What we're reading this week: Growing your own: If you're planning to plant a veggie garden this year, you've probably faced the ete...
Local reading: What to plant vs. what to buy; eating close to home in Alaska and Arizona; foraging 101; local lamb; a chicken story from Oregon

What we’re reading this week:

Growing your own: If you’re planning to plant a veggie garden this year,you’ve probably faced the eternal home-gardening questions: What’s bestto grow in the backyard? What’s best to buy at the farmers’ market? We enjoyed this Ask Metafilter discussion on the topic.

Eating close to home, no matter where home is: Local eating is hot, from Arizona to Alaska. I have to say, I was surprised by both these newspaper articles. from the Arizona Republic and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Living in the mild climate of the Bay Area has gotten me used to being able to have virtually any kind of fruit or vegetable year-round. But it was inspiring to see how people who live in the Sonoran Desert around Phoenix and in interior Alaska manage to eat with local ingredients.

Forage for your food: We’re keeping our eye on foraging. I mean, the local-eating appeal is obvious: Free food that grows naturally in the wild—who can resist? So we devoured this foraging primer on AlterNet.

Meeting your meat: The Atlantic suggests that perhaps your best bet for local meat is lamb.

Coops are catching on! Our affinity for chickens is well documented, but the trend is spreading throughout the West. We enjoyed this urban-chicken story from Salem Monthly, despite the snark: The pastyear has provided an almost perfect storm to make urban chickensrelevant in Salem. Chicken-keeping may have started as an almost tweeoutgrowth of the locavore movement – where people try to eat more foodproduced within their immediate surroundings – but interest in it hasreached critical mass since the economic downturn.

Twee?! Thanks, guys.

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