Liesel Flashenberg – “Enjoy more and better family meals.”

From the husband of the late Liesel Flashenberg:

August 3, 2011 is the first National Family Meal Day, created to honor our Founder, Liesel Flashenberg. In the year since Liesel died, we have repositioned Through The Kitchen Door and successfully begun our FREE National Replication Program. While this was her goal for the organization, Liesel’s goal for each of us was to “Enjoy more and better family meals.” She knew that frequent family meals help young children develop positive life skills. Research also shows that children who have more family meals have less drug and alcohol abuse, better academic performance and fewer early pregnancies. Let me know if you’d like to see our summary of research about the benefits of family meals.

Participation in National Family Meal Day is easy. Just get your family together and have a shared meal. It would be best if you can all participate in the cooking and preparation of a healthy meal, but that’s not always possible. Sharing prepared foods or going out together to a restaurant are also fine ways to celebrate this day. It’s the togetherness, conversation and support that develop during the meal that are the real treats.

If you run a restaurant, National Family Meal Day can be a great opportunity to either thank your family customers with something special or reach out to new customers. Let us know of any special “deals” you make for National Family Meal Day and we’ll help spread the word.

We do ask you to let us know about your National Family Meal Day plans and experiences. Tweet us at @kitchendoor, or just send us an email at dan@kitchendoor.org

Spring Into Action Volunteer Opportunities

April 10th, 2011

Registration Open Now!

Brought to you by Washington DC’s Jewish Community Center, Spring into Action is the their yearly environmental-action program. This year they are trying something new and providing volunteers with multiple options to engage in urban agriculture, community gardening, and creek cleanups throughout the greater Washington DC area. The 2011 “Spring Into Action” day of service is also being coordinated with Global Youth Service Day, so bring the entire family! Feel free to check out the site information below and make sure you register for your favorite local service project before it fills up.

Neighborhood Farm Initiative – Fort Totten:
Come help prep the flower and vegetable beds for Spring by turning the soil, planting seedlings, and doing various work around this gorgeous educational garden in Fort Totten.

Neighborhood Farm Initiative – Fort Dupont:
Assist NFI at their alternate site by helping build their shed and by doing other various garden projects. Construction skills necessary!

Common Good City Farm:
Located in the heart of NW DC, CGCF is a great communal space for local families. Come help them spread compost, prepare seedlings, weed, and get ready for Spring planting.

Rock Creek Park: 
Join us as we help to clean up and restore one of DC’s gems, Rock Creek Park. We will be doing basic trail restoration, removing trash, and beauitifying this great D.C. green space.

Eco Farms:
Volunteering on this family farm is always a treat. Meet the farmer himself, help prepare the vegetable and flower gardens, organize the tools,and get outside the city for a day. Healthy snacks grown on the farm provided.

Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens:
A JCC classic with a new twist. This year we will be doing a big creek cleanup, which helps to restore the watershed and keep local wildlife safe. We will also be planting young trees and shrubs in a brand new erosion-mitigation project that will protect the gardens for a long time to come

Seedling Projects:
Come out and volunteer with this new-to-D.C. organization at a local elementary school. Seedling Projects has incorporated healthy food and nutrition curriculum into the school’s programs, is advocating for healthier school lunches, and needs to finish building their garden so the students can do some hands-on learning.

We are so excited to announce that this year City Blossoms will be working with a group of children and youth at the Marion Street Intergenerational Garden to create our first ever Herb CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Project. This is an exciting chance for local kids to learn basic business skills and improve their garden and herb know-how while sharing very-locally grown fresh herbs with neighbors. Shares are distributed every other week & include 3-5 bunches of herbs, recipe ideas, usage tips, facts about the herbs and updates on the garden. All proceeds will go towards supporting the garden and youth gardeners.

