May 2002 | Editor’s Note
Find Your Inner Farmer
Do you know where your food comes from? Unless you grew up on a farm (or live on one now) your experience with fresh food is likely limited to the produce section of your local grocer or farmers’ market. Some of you may grow a few vegetables in backyard gardens or pot some tomatoes on a balcony or porch. Most folks pick their produce not from the branch of a vine but from the branch of a supermarket chain.
If you’re a regular reader of Conscious Choice you probably are familiar with community supported agriculture, or CSA. This is a relationship between consumers and farmers in which subscribers buy shares of the farm’s crop at the beginning of the growing season. The farm gets money for operations and the subscribers get a weekly box of produce through the summer and into the fall. It’s a great way to get really fresh, organic vegetables while supporting local farmers.
Along with the rapidly growing popularity of farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture is helping small farms stay vital while connecting consumers more closely to the foods they eat.
You can get even closer by volunteering at a local farm. Nicole Magistro did just that after buying a share in Angelic Organics, the first and largest CSA farm in Illinois. She found an intimate connection to the crops she helped to plant and to pick and learned a little bit about what it means to be a farmer. Click here for her story.
Rook to King’s Knight
The Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, more recently known as the Lincoln Park Zoo Rookery, opens this month after a $2.4 million restoration project. A natural pool that formed between ridges of Lake Michigan beaches, the site was first developed in 1889 as a Victorian garden. The pond was artificially heated to support lilies and other exotic plants.
In the 1930s the deteriorating garden was redesigned by Alfred Caldwell, a student of landscape architect Jens Jensen and a follower of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School design principles. Caldwell planted native wildflowers and limestone ledges to recast the space as a woodland forest.
In the late 1950s the Zoo made it a bird sanctuary and used the site for feeding and breeding. This and the heavy foot traffic of Zoo visitors destroyed plants and eroded the edges of the pond.
When control of the site passed from the Zoo to the park district in 1995 plans were made to clean up and restore the area to fulfill Caldwell’s original design. Now the work is complete, but not everyone is happy with the changes.
In "Made in the Shade" Jonn Salovaara shares his fondness for derelict sites where nature has taken its own course, and his dismay at the gentrification of the old Rookery. It’s similar to the story that plays out constantly in city neighborhoods as the old and shabby is swept aside in favor of the new and tidy.
Anyone who has spent time in the cool dimness of a Midwestern forest knows how untidy nature is. Yet the mess does not diminish our awe. We should remember this when we obsess over our neatly manicured lawns and gardens. Nature has been tearing down and rebuilding far longer than we have. If we pay attention, we may learn something. — Ross Thompson
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