Local Heroes: Urban Foraging

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Cool. Nice story on STIR member Jake Kosker and the other urban foragers in Salem.

. . . Kosker is part of a growing movement that touts the sweetness of fruit picked from street trees, local parks or neighbor's yards that would otherwise go to waste.

Urban foraging could be as simple as picking blackberries at a local park or as involved as Kosker's daily trek for plums, cherries, hazelnuts and walnuts through the alleys of his northeast Salem neighborhood.

Web sites such as www.neighborhoodfruit.com, www.veggietrader.com and Portland's www.urbanedibles.org have popped up throughout the country, providing maps and encouraging city dwellers to forage for urban fruit. From a local food standpoint, it's hard to get more local than your own neighborhood. . . .

Marion-Polk Food Share launched its own urban harvest team last year to pick neighborhood fruit trees.

The food bank often gets calls from homeowners who don't have the time or physical ability to keep up with the harvest, said Kat Daniel who runs the program as part of the Women Ending Hunger campaign.

"We have people calling saying, 'we have this plum tree. Can you pick this plum tree?' " she said.

Now they can. She hopes to expand the program to include more volunteer harvesting teams so they don't have to turn jobs away during peak times. . . .

Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization (STIR) - 1st Meeting Coming Up!

How can Salem respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?

That's the question we'd like you to help us answer. Please attend a gathering, free and open to the public, being held to introduce the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization (STIR).

We want to begin organizing in Salem around the issues that arise from the need to rethink the way we use energy, which permeates every other aspect of living today, from how and where we get our food, how we travel, our household budgets, what skills kids will need for the future, and many others. Our first public outreach will be a meeting to introduce the "Transition Towns" model, which is taking off in many places across the United States.

This first meeting will be held at the Straub Environmental Learning Center, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, February 25, 2009.

We hope to see you there! Until then, if you are intrigued and want to know more, see www.transitiontowns.org.