Looking for information about the farmers markets such as hours and the managers’ phone numbers? Wondering how to contact a farmer or rancher to get some local foods when the markets aren’t open? Want to visit a local farm or ranch or arrange a school field trip to one? Frustrated with trying to grow vegetables and need help? Want worms? Interested in harvesting mesquite pods but don’t know how or where to get them ground? Want to start cooking with the sun and need a solar oven and a solar cookbook?
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About our name: We chose to use a Spanish word “baja” which means lower as this part of the state, south of the Gila River, or “Baja Arizona” is a historic area that has many ties to northern Mexico. Our vision is a region that can once again feed itself.
Milestones: In 2004 we received a $7,500 grant from New Mexico State University with the help of New Mexico Secretary of Agriculture Miley Gonzalez (who was raised on a ranch in Cochise County and will retire here.)
In 2006 Baja AZ was awarded a $4,200 grant from Cochise County Health Department for its Desert Foods for Diabetes and Health program. We continue to promote desert “slow” foods which help to keep blood sugar stable.
Our Community Gardens Program helped Douglas High School receive a $4,200 grant in 2007 from the Cochise County Health Department to create an organic community garden, the Paradise Garden or “El Jardin Paraiso” at the school.
What is sustainable agriculture? Gary Paul Nabhan, one of the founders of Native Seeds/SEARCH, the Tucson seed bank that has saved the seeds of the Southwest, Director of NAU’s Center for Sustainable Environments, who will be returning to UA Southwest Studies, defined sustainable agriculture as follows.
“Ideally, a strategy for food production is considered to advance sustainability when it restores (or hardly depletes) the local water supplies, soil fertility, biodiversity and human communities which support it.” This echoes USDA’s definition of sustainable agriculture as “good for people, good for the land and good for communities.”
Baja AZ promotes a return to more sustainable thinking in terms of transportation and storage of food as well as farming and ranching practices. We encourage the revival of natural, organic and time-honored growing practices, the use of drought adapted and heritage seeds and breeds and the consumption of wild desert foods that sustained the people that lived in this region before us. We endorse the common sense redirection of resources and efforts so that most of the food that is grown here is also eaten here instead of somewhere else.
Future plans: We want to increase organic vegetable production by recruiting and training growers. We also want to enable our growers and ranchers to get organically certified with affordable in-state organic certification like New Mexico has.
We want to set up community kitchens that can be affordably rented by small food entrepreneurs to make products in a licensed commercial facility so they can sell them at farmers markets and other places. This would extend and add value to the harvest. Classes on safe practices as well as canning, cheese and yogurt making, international cuisine, solar cooking and healthy cooking with fresh vegetables and leaner grass-fed meats would also be offered.
How You Can Help Us
Volunteer opportunities: You can help Baja AZ by manning the info booth at the farmers markets for a couple of hours, directing people at organic field trips and garden tours, serving at tasting and cooking events, putting up event flyers, filing and grant writing. If you have growing experience and like to get your hands in the dirt, the Community Gardens Program needs people who would enjoy helping with community gardens at schools and elsewhere.
Becoming a Member: You can become a Baja AZ member by making a contribution which is fully tax deductible. You can do this either on-line on the web site, at our information booth at the Sierra Vista Farmers Market, or by printing out the membership form and mailing in a donation. Membership benefits include invitations to local food and sustainable agriculture events, a periodic e-newsletter and an annual members-only field trip to a local farm or ranch.
This Week at the Sierra Vista Farmers Market
Greens: Two growers will bring just-picked greens to the market this week. Sue and Dennis Wyrosdick of Sierra Vista and Carol and Corky Berty of Hereford will have bags of lettuce mix and spinach.
