Just wanted to let you know of a great event happening that SLUG will be participating in this weekend! Growing Together Sacramento, a community gardening event sponsored by the city of Sacramento, will go down on Saturday, May 21 starting at 10am at Old Soul on 34th and Broadway. After a brief gardening demonstration at Old Soul by the Sacramento Yard Farmer Rafael Aguilera, volunteers will choose from three different sites in Oak Park to help build a garden! You will get a chance to learn how to garden, plant some summer goodies like tomatoes and melons and work together with your neighbors and fellow community members to help increase healthy food access in Oak Park.

SLUG will be leading one of the garden builds at a local Oak Park home, so if you can’t make it to the garden demo, let me know and I will give you directions to the local home where we’ll be gardening at. Otherwise, you will receive directions to the SLUG build after we meet at Old Soul. If you plan on helping out with the SLUG build, please RSVP so that we can properly plan.

Student staff from American Legion love working the stand too. D’asia is the farm stand manager, and she has a lot of experience in the past with sales, so it’s an easy fit for her, especially because she’s great with customers and can be wild and crazy with the produce! (see below!). Jenny and Rosa are our Outreach Coordinators, and they flyer in the community and talk to folks about the farm stand, eating healthy and promoting food justice. They really like getting out there and they have a really good time with it.

Last Thursday the Sol Collective (www.solcollective.org) came out and collaborated with students to make some music. They were working with beat boxing machines to make their own samples. It was great! Hopefully we’ll have them out again real soon. The hip hop went really well with the farm stand and the ping pong action we had going in the back.

This week we’ll have organic asparagus, spinach, collard greens, French Fingerling potatoes, La Ratt potatoes, German Butterball potatoes, cilantro, mustard greens, strawberries, turnips and free donated fruit! So come check us out! Every Thursday from 12-6 on 38th St. at Broadway near MLK.

SLUG members Josh and Jolie getting ready for the rush!

Josh and Jolie chillin...

Jesus (left), Jenny (center) and Christina maxin and relaxin

Farm stand manager D'asia chomping on some collard greens

All power to the people! (Outreach coordinators Rosa and Jenny with volunteer Jesus)

D'asia and Principal Echols

Mr. Feenstra (PE teacher) and Mr. Echols shopping!

Rosa modeling some organic radishes!

Sacramento League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) will be holding a food justice discussion next Thursday, Feb. 24 at the Sol Collective (2574 21st St.) from 6pm to 8pm. The discussion will be co-facilitated by Josh Cadji from SLUG and Maya Abood from Pesticide Watch.

Since food has become such a focus in our communities, we’re going to take a look many different aspects of food politics. So, the question proposed is, what is meant by the term ‘food justice’, and what are the politics that make the distribution of food unjust?

Some topics to be covered include:

• How do food access, food security and food sovereignty play a role in our local food systems?

• Who is Via Campesina?

• Is hunger really a problem in the United States, and do food banks really help?

• What is meant by ‘food apartheid’?

• What was the Green Revolution in India and Mexico?

• What do people mean when they say that we need to ‘decolonize our diets’?

• What role does the Farm Bill and NAFTA play in emigration to the US from Mexico?

• With so many programs and organizations out there relating to food, how can we as a community work to effectively address the root causes of diet-related diseases in urban communities and the undermining of small farmers in rural communities?

So come check out the discussion and see how you can get involved in the food justice movement!

For more information, visit SLUG’s web site at www.oakparkslug.org.

See ya’ll soon!

Josh Cadji
Founding member, SLUG

SLUG has some exciting events coming up!

We’ll be continuing to do home garden builds starting in the spring, which are all sponsored by our fiscal agent Ubuntu Green. Stay tuned for days, times and locations!

On Thursday Feb. 24 and March 24, SLUG will be facilitating a food justice discussion at the Sol Collective (2574 21st St.). Come check out how wacky our food system is!

In late March, SLUG will be facilitating a student-run farm stand at American Legion High School on MLK and Broadway. It will be open from late March until the end of school in June on Tuesdays from 12-5:30. The farm stand is scheduled to open back up with the start of school in August. More details to come.

