Mar/Apr 2021
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Letter from the Editor
On a recent walk to the market, my daughters and I were struck, not for the first time, by the generosity of our neighbors. Free lemons in front of one house, geranium cuttings in front of another. But the biggest score was a lovely wooden kitchen chair, luckily just a couple blocks from home. We…
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Meet a Local Maker
Andrew Carruthers Violin Maker I was born and raised in England. My father was a sculptor who encouraged his kids to use his studio, so I grew up making things. I was also an enthusiastic, but not very accomplished, musician. It wasn’t until my early 30s that I finally figured out a way to combine…
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Sustainable Slaughter
BAR-C Ranchers Co-op Takes the Reins. Until last year, Sarah Silva prided herself on raising animals who lived a good life, from start to finish. At Green Star Farm just outside of Sebastopol, her pigs, chickens and lambs grazed happily under an open sky on lush grasses until the day they took a quick jaunt…
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Vamos Afuera! (en español)
Rompiendo la barrera del idioma: ¡LandPaths celebra 10 años de Vamos Afuera! Traducción al español proporcionada por LandPaths (Translation into Spanish provided by LandPaths) Desde 1996, LandPaths ha trabajado incansablemente en la administración y la construcción de comunidades. Las iniciativas centrales de LandPaths son tripartitas: Arraigar a los jóvenes a la naturaleza, diversificar la conservación…
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Vamos Afuera! (in English)
Breaking the Language Barrier: Landpaths Celebrates 10 Years of Vamos Afuera! Near the top of Fitzpatrick Lane, a winding, often single-lane road that snakes its way upward through the hills of western Occidental, stands one of the few remaining groves of old growth redwood trees in Sonoma County. The Grove of Old Trees, one of…
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Farmers’ Market Find
Tea and Trumpets On a recent sunny Saturday, I visit Mark Bowden, owner and creator of Tea and Trumpets Tea Company, at the Santa Rosa Community Farmers’ Market location on Farmers Lane. I ask if he ever gets tired of the furtive half glances from people who awkwardly pass his stall for another. “Nah,” he…
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No Can Stands Alone
Green Mary on her Decades-Long Mission to Create Less Waste While waiting for her latte at Coffee Catz one January day, Mary Munat wandered over to the nearby Sebastopol Inn to ask what they were doing with their organic waste. After chatting with the onsite manager about the inevitable waste stream of the newly converted…
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One Man’s Trash
Steffen Kuehr Wants to Remake Your Refuse Out back of an unassuming warehouse tucked off the main drag of Santa Rosa Avenue, tons of decommissioned fire hose from the 2019 Kincade Fire and the 2020 Glass Fire sit coiled up like giant piles of spaghetti. Inside the colorful, organized factory retail store are the same,…
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Savorbang!
Rot Everything. Basque Browns! Welcome to our regular recipe column from teacher and stand-up comedian Sarah Whitmore. WAIT! Maybe not everything. I know, local reader, you are sick and tired of hearing about closet kombucha and local sauerkraut. In reality, you might be sick and tired because your food hasn’t been left out on the…
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Meet a Local Farmer
Sarah Silva of Green Star Farm Sarah Silva is the rancher/operator of Green Star Farm, an 85-acre pasture-based livestock farm in Sebastopol, California. Prior to beginning her career in farming and ranching in 2007, Sarah was the program manager for a NASA Education and Public Outreach group through Sonoma State University. She currently is an…