Rock Rose Food Justice Project

08/21/2024

This summer I raised funds to support six fantastic Environmental Justice interns from the University of Delaware. Among them: masters students in entomology and speech pathology; a pre-med undergrad; and three PhD students in Geography and English.

We spent 10 weeks in Baltimore building gardens with the Nepalese-American Cultural Center; planting trees and native plant meadows with Stillmeadow Community Fellowship; building chicken coops with Ulysses Archie Jr.and the Baltimore Gift Economy; and growing and delivering many hundreds of pounds of organic food from the Rock Rose Food Justice Project to Soul Kitchen, the The Agoge Project and Love & Cornbread.

Oh -- and we paddled the Susquehanna and the Potomac, just for fun.

06/27/2024

Harvest time

04/09/2024

Bamboozled! Setting up trellises for pole beans.

03/06/2024

Hi, all -- many of you have followed the urban reforestation work we have been doing at Baltimore's Stillmeadow Peace Park over the last four or five years. Baltimore Magazine, edited by my fabulous former student Lydia Woolever, has just published a terrific piece about it, Check it out:

Starting with an inspired vision from a parishioner and nurtured by an outpouring of collaboration, Southwest Baltimore’s Stillmeadow woods have been given a second chance.

01/04/2024

Very excited: just handed in a new book manuscript: The Maryland Naturalist's Handbook, for which I served as both contributor and editor. 17 chapters (and 100 images) on everything from native plants and Chesapeake Bay ecology to urban forestry and environmental justice, written by some of the region's top scientists and educators. The book will serve as the primary text for Maryland's Master Naturalist Certification Program, which annually trains some 200 environmental restoration volunteers around the state. To be published later this year by Johns Hopkins University Press.

11/01/2023

Great piece about our work by — check the linkin our bio!

10/31/2023

A nice piece about our work at rock rose:

EJJI fosters a diverse community of journalists and supporters working towards environmental change in Baltimore, MD, and beyond.

10/20/2023

Humans got you down these days? Try vegetables.

07/17/2023

Strong July harvest thanks to help from Baltimore YouthWorks. All produce delivered to LoveAndCorbread!

07/12/2023

Great day of community garden construction in Bmore’s Mount Holly neighborhood.

07/12/2023

06/26/2023

Carrots! Beans! Collards! Kale! Arugula! Delivered fresh to Baltimore’s SoulKitchen!

03/30/2023

Gilman teachers Frank Fitzgibbon and Tim Lauer weeding the collards!

03/30/2023

Growing food for the Baltimore community— fun for all ages!

03/28/2023

03/25/2023

A beautiful rainy day planting seeds at our Rock Rose Food Justice farm in Baltimore. Starting in a few weeks we’ll start delivering 100 pounds of fresh produce each week to our food justice partners like Love & Cornbread and Carolyn Anewich’s Soul Kitchen.

03/07/2023

First day back at the farm — garlic is up, peas and collards are in!

12/19/2022

Check out the podcast I did on GMOs, the cost of eating industrial food, and the need to support local, sustainable food production: (all subjects of. my book "Food Fight"):

https://music.amazon.in/podcasts/ab13c5d7-9204-4e56-affd-5e3570b08455/episodes/2da2d4c1-68a7-49ed-a71d-568d505dfea5/phoenix-helix-autoimmune-resilience-episode-177-gmos-with-mckay-Mckay Jenkins

The first genetically modified food hit the market in 1994. Now, nearly all the food included in a Standard American Diet contains GMO ingredients. The good news is that if you avoid processed foods and shop the perimeter of the store, you cut your GMO consumption dramatically. However, we can't...

12/14/2022

A nice New York Times piece about Maryland homeowners holding firm on native plantings at their home in Columbia:

After their homeowner association ordered them to replace their wildlife-friendly plants with turf grass, a Maryland couple sued. They ended up changing state law.

11/12/2022

Building beds, harvesting fall crops with Carolyn Anderson and Carolyn Coletti.

11/04/2022

Gorgeous late season harvest of lettuce, collards and peppers from our nonprofit Rock Rose Food Justice Project, bound for nonprofit Soul Kitchen. Next week: turnips.

10/14/2022

Robust kale and chard harvest this morning— all going to Soul Kitchen .anewich

09/19/2022

At the Rock Rose Food Justice Project, we close as many loops as we can. We compost all our plant waste and food scraps, and build (and rebuild) our beds with reclaimed lumber from The Loading Dock. This keeps discarded building materials from ending up the landfill. David W. Kalb Derrick Weston Michele Lynne Kate Foster Love & Cornbread Rockrose Gardeners

09/07/2022

09/07/2022

31 percent of Black people, 11 percent of Latinx people, and 9 percent of white people in Baltimore live in food deserts. We need all hands on deck. Love & Cornbread https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-food-deserts-20220901-zpncfve6sjfejf2yh3grehx2uy-story.html

About 146,000 people in Baltimore live in areas considered "food deserts" because they don't have easy access to a supermarket.

08/25/2022

Here'w what excellent nonprofit collaboration looks like: we grow organic vegetables at Rock Rose and donate them to Love & Cornbread, where great people like Susan May and Nina Bathon Early cook them to deliver free to the Baltimore community. David W. Kalb Derrick Weston

08/23/2022

Today’s winner is: tomatoes! Runner up: okra! All being delivered to Guardian Angel food pantry in Re*****on.

08/15/2022

Some real summer bounty at Rock Rose.

08/15/2022