GULP Health

From CFI

Combined Food and Health Group Notes from the 5/2/06 General Meeting:

At our last meeting the Food and Health Group worked together as it is our common goal to promote more vegetable and healing herb gardens. Gardens in the works include the demonstration Medicine Chest Garden to be located at the home of Leeya, Ruth and Star as well as the demonstration vegetable garden being planned on the land owned by Jeff Taylor located in Redwood Valley. This garden will be managed with the expertise of Adam Gaska and may be the site of future gardening training sessions.

Another project initiated by Adam Gaska is his Germplasm inventory of vegetable seeds being saved and breeds of animals being raised by local farmers and gardeners. Sumo Burnstad has offered to guide in the design of a county wide relational database to store this information. It could be an online and available resource. Sumo also envisions a self diagnostic expert system of medicinal herbs.

Ann Oliver encouraged the participation of GULP in the Redwood Valley Community Market which is held at Lions Park in RV on Sunday’s from July though October. GULP could have a table there and also schedule demonstrations such as how to build worm bins, solar dehydrators, etc, or even offer medicinal herb start up kits.

GULP would like to encourage more community gardens within the Ukiah City limits and realizes that a representative to the UVAP planning meetings is vital. Miles Gordon will be recruited for this role. It was suggested to outreach via a classified ad to seek out vegetable gardeners within the city who would be willing to share their techniques for gardening in small areas and from this develop a garden tour map.

Finally, we got excited about having a facilitated visioning session about the possibility of the Masonite property becoming a demonstration project for economic localization. Local inventors and creative thinkers along with newly identified potential big money investors would be invited to attend.

Pea Pod Seattle was suggested as a site to Google.