Obviously the do it yourself community has a little bit of everything!

Visit the First MidWest Maker Faire this weekend! http://makerfaire.com/detroit/2010/

Check-in and food for the tour will begin at 4:30pm at the Flint Farmers’ Market, 420 East Boulevard Drive. Buses and bicycles will depart at 5:30pm. Everyone on the tour will be given a light meal made from locally-produced delicacies.

Tour participants will meet local food producers, including some who are growing food year round and raising bees and chickens. They will also see, firsthand, how local residents of all ages are transforming community concerns, such as vacant land, into valuable neighborhood assets.

Immediately following the tour, members of Edible Flint will host an after-glow with live music and dessert at the Flint Farmers’ Market.
The entire evening is free, though participants must register in advance. There will be plenty of opportunity for participants to talk with others on the tour and with local growers. Donations will be accepted and will be used to support food gardening efforts in Flint.
To register for the bus or bike tour, contact Natalie Pruett by August 9, 2010 by calling 810-257-3088 ext. 541 or by e-mail at npruett@co.genesee.mi.us.

Edible Flint members include Applewood Initiative for Garden and Community, the Genesee County Land Bank, Keep Genesee County Beautiful, Michigan State University Extension, Salem Housing Community Development Corporation, plus other organizations, local gardeners and independent producers who work together to provide support to those growing food.

For now, focus on hearty crops such as broccoli, cabbage and kale, greens, beets, and peas. They laugh at snow. It only makes them sweeter!

If you have deer grazing in your neighborhood this spring, you may have noticed that they love the taste of tulips and don’t touch daffodils.  Adding plants that they don’t find attractive seems easier than trying to keep them away from their favorites such as coneflowers, roses, azaleas and ….oh my…the list keeps getting longer! What have you found that deer don’t eat?

Bucket and lid on a maple tree after drilling a hole for the spial

Guest Blogger Joanna on urban tree tapping!

To follow up on a previous post about Flint’s “untapped resources,” here’s an entry about our syrup-making process. In late February, a small group of us decided to go about tapping Maple trees within the city. We purchased 50 spials and buckets and went off to identify urban Maple trees. While other trees like Box Elders and Walnuts can be tapped, sugar content is highest (around 3%) in the Sugar and Black Maple. After spending a couple of hours in the urban wilds of Flint, we identified and marked 48 trees we believed to be Maples. During the winter, when there are no leaves on the trees you can ID them by the bark, leaves on the ground and organization of the branches.

When tapping a tree, you want to make sure the diameter is at least 12 inches. With a drill and drill bit of 5/16, drill a hole about 3 inches in aiming upwards so that when sap is running down the trunk, it will come out of the spial. You want to do this when there are sunny days with above freezing temperatures and cool nights below freezing to promote sap flow.

After tapping our trees, we made a schedule to check the buckets every other day. We made it out when we could, emptied the buckets into plastic five-gallon tubs and stored them in a root cellar. As long as its kept below 38 degrees, it should be fine.  As days and nights got warmer (up into the 60’s!) sap stopped flowing as easily and the mosquitos came.  We built a firepit with concrete blocks to contain the warmth and started boiling our first batch of sap. With Sugar Maples, usually around 40 gallons of sap will boil down to one gallon of syrup. Make sure you don’t burn it! You may want to take the sap off of the open fire and finish it off on your stove. There is a lot of steam generated by the boiling, so make sure there’s adequate ventilation in your house beforehand. You are looking to finish the boil when the temperature is seven degrees above the boiling point of water (219 degrees F here in Flint).

The sap was flowing!

To boil, we used galvanized steel tubs but have heard that this is not the best material, as it interacts with the sap in high heat. Make sure you taste the sap at all points in the process, not only to detect off flavors or sourness if something went wrong, but because this is the best liquid I have ever tasted in my whole life.  Despite all of the problems we had with high temperatures, infrequent collection, mosquitoes, an inappropriate evaporator pan, the syrup is delicious and perfect. I would recommend this to anyone and everyone wanting to experience a bit of wild-crafting, self-sustainability or urban foraging. This was so rewarding and fun that we were thinking that next year, we’d explore options of marketing wild Flint edibles like maple syrup, mushrooms, mulberries and wild raspberries.

Until next time, food and love

Joanna

First drops

March 23, 2010, 11:11AM

FLINT, Michigan — A Flint deli may soon be able to pick fresh sandwich toppings from its own urban backyard.

A University of Michigan-Flint project to renovate a historic house on Garland Street has added plans to start an urban garden that would grow produce for next-door Hoffman’s Deco Deli & Café.

Officials at the UM-Flint Urban Alternative House hope to spend the next year turning a now vacant plot by the deli into a sustainable local food system in the center of Flint that offers tomatoes, spinach and other salad vegetables and herbs.

“It will help us get the freshest food possible and keep our money in Flint,” said Hoffman’s co-owner Mark Hoffman said at a press conference at the deli today.

A growing number of community garden projects have sprouted around Flint as more groups aim to reuse the thousands of vacant lots in the city while providing the community more access to locally produced and healthy food.

Maple Syrup cooking.

Thanks for the question Don,

You can tap any native species of maple. Sugars and black maples tend to have the highest sugar content in their sap. Red and silver maples usually have a lower sugar content. This is less important to those with home operations making small amounts of syrup – perhaps a few gallons – than to a commercial operations making hundreds of gallons.