CSA DATES: late April through October 2011

COST: $60/ Share for the whole season (that’s less than $10/months for almost 7 months & can be paid in two $30 installments)

WHERE: Marion Street Intergernerational Garden, 1517 Marion Street, NW (near P Street)  Washington, D.C. 20001

The application to the CSA is available online. To learn more about City Blossoms or to become a CSA member contact info@cityblossoms.org or call 202.870.8158.

Join us for food, drink, and fellowship, and help us raise money to KEEP ROOTING DC FREE! Your (suggested) donation of $10 at the door plus contributions from our generous hosts (Bread & Brew and The Wonderland Ballroom) will help cover the forum’s costs, and ensure that Rooting DC will remain an event that the whole community can attend, free of charge!

Check out this new book! Farm Together Now: A portrait of people, places and ideas for a new food movement is an exciting project by Amy Franceschini & Daniel Tucker, with a foreword by NY Times critic Mark Bittman. Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma) recently rated it his top food book of 2010. Learn a bit more about the idea behind the book with this short video.

There is a release party for the new book coming up at 6:30pm next Friday, January 28th at the Busboys & Poets located at 2021 14th St.  The author will be presenting alongside some of the farmers featured in the book. The event is co-sponsored by the National Family Farm Coalition.

For those of you who are looking to get involved in your community and have a few extra hours a week, here are a few opportunities available for you!

The D.C. Farm to School Network is looking for a dedicated volunteer to help 2-4 hours a week with website content, website updates and database management.  Please read the full description and instructions for how to apply here.

The Capital Area Food Bank is always looking for volunteers, and through their Ambassador volunteer program you can utilize skills you have to help them with specific projects. Some of the volunteer areas are advocacy, agency relations, development, food for kids, and nutrition education. Find more information about these opportunities here.

Bread for the City looks for volunteers to commit to a weekly shift for at least a month, so if you have the time for that sort of commitment, check out the details here. They also have opportunities for those who wish to volunteer as a group. If you’re interested in donating food or clothing or organizing a drive, you can find more information here.

If you’re more interested in policy, join one of the many action groups at DC Hunger Solutions.

Happy volunteering!

While it may be too cold to start planting, it’s never to early to start planning! With a free trial from GrowVeg you can plan your garden or herb garden for next season. Their online tool helps you to decide where different crops should go to best complement one another, and includes techniques like crop rotation. To help you plan an herb garden, check out Herb Companion for tips on growing and cooking with different herbs, as well as their healing properties.

GrowVeg also has information about growing many crops and using different techniques, as well as a blog on organic gardening available for free on their site. A subscription to GrowVeg’s garden planning tool may be a perfect gift for the gardener in your family! There are special subscription deals for organizations like schools that want to use their tool.

Join this house party/barn dance/potluck to celebrate the first year of Beet Street Gardens and donate to raise a (small) barn for the garden at Bruce House, a program of Sasha Bruce Youthworks. The actual (quite small) barn raising* will be raised by volunteers in the spring, just before the planting season.

Saturday, December 11th

1412 Parkwood Pl NW

Potluck dinner at 7:00

Contra, two-step, square dancing, fire pit, and good company ’till late

$10 suggested donation. No one turned away. All proceeds go to Beet Street.

There will be a fire pit on the porch, a keg of beer, and a pot of mulled wine. We will have Gabe Popkin calling dances and old timey tunes from local musicians.

All are welcome. RSVP on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=166008356773337.

*A barn raising is an event during which a community comes together to assemble a barn for one or more of its households, common in 18th- and 19th-century rural North America.

Beet Street Gardens is a community garden project at HIPS, Pathways to Housing and Sasha Bruce Youthwork. We are working to reduce the barriers of participants at these organizations to nutritious, affordable food and offering all the benefits of getting to know a garden.

Bruce House is a 10 room transitional shelter for teens. The house sits on a corner lot on Capitol Hill with about a half acre of potential magical garden space. This coming year we will hopefully expand to double the space for vegetables, as well as a berry patch, fruit trees and cut flowers. We’ll need lots of tools and somewhere to store them!