Evan Wiig
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Ripe for Change: Making Space for Food in Wine Country
There’s a new crop popping up across Sonoma County. You’ve probably seen them while driving by rolling hills or along rural roads. Emerging from soil once dominated by grapes, this new crop is sturdy, oddly rectangular, and complicates the future of local agriculture: “For Sale” signs. For half a century, ever since local wine began…
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Against the Grain: From Global Commodity to Local Staple
What comes to mind when you imagine your local farmers market? Those first sweet, hand-picked strawberries in April? The late summer arrival of apples, mounds of vibrant heirloom tomatoes? Even in winter colorful veggies greet the shopper. Mai eventually landed in Sonoma County, leasing multiple parcels, setting up their own flour mill, and selling directly…
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Jardín del Pueblo: The People’s Garden – Farmworker families grow food for themselves and those in need.
Pants freshly stained with grape juice after a long night harvesting a nearby vineyard, a worker arrives to a farm just outside Healdsburg. After an exhausting shift, he should be heading straight for a shaded hammock for some much-deserved rest. Instead, he walks between towering banana plants and a greenhouse strung with drying hibiscus flowers…
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The Best of Both Worlds
An Immigrant Legacy of Entrepreneurship. Surrounded by succulents, snake plants, and philodendrons in her downtown Santa Rosa shop, Ana Prado describes herself as “Con el nopal en la frente,” which translates to “with a cactus on the forehead.” For the founder of a new plant boutique on Courthouse Square, this might seem an apt if…
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Summer in the City: Taco Tuesday Bike Ride Rolls to the New Mitote Food Park
A serpent-shaped balloon animal, painted four stories tall, coils around a prickly-pear cactus on the facade of an abandoned grain silo. Across the street, beside a clanking railroad crossing, a hundred papel picados, suspended above picnic tables, rustle colorfully in an evening breeze. Nearby, kids pose for a photo with a life-size mariachi-clad Snoopy statue…
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Name Games: What Does “Local Food” Really Mean?
In 2007, the New Oxford American Dictionary named “locavore” its Word of the Year. Farmers’ markets were proliferating nationwide, tripling in just 15 years. Restaurants began emulating farm-to-table trailblazers like Chez Panisse. Then came surprise bestselling books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and films like Food, Inc. as millions reconsidered dinner’s long and convoluted journey to…
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Finding Unity Through Food: A Global Table at Sonoma Family Meal
“I come from a country where hunger dominated our population,” explains Jules Sinai, who arrived in Sonoma County last year from Haiti, “so, I know the importance of feeding people and am passionate about food and the happiness it can make in people’s lives.” Despite recent false claims from fear-mongering politicians, Haitian immigrants are arriving…
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Grow Local – Grazing for Good
PHOTOS BY PAIGE GREEN With a knife sheathed in her belt on one side and a bright orange mallet on the other, Paigelynn Trotter traverses a steep hillside with a baby strapped to her back, and a livestock guardian dog at her side. She’s studying how 140 goats just grazed down the spring forage where…
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Grow Local – Hardcore
PHOTOS BY PAIGE GREEN It was a bittersweet milestone for Manzana. Just two years after reaching its centennial, the North Bay’s last remaining apple cannery announced they’re relocating to Washington. It’s said that the only constant is change. And that old facility along Atascadero Creek, with its big metal tanks, loading docks, and piles of…
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Grow Local – The Future of Farming, Part 2
SEE PART 1 IN VOL. 11 – ISSUE 2 – MAR/APR PHOTOS BY PAIGE GREEN Twenty years ago Wayne James harvested garlic with a pickaxe. Today, on the exact same plot of land, all that’s required is a light tug and those bulbs slide right out from soft, dark earth. That’s because Wayne, together with…