I’m still doing lots of thinking, so instead of going completely dry here on the blog, I thought I would give you an article to read about the Fruit Belt. We live a paltry eight miles to the north of Benton Harbor, and almost every small business around here of longstanding either goes by Blossomtime X or Fruit Belt Y. And yes, I can easily buy cheap produce here…it’s one of the reasons we moved!
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Got something to say? Email me at fastweedpuller at gmail dot com.Wisdom from the sage
Wendell Berry:
"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."
--from an essay in "The Long-Legged House""The word agriculture, after all, does not mean "agriscience," much less "agribusiness." It means "cultivation of land." And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both "to revolve" and "to dwell." To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term "agribusiness."
"Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating."
--both the above are from essays in "The Art of the Commonplace: Agrarian Essays"Is this so hard to believe?
"An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor, or Ba'al, or The Golden Calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further," Richard Dawkins, 2002.
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fast grow the weeds 
Interesting. Did you read the one at the bottom about the chef, Mario Batali, making his home up near Grand Traverse Bay? I printed both out to send to my Mom.
I know of the roadside farmer stands. Whenever I’m up there, we always buy something at at least two or three of them. I love those stands. You don’t see many down here too much.