Also in late March, with the help of students at Sac High and community partners, SLUG will be starting a garden at Sac High that will produce organic fruits and veggies for the American Legion farm stand starting in August.

Stay tuned for more details on these projects! And please, if you’re interested in helping out with these projects, let me know! Our organizing meeting for this project is on Tuesday, Feb. 15 at 5:45 at Johnny Broadway’s on 37th and Broadway. Hopefully see you there!

-Josh Cadji

SLUG collective

So what’s growin’ on with SLUG, you ask?

Well, just wanted to thank folks in the Sacramento community and Oak Park in particular for all of their support in helping to make SLUG’s first year a complete success!

Another special thanks to our committed donors: Steve Jenkins, Hastie’s Compost and Soil and Soil Born Farms for all of their support and donations this year. Including equipment, plants, seeds, soil and cash money, we raised over $1000!

Our success of 2010 include:

• 5 garden builds in Oak Park
• 2 food justice workshops and discussions
• 1 compost workshop at Sacramento High School
• 1 fundraiser- “Bend Toward Justice”

It couldn’t have been possible without everybody’s support. If you are interested in donating to us to help us continue our work in Oak Park, please leave a comment with your contact information and I’ll get back to you (I’m working on getting a Paypal account going on this site).

See ya’ll next year! Keep checking out the site for more updates, and don’t hesitate to contact me with suggestions or ideas.

Best from all of us at SLUG!

Josh Cadji

Founding member, SLUG

By the way, the first SLUG food justice workshop went great as well. We’ll be having our final SLUG build for the year in Novemeber some time, so stay tuned for that and our next food justice workshop, which will be in Novemeber as well. Thanks!

Akie and Elizabeth mixin' it up

family portrait

Elizabeth and Natalie

getting things ready for planting

Sarah (the lady of the house) and daughter

planting...

Winston (gentleman of the house) and daughter

the fam planting

cute tree collard

finished!

the whole family (minus a few, haha)

josh cadji

We gotsa SLUG build coming up on Saturday, Oct. 9 from 10am-2pm. The build will be at 3200 San Jose Blvd.  (On San Jose, near 7th Ave, south of Broadway). Let me know if you’re interested in attending. There will be food, drinks and a all around good time. No need to bring anything! Just show up ready to dig and plant. We have some broccoli, greens and cabbage going in.

On Thursday Oct. 7 from 6-8pm, we’ll be having a food justice workshop at my house. 3934 2nd Ave. Sac, CA 95817. It will be a potluck, so bring some food and the fam! For the workshop, we’ll be discussing issues surrounding food access and the reasons why there is less healthy food access in low-income areas as opposed to affluent communities. We’ll be touching on food policy, what the US government chooses to subsidize, how local government plays a role, why grocery store don’t build in low-income areas, etc.

Here’s a question: why doesn’t the government subsidize farmers to grow more organic fruits and veggies, making them cheaper at the store and thus more accessible? What are the conflicts surrounding this seemingly easy solution? …

So come on down for a double dip! Thursday Oct. 7 and Saturday Oct. 9.

We’ll see you in the soil!

Friday September 10th -

Join us for BEND TOWARD JUSTICE, a fundraiser for the Oak Park Community with proceeds going to Sol Collective, Sacramento League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), and Sacramento Copwatch…Featuring community forums, incredible food, and live hip hop performances. Event admission is at a sliding scale from $5-$20, though none will be denied due to lack of funds. 6 p.m. – Midnight.

So for August, SLUG is taking a break! August in Sacramento is sort of an in-between month in that it’s too late for summer plants and it’s so early that no fall/winter plants are ready to be transplanted. We could do a build where we’re sowing seeds, but that’d be sort of boring for everybody, since we want instant gratification! So we’re going to hold off until September for our next build where we can plant some mature seedlings – cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, greens, carrots, etc.

So stay tuned and we’ll let you know when and where our next build will be. Thanks for your continued support!