Food, Memories, Gardens and Families

Food from gardens is something near to my heart. For a few reasons. One my great grandmother, Lillian Finn, went to college and became a nutritionist when she was 35. Second I split my time between the East Side of Buffalo where I was born and my home which was the old Singer's Orchard in the South Towns. We raised apples, cherries, pears, plums not to mention the the 16 garden beds and a 40 by 40 veggie bed. Third, I was raised on PBS. Who often interjected about the importance of community, health, and loving life.

The east side of Buffalo and our orchard near the Boston hills were worlds apart. I got to see both sides. I participated in events like the Love Joy Halloween parade on the East Side. Yet, I was throwing nets over cheery trees so the crows didn't steel them all. I would take a quarter my great grand mother Lilly Mae gave me, cross Filmore Ave as she waved me on from her second floor apartment, walk to the corner vending machine, and out fell a frozen carton of milk. Then again harvest time meant climbing into the plum tree and eating the purple drops of lushness while bouncing on a branch.

I remember my mom making cherries jubilee lighting the flames and presenting it to the table. Or the rhubarb crisp, apple pie, and mammoth berries off the rod. All pies were made in sheet cake pans about 16 by 24 inches. They last longer that way.

The wild animals loved the food. And the deer were kept healthy all winter long digging up the apples that were left on the ground. Which brings me to another thought. Farming and gardening is done differently in the city.

Last year, as people walk by my wild front garden, they would point to a plant asking for its name (which I often do not know) or comment on how much it has changed from two years ago. Even a seasoned "Garden Walk" participant asked how we got the plants to maturity in only two years. As I watch other gardeners I began to realize that many of the gardeners in cities and suburbs are different then in small towns and small farms. I have a few rules of I follow mostly because they worked for my mom. Much of what I know has been past down in my family. And every time I listen to my mom I am reminded of how little I know.

For example here are some things that are different between city and country:

1. If you want to remove a vine from a building cut the vines at the based from the roots. Let them die over winter. Then you may have a chance at scrapping them off the wood.

2. Rake your leaves ONTO your garden before the first frost. It should not be a foot thick or you can get rot. But a healthy 1-2 inches allows normal microbial breakdown, sustains nutrients in the ground and it is free.

3. Never ever KILL the microbes in your garden. You are better off with a few grubs and a ton of good fungi and bacteria then a sterile garden and or lawn. Sometime I walk by a lawn and I see a pretty green lawn with short dandelions. And sometimes I see a lawn that obviously has damage soil. These are the lawns that are deep green in the spring. They suffer from synthetic fertilizers and even pesticides. The owner thinks the deep green is a sign of a well maintained lawn. Deep green like that usually means the plant is pumped up on chemicals, will be short lived, die back, get sun burn, and only causes more work. Most of these lawns I see are homogeneous which is a lawn made of one species of grass. This is an odd thing to do to a lawn. A healthy lawn will have about 15% minimum of weeds and at least a couple species of grass. Some "weeds" are good for gardens as well. The lawn is an easy and obvious example.

4. Do you need to kill off grass? Spray vinegar ! The type you can get from a grocery store is perfect and then cover the ground with a tarp. If you are only killing grass and dandelions, a few weeks will do it. You also do not get the die off of the beneficial microbes. But if you have a creeping plant, with runners, you can over the ground in fall and come spring the ground should be ready to go. That is what I did with a front section of my lawn. It had an invasive weed that would choke out other plants. Now I have perfectly cleared ground to work with. I did get some weeds growing on top of the tarp but they popped off the ground when the tarp was lifted up. I also did no harm. My yard is carcinogen free. It is safe for children, dogs, my friends, family and me.

I have also been learning a lot about family. Right now with a toddler I can only work in the backyard or risk her running into the street every time she sees the neighbor's dog when in the front yard. But sometimes I get to go out and just work on the front garden. I enjoy working on my garden. It is not very old. Developing a healthy lush garden does not happen over night. I sometimes just focus on what I am doing. Other times I think about my relatives back when they had farms and what it was like for them. I have recorded the foods they grew and where they were sold. I have recipes from each relative that came to live in Buffalo whether they were from Italy or North Carolina. I have my great grandma Lilly Mae's southern cole slaw and biscuits. I have my Great grandma Lucy's Florentine mint cheese over sized ravioli. I have my mom's pizza, cherries jubilee, and sheet cake pan apple pie. And my Dad's lasagna. Though I am a vegetarian I have my... let me think here, yeah, great great grandma Maria's Abruzzi lamb/beef mint meat ball recipe. Wow, food is good. I just realized I have a food associated with each person in my family. There are more but I'll stop the the flashbacks now. It has been 4-5 generations since anyone made farming a living in my family. But we always maintained land, gardens and trees despite our careers. The foods and recipes each family member favored is reflective of the farms and places they were from.

Buffalo - A Niche

Buffalo is like a niche product. It fills a gap that is missing in the United States. It can not be summed up in few words but I found out after traveling to cities from the likes of Shanghai, Tokyo, Milan, San Fransisco and Toronto, that finding a city that is so satisfying to live in are far and few.

Some words I can used to describe Buffalo, NY are; human, theater lover, music lover, festival enthusiast, architectural exhibitionist, food and kitchen obsessed, college students everywhere, ethnic diversity welcomed, a small business incubator and we have our share of competitive highschools.

