Meet Local Green Peeps!

Chances are, if you are reading this, you support green causes. You go to meetings, you visit local farmers’ markets, and soon you start running into familiar faces. You know their names, but have you ever wondered what they do to be GreenAR? Well, Meet Local Green Peeps! hopes to satisfy your curiosity about area green people and what they do to be GreenAR in the Natural State. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

Vital Statistics (Name & Location): Georgiaberry, Kandan, Cecily, and Max Mobley with Sunshine For Dinner – The Farmer’s Market that comes to you – in Fouke, Arkansas.

What Do You Do?: Sunshine For Dinner is the Farmer’s Market that comes to you. We offer recurring deliveries of fresh, seasonal, locally-grown fruits and veggies, and farm-fresh eggs, right to your home or office.

Steps Taken to be GreenAR:

GOALS: If I had a lifestyle goal, I would say it is this – to produce more than I consume. I am happy that I at least produce something, although not equal to my consumption, but we are gaining on it. I need to continue whittling away at the consumption from outside my system and gradually build on the production end.

RECYCLING: I am thankful to be able to take part in the Texarkana, Arkansas area recycling program. I store all my recyclables and bring them up to town once or twice a month. It was difficult to get into the routine to sort and store the materials, but now that we have been at it for almost a year, it feels like just the way we do things. Of course, green waste of any kind – food scraps, garden waste, leaves, weeds – never leaves our property – it goes first to animals for feed, then into our composting system.

PARENTING: Of course we’ve done many of the things that eco-parents “should,” like breastfeeding and cloth diapering. Both of these things are great reducers of consumption and can save a family a lot of money. And, let me drop in my favorite slogan, “Eat Local From Birth, Breastfeed!”

FARM: On our small (micro) farm, we produce quite a lot of compost to amend and continually improve our garden soil. We use animal manures from our own animals (chickens, pigs, and rabbits) to enrich our garden plots, and we feed excess vegetable matter and garden waste to our animals. It isn’t recycling, it’s just cycling

Internet resources allow us to source seeds from small producers, so we can grow rare and heirloom open pollinated varieties of veggies. That makes us happy. Our favorite seed catalog: Fedco Seeds. We save our own seed for easy stuff, like beans, but we’d like to start doing this routinely with other crops, like tomatoes. Tomato seed is expensive!

I am still trying to find a happy medium with packaging for Sunshine For Dinner veggie deliveries. The produce needs to be well packed to arrive in good condition, but sometimes I despair of all the little bags and crates! I do get non-petroleum based materials when I can, like paper pulp egg cartons (which are also overruns, so are really an industry waste product), cornstarch clamshell containers, and compostable produce bags. Reuse of these items is easier said than done, but we keep pushing ourselves to make it better.

Hard-to-Take Steps: Improving energy efficiency in our home and reducing our consumption of electricity. I leave way too many lights on, my phantom electrical usage must be astronomical, and my house leaks air like a sieve. I know our house is hemorrhaging cooled air in the summer. I have an EPIC FAIL in this area, and I have to do something about it! (Caulk, right?)

Future Steps to be GreenAR: Finding a replacement for a tomato that we really like, “Early Girl,” that is a hybrid now owned by Monsanto. We will be testing open-pollinated varieties to find one with the same qualities – early, tasty, uniform quality.

Favorite AR Businesses: The Arkansas business that I cannot live without is my local grocery store, Jerry’s General Store. This small family-owned store supports our community by stocking groceries at good prices, selling fresh locally-grown tomatoes during the summer, and stocking all kinds of hardware and plumbing supplies that let us solve our problems close to home. I feel good about buying ground beef from Jerry’s because they grind and package it in small lots in their store, greatly reducing the risk of contamination from the mega slaughterhouses that exists in the prepackaged ground meat sold at Walmart and other discount food stores.

It makes sense to shop close to home, and the excellent service that I get at my local grocery store makes it easy for me. Thank you, Tony and Christy!

Of course, I am devoted to the Texarkana farmer’s markets and all their wonderful growers. I am a big fan of Youngblood Grassfed Farms of Grannis, AR. They deliver their wonderful grassfed meat all around the state, including Texarkana, so it is easy to stock up when they come our way.

If You Can Do One Thing to Make the Natural State Even More Natural, What Would You Do? I would work toward increasing energy efficiency in our public school system, immediately. Prices for electricity are not going to decrease in the coming decades. Our schools are going to drown under utility bills if things are left as they are. We need to plan now for improvements that will help in 20 years. Our local school sits in the blazing sun with air conditioning units on its roof. This makes no sense. Our schools need SHADE.

Know a green Arkie? Leave a comment and let me know how I can get in touch with him or her.