Everybody Eats: NM Farmers Market

... News page updated. With the planning for a #Mountainair Garden & Farm Market underway, look for more Everybody Eats features here as well as garden coverage on iCreate NM. My rss feed reader (amped up with new Farmers Market & Community Garden subscriptions) sends me a notices so there's no shortage of material. Let the sun shine in... 

Next meeting of the MFG Market steering committee: 10am Friday February 4 in the Alpine Alley Back Room. Email Nancy Stone, email2stone@yahoo.com, for more information and to add your name to the Market email list

S. 510: Frequently Asked Questions/Myths

S. 510: Frequently Asked Questions/Myths

Cultivando Tradición

New Mexico Community Garden Resource Manual now available read full story (pdf)

Celebrate Local Food, Grant County, NM

Celebrate Local Food, Grant County, NM

Two-for-One Bonus Dollars Available for EBT Customers

Two-for-One Bonus Dollars Available for EBT Customers

"Locally Grown Ingredients" Now Available

"Locally Grown Ingredients" Publication now available read full story (pdf)

Micro-Loans Now Available for New Mexico Farmers

Micro-loans Now Available for New Mexico Farmers read full story (pdf)

2011 Water Conservation Conference

I just wanted to remind everyone that it is time to register for the 16th Water Conservation/Xeriscape Conference in Albuquerque. This 2-day Conference, 24-25 Feb, will be held at the Abq Hilton and features Pat Mulroy as opening keynoter. Please review the agenda at xeriscapenm.com and register today! ....... Scott Varner Executive Director Xeriscape Council of NM, Inc. www.XeriscapeNM.com 505-468-1021 scott@xeriscapenm.com View in new browser window: http://xeriscapenm.com/email/2011conference7.html

around town

Mountainair, Thursday January 27th

Yet another possible series that may or may not make "survival of the fittest" cut. By now most of my "around town" notes  made last week are out of date, which should save writing time, which is the whole idea of posts in a catch all series. On the other hand, I keep tripping over clichéd "step back into yesterday," "land that time forgot," and "Twilight Zone" (favored by SoCal diaspora) references, suggesting that there are criteria other than timeliness. Timely or tardy, 'tude and all, this is my bit for community networking and tending local information networks.

image from Discover Mountainair

If you want timeliness, check the Mountainair Community Calendar, subscribe to updates by rss feeds or export to your own calendar. OK so this sounds like a topic for a "Mountainair Wired" feature. But not today. Just check the calendar and do your bit to keep it up-to-date by sending me your event dates.

Everybody Eats: Farmers Market Strategy Meeting

January 21, 10 am, Alpine Alley. Email Nancy Stone, email2stone@yahoo.com, to have your name added to her Farmers Market email list

Nancy writes, 

So many of us have been talking and thinking about starting a farmers market in Mountainair, it's time to get together and share ideas for a next spring/summer start-up.

Pass this information on to anyone inadvertently overlooked in emailing but whom you think would be interested in the Mountainair Farmers Market Project Please let them know about this meeting.

We will meet at Alpine Alley on Friday, 1/21/2011 at 10:00 AM in the back room.  Please bring along your ideas and we'll hopefully find a starting point.


Read more about Farmers Markets and how to organize them...

Age-Activated Attention Deficit Disorder

Something to tide me over for today's blog post until I remember what I was going to write about...

my day + URLs de anteaño

xkcd.com

and now for the anniversary trip down memory link lane

• How to dry sunflowers (June 2006) 
• Sunflowers and toxic environments (August 2006)
• The New Ruralism (December 2006)
• Mountainair in the News (October 2007)
• Professional Porch Sitters Union (August 2007)
• 2007 Mountainair Monties (January 2008)

20 predictions for the next 25 years

Late blogging this, so here's a hearty thank you to The Guardian ~ 

From the web to wildlife, the economy to nanotechnology, politics to sport, the Observer's team of experts prophesy how the world will change – for good or bad – in the next quarter of a century

20 predictions for the next 25 years

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Between the class of pundits who make safe and boring predictions based on current events ('tablets will be big', 'gesture-based interfaces will be big'), those who make predictions in line with their own self-interest ('the classroom will never go away'), and those who say that you can't predict the future (as though they've never expected the Sun to rise or waited for their monthly paycheque) is that small, achingly small, class of pundits who actually grapple with the future and wrest out of it meaningful and probably reliable predictions. This article is a case in point, where 20 very informed writers each make one interesting prediction. 

The last three predictions (numbers 18, 19 and 20) are pretty weak, but there are some very strong and challenging points in the list. For example: 'The popular revolt against bankers will become impossible to resist.' And: 'Returning to a world that relies on muscle power is not an option.' And: 'Russia will become a global food superpower.' What does a world in which just those three statements are true look like? Not like our world.

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More predictions

Technology (TechCrunch)

Environmentally informed predictions (GreenGrok, Scientific American)

Political (multiple predictors, from politico)

Economic (Seeking Alpha)

Got predictions? Please share.

Blog Anniversary: Mountainair Arts Celebrates 5th

In just 10 days, an anniversary, it will be 5 years since the first post to this blog, January 20, 200. Although not all readers might be aware, I started the blog as a planning and communications tool for MMAC's annual Arts Tour. Titled, "Welcome to the 2006 Tour blog," the inaugural post lays out basic information and lists the tour committee. Subsequent posts were primarily arts tour related.

