New Book of Short Stories from Mort Mather

A Stone's Throw, Orvie's Stories

Back in the earliest days of the internet, Mort Mather looked around for someone to help him publish his work in this new cyberspace thing. He found me. We published his archive of organic gardening information which has helped hundreds of thousands of people garden organically.

We've been friends ever since. In fact, he still owes us a dinner at his son's excellent restaurant in Wells, Maine: Joshua's. Mort grows most of the restaurant's fresh, organic produce every year.

Mort's new book is A Stone's Throw, Orvie's Stories. You can read several pages of praise for these short stories on his site. Here's a taste:

“Mort Mather has captured the feel, the sounds and smells of rural life in the 40's”—U.S. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree

“Mort's writing is every bit as wonderful as the food in his splendid restaurant.”—J. Courtney Sullivan, author of the New York Times best­selling novels Commencement, Maine, and The Engagements

“A Stone's Throw is a wonderful collection of stories, told from the perspective of Orvie, a young boy growing up in the 1940s. Orvie's world is a swirl of outdoor adventures, forts, farm animal, school, chores, and family struggles. Through witty dialogue, rich descriptions of life on the farm, and the captivating voice of Orvie himself, Mort Mather invites you to enter Orvie's childlike imagination, and to remember your own. I love these stories and I know you will too.”—Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., best­selling author or Blue and Low­Fat Love 

A Stone's Throw is available from Maine Writers Publishing. Visit Mort's site to find out how to get an autographed copy!

Mort is a shareholder of Good to Go Farm-to-Counter, LLC, our small, organic and local food takeout restaurant opening soon in Cherry Valley, NY. We still have $100 shares in the LLC available to our friends. To find out how you can invest, click here!

Community Supported Agriculture

This is an interesting post on Grist: It takes a community to sustain a small farm. It doesn't mention CSAs, community supported agriculture, where local residents purchase "shares" of a farm, which guarantees delivery of a set amount of food over a period of time, usually a year. But it does address the issues small, local farms face, considering that agribusiness has been putting the little guys--from farmers to butchers to truck drivers and grocers--out of business for a long time now.

Our local and organic grass-fed highlander beef (very lean), which we use for our Happy Hobo Grass-fed Beef Jerky, is from Nectar Hills Farm, which recently started an upstate New York CSA of their own, mostly for meat (they also have lamb, pork, poultry, eggs, and cheese), but also other things from the farm, like incredible organic produce during the season and organic red bamboo honey (which we also use in the beef jerky).

Nectar Hills Farm also has a new farm picture gallery, if you'd like to see some pictures of a small organic farm in upstate New York.

CSAs aren't new. You can find one near you on the Local Harvest's CSA finder. They're a great way to help your local farmer. It gets them money when they need it, and it gets you a discount on farm-fresh local and organic products on a regular basis. This food is better for you, better for the animals, and better for the environment. It is money you won't spend keeping big agri-business in business.

Our New Year's resolution is to stop eating corn-fed and factory farmed beef. You don't have to be that drastic about it, but once you research grass-fed beef in your area, you'll find an array of delicious meats that are essentially solar powered, instead of oil and corn powered, like the concentrated feed lots of industrial meat production.

Organic no-till agriculture will save the world!

A story in the Christian Science Monitor about no-till organic agriculture caught my eye:

New way to farm boosts climate, too

Once I've established my raised or terraced beds (a muddy job that I'm currently devoting a couple of hours a day on--as much as my arthritis will allow), I follow an organic no-till method on a micro-scale. This is my first year up here in zone 5, but the parts of the garden that I didn't make into a cold frame were covered in leaves. This fall, I'll plant a cover crop that I can just knock down, use as mulch, or rake away. I'm a little worried about seeds becoming weeds in my planting area, but I figure using Mort's method of weed control (water, rake, wait, repeat) will help. Plus, I'll be adding manure and compost on top of last years soil, so that will help too.

If a cover crop is too much work, I recommend just covering your whole garden in layers of manure and straw. The worms will do a lot of the "tilling" for you, coming up to get the decomposing organic matter which they eat as they tunnel back down, leaving pathways for water to get deep into the spongy soil they leave behind.

In this article, the guys who developed the tractor attachment discovered the process by accident, as doing this kind of thing on a large scale is a whole different animal than what we small scale home gardeners have been doing for a long time now. As far as reducing one's carbon footprint goes, gardening at home is hard to beat. The only oil used is to get the seeds and manure to my house. No tractors. No trucks full of food. Just a big garden full of fresh vegies waiting for me to go out and pick! And, it forces me to do my garden yoga exercises!

It is good to see these farmers doing their best to help the world, though. The fact that this method stops runoff and topsoil erosion is enough to make me want to support it. The carbon sequestering is a bonus!