Exciting news from Minnesota!  Last Monday, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that damaging chemicals that cross property lines constitute trespassing.  The Star Tribune reports on it here.  This is great news, meaning that organic farmers can sue if negligent conventional and GMO farmers contaminate and thus destroy their organic crops via drifting clouds of pesticides and herbicides and possibly even GMO pollen or seed.

This follows a few months after California’s Sixth Appellate District Court ruled in December that Jacobs Farm/Del Cobo could sue a neighboring farm whose pesticides drifted over and covered an organic dill crop, making it unsalable.  Read the story here.

It will be interesting to see how these rulings affects the case against Monsanto that we’re a part of as it goes forward.  Stay tuned…

The authors of the new book Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail singled us out as a force working for the preservation of heirloom chiles in a recent interview on grist.org – Hot stuff: chile peppers, climate change, and the future of food. Authors Kurt Friese, Gary Nabhan, and Kraig Kraft (an ethnobotanist, a chef, and an agroecologist) examine climate change through the lens of the chile pepper. In another grist post, Nabhan writes about Global weirding and the scrambling of terroir.

We carry seeds for three of the chiles they track in the book – Habaneros (the Yucatan), Fish Peppers (Chesapeake Bay area) (sold out for this year), and Jimmy Nardello’s (from Italy via Connecticut). 

Gary Nabhan will be presenting at this year’s Heritage Harvest Festival on the findings of the book.  You can download free booklets on Place Based Foods from his website. The most recent – Appalachia – From Rarity to Community Restoration and Market Recovery – features a piece on heirloom grinding corns of Appalachia by our own Ira Wallace, as well as articles on heritage apples, pawpaws, wild spring greens, traditional sweet potato curing, and Bill Best of Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center on the Noble Bean.

Just a quick note to let our local readers know that our friends at C’ville Foodscapes, a worker owned cooperative that designs and installs food gardens in the Charlottesville area, are accepting applications for their 2011 Garden Grants program.

The C’ville Foodscapes’ Garden Grants Program, in partnership with Charlottesville’s Quality Community Council (QCC) will help low-income individuals and families have their own vegetable garden.

Tax deductible donations can be made to Quality Community Council (QCC), which will act as the fiscal sponsor for this program and manage the application process and criteria for awarding a grant. QCC, is a Charlottesville non-profit organization dedicated to improving the community by addressing the problems that detract from a higher quality of life for its citizens.

Can you help a deserving family receive the gift of their own food garden? Please contact us to contribute to the Garden Grants Program. Donations may be sent to:  QCC Garden Grants, 327 W. Main St, Ste 101, Charlottesville, VA  22903.  Thank you!

Check them out here.