Articles by Leda Meredith
Leda Meredith is a local foods activist, instructor at the New York Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, author of Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes and The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget. She blogs about her local food adventures at Leda’s Urban Homestead. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
I’ve grown herbs in window boxes, indoors, on the back steps of my apartment, in hanging baskets attached to a chain-link fence, and even in cracks in pavement. Here’s how you can too.
This week my CSA share included lettuce, kale, arugula, bok choy, and spinach. That’s a lot of greens for a single gal to eat. But not a leaf will go to waste. Here are my tips for making the most of all that green goodness.
Although I grow a couple of familiar fruits (strawberries, raspberries), my garden is rich in fruits that either never show up at the markets, or when they do, it’s with a high price tag.
Although many gardens, especially in cities, lack the six to eight hours of direct sunlight needed to grow many familiar crops, there are foods that you can cultivate in part sun, part shade, or even full shade.
It’s the end of March. Crocuses, magnolias, and the first daffodils are blooming. Looks like spring, but on the local foods front here in the Northeast it would be the bleakest culinary season if I didn’t forage for wild edible plants and mushrooms.
Whether you’ll be growing food in a big backyard, a community garden plot, or in a small windowbox, now is the time to plan what you’ll grow this year.
Leda Meredith shares food preservation techniques and explains how preserving the harvest can help one maintain a commitment to eating local food during winter months.
Vote for keeping heritage breeds around by purchasing your pork from a local sustainable farmer, Every small purchase helps preserve wonderful pig breeds like the Gloucester Old Spots pig. They’re an extremely thrifty breed also known as the Orchard Pig due to their predilection for rummaging around orchards for fallen fruit. They thrive on pasture and are gentle, calm creatures with outstanding maternal abilities.
The proliferation of social media has elevated many long misunderstood and maligned professions into the mainstream. As a full-time farmer, it’s been both exciting and terrifying to connect online with a larger community. But when even the New York Times is writing pieces about “rockstar butchers,” it is fair to say that the local sustainable movement is threatening to become mainstream. As a farmer involved in this movement, I applaud the evolution currently taking place. After decades of stunning apathy, American consumers have become curious about the how and why of our broken food system. As the body politic has finally begun to investigate the paths between the farm and the table, American farmers have been thrust into the public sphere like never before.
