearson was in attendance and seemed to be interested in the matter as well. This was encouraging. We as citizens need to ask for this and act on it, however, or our electrical services and possibly the vital control of the Skagit River will be in the hands of an overseas absentee landlord.
Here is a brief overview compiled at LineTime.org (Guemes).
Fill out the poll at the Skagit County P.U.D. website.
Come to the public hearing at the Bellingham Senior Activity Center on May 20th. If you’re in East Skagit, come to the AWARE community meeting on May 15th (?) at 7pm as well.
In addition to the people mentioned in the LineTime overview, write to your elected representatives: Christine Gregoire, Rob McKenna, Maria Cantwell, Patty Murray, Rick Larsen, Val Stevens, Dan Kristiansen, Kirk Pearson, and Commissioner Jim Cook and General Manager David Johnson of Skagit P.U.D. (If you’re not in the 39th District, you might have to find your own representative.)
This is our opportunity to wrest our power utility from private hands and into a public cooperative form of management. It will most likely be a tough fight, but the outcome will be worth it: local ownership of our resources and assets with no skimming of (at minimum) 10% of profits off to line the pockets of foreign
investors.
If you are unsure about the sale, now is the time to educate yourself on this issue. The deep pockets advertising campaign will begin soon to try to convince you that selling our rights off to foreign interests is a good idea. It is not.
Read “The Pros and Cons of Private Provision of Water and Electricity Service: A Handbook for Evaluating Rationales” (HTML) and other informative articles at that link.
Also Beyond Privatization: Restructuring Water Systems to Improve Performance (PDF link to report)
P.S. I’m having some formatting issues, I apologize.
Spring may be slow in coming, but we have sunshine for Earth Day!