Fiesta Growers has Tucson grown, pesticide free, frost tolerant herb and vegetable bedding plants for early spring planting. Herbs include cilantro, chives, chervil, dandelion, dill, apple mint, chocolate mint, peppermint, spearmint, parsley, oregano, sage, savory, salad burnet, sorrel, thyme. Vegetable plants include broccoli, collards, endive, red cabbage, peas, red and green leaf lettuce, Swiss chard and miscellaneous Asian greens. Assorted seeds are also available. To spice up salads try chervil, a cross between parsley and anise, the French use it in béchamel sauce. Or salad burnet pronounced (bur-nay) a hardy perennial that forms a low growing mound and gives a nutty cucumber-like taste, sorrel, also good in bean soups and field cress, reminiscent of radish. In the Garden Nursery will return to the market in time for St. Patrick’s Day with 4 inch blooming shamrocks. (Most nurseries don’t offer them because they don’t ship well.) It also offers small bedding sprouts that should transplant well. Available this week are: butter lettuce, tomatillo, yellow pear tomato, cherry tomato, cilantro, spinach, chives and jalapeno peppers. Culinary and medicinal 4” potted herbs will include oregano, rosemary, curry, globe basil, peppermint, spearmint. chocolate mint, orange mint, sweet marjoram, catnip, society garlic, yerba mansa, echinacea, pineapple sage, fennel, sorrel and aloe vera. Dried herbs as well as agaves for landscaping & borders and pothos, philodendron, spider and jade house plants.
Grammy’s Garden will have lots of the grape and beefsteak tomatoes they raise in their greenhouses outside of Willcox if the sun shines to put enough color in the fruits. Look for kabocha winter squash as well as small spaghetti squash, butternut and acorn, green beans and Yukon Gold potatoes. Unsprayed Arizona grown citrus will include grapefruit, oranges, lemons and limes. Certified organic mangoes and other fruits from Mexico. Pick up a pack of flavorful De Cio herbal pasta handmade in Scottsdale.
Desert Oasis Soaps will have their kaleidoscope of richly scented and colored hand-made soaps as well as other body care products. Try a hot bath with muscle soak made with eucalyptus and winter green, a natural aspirin or the tropical flower plumeria and sea salt, known to remove toxins.
Bring something different to the next pot luck with a tub of roasted red pepper hummus made in Arizona by Dr. Hummus. Pair it with garlic or regular baked pita chips for a new take on a chip and dip tray. The ingredients list is short and pure, garbanzo beans, real lemon juice, red peppers, olive oil, sea salt, cumin and other spices.
The Tortilla Lady is back with mesquite, regular flour and corn tortillas. Her corn tortillas are made with locally raised tamale corn from the Ochoa Farm in Elfrida which she buys and freezes. She also uses their corn and green chile for green corn tamales in addition to chicken, beef and pork varieties. The mesquite cookies are naturally sweet and the tortilla chips are fried in olive oil.
There so much to choose from at the Maya Tea Company booth. Tea drinkers and friends of tea drinkers can have fun selecting and sniffing all the teas blended and flavored by a Tucson tea-drinking family originally from India. For the real thing try the family’s own recipe for chai tea, both herbal and caffeinated. Ask for a sample of the fresh brewed tea of the week. Vendor Jenn Vallier also offers fresh organic dates and date sweetened fudge, sunflower raw hummus and tahini made fresh of high quality ingredients.
Coffee drinkers can choose a fair-trade organic coffee from Adventure Coffee’s selections from around the world or Just Coffee from Katherine Zellerbach. Ask for samples of fresh brewed coffee.
Nuts: Two kinds of naturally grown pecans by the Hallsteds, organic shelled walnuts from River who also makes tasty baked goods from healthy emmer grain, and local pistachios by Dragoon Marketplace.
Stop at the fish and meat markets for your selection of Max’s wild ocean fish or grass-fed beef and goat from rancher Dennis Moroney of the 47 Ranch on Davis Rd.
The Next Door Kitchen will return with its home-style soups, stews, breads and cookies.
Large brown eggs available from Elfrida Egg man Don Smythe.
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