In life, love and in the garden.
—by Adele Flail

Beyond Boston baked beans or California-style pizza are foods through which we can actually reach a deeper communion with place. Cheese is one of these foods, its alchemy dependent on the subtle unseen of a place, as the microor­gan­isms that permeate the environ­ment work away to alter the raw material into the final product.

Books to help your garden grow.
—by Adele Flail

The insistent cadence of crickets already evokes the beautiful melancholy of late summer: warm evenings spent in conversation under the stars, or the knowledge that soon—though not quite yet—vacation will end with the return to school or work. But Salt Lake resident Pat Crowley hopes that crickets' evening sussurance (or—more accurately though less poetically—stridulation) might soon have another association for people here in the US: that of a ringing dinner bell.

Easter is on Sunday, March 31 this year. If your celebration of physical and spiritual renewal features dyed eggs, a roast ham or lamb, consider purchasing directly from one of Utah's farmers. However, many of these producers run small-scale, family-run operations, so get in touch with them early in the month to reserve your Easter dinner. (If your Easter celebration includes some of the more esoteric cultural trappings—willow switches and mystery novels, anyone?—you're on your own.)

Utah is a treasure chest for the locavore, abundant with farmer’s markets and CSAs offering up the emerald of dew-glistened spinach and lettuce, the rich ruby of beets and the dull gold of potatoes and corn. But busy schedules don’t always allow time for a treasure hunt—whether it involves squeezing in an extra trip to the farmer’s market (in season) or scrambling for a decent recipe that can incorporate unfamiliar or surprise CSA fare.

...if you have an interesting food-related project in need of some seed dollars.
—by Adele Flail

You could say Appenzell Farm started in 2008, when Jesse Corbridge and his mother Barbara read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and decided to dedicate their 10 acres to the sustainable farm movement. You could say that the Appenzell Farm really got it's start a year later, when Jesse's grandmother leased her fallow 70-acre lot to the farm.

For Julie and Rich Clifford of Clifford Family Farm, getting back to agrarian roots was a matter of necessity. Both grew up in Utah with links to the rural way of life—Julie's grandparents were farmers and Rich's family kept horses—so it was natural for the couple to keep a garden and a small flock of chickens when they married 30 years ago. But home-grown food became a way of life for the couple as they began raising a big family, not only for sustenance, but to foster the spirit of self-sufficiency.

When you first step through the gate, the rectangle of dead weeds and road base looks like any other leftover space in the city, a place where the tabs and slots of city planning never quite aligned during the tetrising of gas station and stockyard, store and coffee house—another blind-eye/eye-sore, an unintentional gap in the productive spaces of the city.