My goal was twofold:

1. for the tour committee use the blog for communication amongst members and thereby eliminate at least a few time consuming committee meeting.  
2. increase tour involvement among arts council members and within the community by sharing information and ideas.

Good ideas but, as with the best laid plans of mice and men, they didn't play out as intended. For starters, I was the only member of the tour committee who used the blog. Our earliest and most active participants were not even arts council members. 

By mid-February, Arts started covering other stories in addition to supporting and covering the tour ~ mostly because tour and nothing but the tour was getting boring to write and surely to read about.

Notably, we covered "An Impromptu Music Happening," 

Did you know that Dennis Fulfer hosted Dennis Banks and his friends at his home Friday night? The AIM group was walking from Alcatraz to Washington DC. Robin DesJardins reported passing them, after spending the night in Abo, on her late to work ride down the hill. They had a conference and a jam session with our Dennis' band and Bank's musicians, followed by a drum circle. All right here in Mountainair!

During that 1st year, I covered not just the arts tour but also the train mural from start to finish, ATCs, MMAC meetings, poetry, the Shaffer grand re-opening, initial plans for a town square (sigh, maybe someday...),  Sunflower Festival, Poets and Writers Picnic (before it had its own blog), local artists and exhibits, parades, chamber meetings, holidays and more.

My plan from now to January 20th: a survey of our past five years with favorite posts, links and pictures to match. Let me know if you have favorites you'd like to see reposted.

Everybody Eats: Community Garden Meeting & Farmers Markets Newsletter

Mark next Saturday, Jan 15, on your calendar for the #Mountainair Community Garden meeting at Mojave Rose. Tomas writes, 

Fellow garden members ~ While the garden is hibernating, we thought it  would be good to meet and plan our spring garden. Addie has generously offered her green house for pre-spring planting.

We were also discussing possible fund raising projects such as offering seedlings for sale and even getting our own started. Come to the community garden at the Mojave Rose, Saturday, January 15th at 10 AM (we will meet inside!) to help make some decisions, and perhaps to have a community seed planting session. What should we plant in the community garden? Think about it! 

Winter /indoor gardening: I'd recommend the Grow Your Own posts in John Weckerle's New Mexico Central blog. 

• Winter Gardening Tips
• January Gardening Calendar from the Albuquerque Master Gardeners
• Lazy Man's Winter Garden Conserves Water (NM)
• Winter Gardening Articles from Albuquerque Examiner
• Home Vegetable Gardening in NM
• Container Gardening

Fundrasing: The garden did well selling green tomato and other items at the Christmas Craft/Art Fair. Seeds and supplies but there's still the water bill and improvements on the wish list. If the garden shares iCreate's 501(3c) status, it could sign up with Good Search/Good Shop programs.  

Is this serendipity or what? Today "News from New Mexico Farmers' Marketing Association" arrives in my mailbox. Definitely a sign to add it to the garden meeting notice and come out with an overdue but fat Everybody Eats post, complete with recipes.

Art as a public good

By all means, let's have a WPA for this millennium and more public art.

 

Aviad Heifetz makes the case for treating beauty as a public good, and therefore for public funding of the arts.

Beauty cannot be provisioned in a decentralized market. Unlike with vaccinations, the problem has nothing to do with free riding. The point is that there is no way in which beauty can be marketed: there can be no promo to genuine surprise. We cannot form demand for an experience which will alter our outlook, because the new outlook makes no sense to us before we actually have it. Our only chance to have beauty is to commission it by a centralized, public initiative.

One argument Heifetz doesn’t make is that, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, public funding of the arts would put people back to work. Just as the Works Progress Administration did during the first Great Depression. Together, the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Writers  Project provided employment to thousands of struggling cultural workers and gave the nation hundreds of thousands of new cultural artifacts. Visual artists decorated post offices, schools and other public buildings with murals, canvases and sculptures; musicians were to perform with symphony orchestras and community singing concerts; new forms of theater were created in New York City, while touring companies traveled the country performing old and new plays; and published state and local guidebooks, organized archives, indexed newspapers. and collected folklore and oral history interviews. 

Yes, beauty is a public good and, especially right now, we could use a lot more of it.

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Possibly related: (automatically generated)

• Why do we fund the arts? Part I
• Up with the Art!

via anticap.wordpress.com. Posted via email from Mountainair NM

Name That Weird Invention!

Life surrounds us with weird inventions and practices. Some we become so accustomed to that they no longer seem weird ~ normalization. I'll spare you extended references structuralism and Gombrich on the visual arts.

It’s time for the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of crazy ideas in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenters suggesting the funniest and wittiest names will win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop. Let your imagination run wild, and good luck!

via neatorama.com

Somehow this also reminds me of Mountainair Moments. What would you designate as the oddest / weirdest structures, practices, stories, etc. about Mountainair? If unnamed, then go wild naming it. Yes, we have no free T-shirts today. Sorry about that...

Posted via email from Meanderings

10 New Years Resolutions

Top 10 New Years Resolutions 2011 - EP