Areas that we are lacking are: The city school system has many good and great schools but as a whole needs a lift. If you need an expensive home that cost more than one million dollars to sink the capital gains you just scored into then we are lacking. Public bus transportation can improve and our metro train is limited. The spring and fall can feel too short. The east side of Buffalo has many empty houses, 10,000 of them. They need to be rehabbed or taken down by Buffalo Reuse.

These are some facts and surveys done on Buffalo.

Population
Second largest city in NY state
Population as of 2005: 276,059
Diversity as of 2000: African American 39.3%, Latino 8.3%, Asian 1.8%
Median family income: 36,700
Median cost of home: 74,000

Schools
Student Teacher ratio in City schools 13 to 1
Schools: 78 Public, 47 private, Charter
Magnet (specialty) Public High School: 11, including specialties like art, finance, honors, bilingual, etc
University/College: 7 private, 2 state, one junior college (three campuses)
City Honors Public High School is ranked 8th in the nation.


Jobs - in private industry

Company.................................Industry.............................No. of Employed

Kaleida Health	Health Care	10,000
Catholic Health System	Health Care	8,400
HSBC Bank USA N.A.	Commercial Bank	5,848
Employer Services Corp.	Employment-related services	4,880
M&T Bank	Commercial Bank	4,820
Tops Markets LLC	Supermarket Retailer	4,673
Seneca Gaming Corp.	Entertainment	4,020
Catholic Diocese of Buffalo	Parishes, schools, and institutions	3,700
Wegmans Food Markets Inc.	Supermarket Retailer	3,288
Roswell Park Cancer Institute	Hospital	2,699

Art:
"Buffalo is home to over 50 private and public art galleries^[54] , most notably the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, home to a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art. The local art scene is also enhanced by the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, CEPA, and many small galleries and studios.^[55][56]"

Theater
Buffalo has over 20 theaters including Shea's performing Arts Theater, Irish Classical Theater, and Alleyway Theater.

Water - Sailing / boating / Crew
"Buffalo is at the eastern end of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes, which boasts the greatest variety of freshwater sportfish in the country. The Lake serves as a playground for numerous personal yachts, sailboats, power boats and watercraft, and provides a short water route to excellent sand beaches on the nearby Ontario (Canada) shore. The city has an extensive breakwall system protecting its inner and outer Lake Erie harbors, which are maintained at commercial navigation depths for Great Lakes freighters."

Night Life
"Several distinct and thriving nightlife districts have grown around clusters of bars and nightclubs in the city. The most visible nightlife district is West Chippewa Street^[61], located between Main Street and South Elmwood Avenue. The area is home to high-energy dance clubs, crowded bars, trendy coffeehouses, and restaurants. Allentown, where bars are as numerous but the atmosphere is a bit more relaxed, is a several minute walk north to Allen Street. Allen Street near Main Street houses several gay bars, while Allen near Elmwood has many bars that feature live music. Continuing up Elmwood Avenue from Allentown is the Elmwood Strip, which runs about two miles to Buffalo State College. This strip has numerous small boutiques and restaurants, with few large corporate establishments. Crowds on this strip include everyone from college students to families to the elderly."

Ski Resorts
We have 13 ski resorts within a 100miles of the city.

Buffalo has had top ten rankings:

Forbes Magazine - First (1st) for The Perfect Commute
Half of the workers in the Buffalo metro spend that time or less getting to work, and drivers experience only 10 hours of annual delays, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. Of cities with over 500,000 commuters, fewer people spend an hour or more getting to work in Buffalo than anywhere else in the country.

Forbes Magazine - Fourth (4th) strongest housing market
Buffalo home owners are poised to not be hit hard by the housing downturn. Housing values rose during the bubble but at a marathoners spead rather then the sprinters pace the rest of the U.S. This is allowing Buffalo's housing values to stanbelize.

"The quarterly NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) stated that nearly 90% of the new and existing homes sold in the metropolitan area during the second quarter were affordable to families making the area's median income of $57,000. The area median price of homes was $75,000."

Newsweek - National Public School Ranking

"The rigorous college preparatory curriculum at Buffalo's City Honors School has landed it at the head of the class in a Newsweek magazine ranking of the country's top high schools. Newsweek's 2006 list of "America's Best High Schools" ranks City Honors No. 4 on its list of the nation's 1,000 top schools. The high school rankings are the cover story of the publication's current issue"

Medical Jobs and Facilities

"Buffalo has increasingly become a center for bioinformatics and human genome research, including work by researchers at the University at Buffalo and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. This consortium is known as the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. It also includes: Buffalo Hearing & Speech Center, Buffalo Medical Group Foundation, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, Kaleida Health, Olmsted Center for the Visually Impaired, Cleveland BioLabs and Upstate New York Transplant Services."

The American Planning Association - 3rd Best Neighborhood to Live - 2007
The Elmwoodvillage, a neigborhood in Buffalo, NY, was ranked the best place to live.

AmericanStyle - Art Destination
"Ranked Buffalo fourth (4th) in its list of America's top art destinations."

Air Quality - 86% of a year has good quality ! - 2008
For a medium to large city to have 86% of its days having good air quality is a big deal. This is a significant change in the last 3 years.

USA Today - 2001
Named Buffalo the winner of its "City with a Heart" contest, proclaiming it the nation's "friendliest city."