The Farm to Table Tour was created to highlight farmers markets around the country and the benefits they offer their communities, and to celebrate the food produced by each market’s farmers and vendors.

This event will pair local chefs with local farmers to prepare special tastings showcasing their partner farm’s fresh ingredients and visitors will have the opportunity to sample the chefs’ creations while also learning more about the market vendors, their products, and how to buy and eat seasonally. Chefs will serve samples from 10:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.

Here are the participating chefs:

• Michael McKinney of Chew Restaurant
• Eddy Escriba of Uptown Market
• Nick Robson of Eleven South
• Sam Efron of Taverna
• Eric Fritsche of Pastiche
• Richard Nunn of News 4 Jax
• Damon Burch of Biscottis
• Brian Vandenburg of Burrito Gallery
• Brian Siebenschuh of Orsay
• Floyd Slyman of Café Du Marche
• Rodrick Smith of Sweet Pete Catering
• Tom Gray of Bistro AIX

Sam Efron of Taverna, one of the chefs, will be a guest on Urban Jacksonville Weekly Tuesday night at 5:30. We’ll talk about Sam’s new San Marco restaurant, his involvement in the the Farm to Table Tour and the importance of buying and eating seasonally. Read Taverna reviews on Yelp.

In addition to free tastings, visitors will have the opportunity to select potted culinary herb plant starts at the Mobile Garden Highlander Hybrid, and can also enter for a chance to win a unique culinary prize package. Toyota will also provide interested market goers with the opportunity to take a ride in the 3rd Generation Prius or a 2009 Highlander Hybrid and take home a John Boos cutting board as a thank you gift.

Toyota is dedicated to using eco-friendly materials throughout the tour and will be purchasing carbon credits through TerraPass to offset the impact of the tour’s carbon footprint. In addition, to further support the market, Toyota is making a financial donation to the Riverside Arts Market, LLC, the organization that brings the Riverside Arts Market to life each week.

A friend of mine wrote in response to the picture about about the use of cypress mulch at the Riverside Arts Market. Most may not know using cypress mulch is probably the worst way to mulch in Florida.

Good News

The mulch used at the Riverside Arts Market is wood pine dyed red with a vegetable based dye. Even better is the fact that this is the same mulch COJ uses in all it’s projects around the city: the Landing, FTU PAC, Stadium, parks, etc. when re-mulching required.

Melody Bishop called the mulching supplier Innovative Mulching to confirm and the person she spoke to said

it’s hard wood pine that is dyed red with a vegetable based dye. He went on and on about why we shouldn’t see much of the cypress as at the rate the wood is being used in 10-15 years it will depleted, he discourages the cypress and they now mix it with other wood because of the issue, and his concern for our environment.

I thought this was interesting to note and I wanted to spread the word on this progressive use of mulching by the city.

These bags rock and you can get one for $15.00 at the Native Sun Inside & Out Earth Day Affair this weekend. They are made from a recycled billboard by your hometown heroes, Burro Bags.

We’ll have approximately 100 bags for purchase at our Inside & Out Earth Day Affair THIS SATURDAY from 12 – 4pm at our Mandarin location. We expect these bags to go fast, so arrive early for the best selection.

Read more about the bags here: Native Sun Limited-Edition Burro Bags!. I love local collaborations, this is exactly the way things should work in our city. Local companies getting together to make the city awesome.

Inside & Out Earth Day Affair
Saturday, April 18 from 12 – 4pm
10,000 San Jose Boulevard, one mile north of I-295.
This event is fun for all ages and FREE to attend!

I learned from a co-worker that Jacksonville may halt recycling selected items. The economics of recycling just aren’t adding up for the city any more. An article from WJXT begins like this:

Recycled material may soon end up discarded in the dump because the new economy has dropped the price recycling companies pay the city for old newspapers, plastic bottles and cans. Recycling Firms Face Tough Times in Jacksonville

The article details how Jacksonville sells it’s recyclable materials to companies who flip those materials to buyers in other countries like China. China, in particular, has decreased it’s purchasing of recyclables, this is driving down the price cities can fetch for their bottle and cans.

We’ve reached a point where Jacksonville is paying more for the infrastructure to support recycling than it’s making, producing a net loss for recycling.

Since this story has come to light, certain puzzle pieces are fitting together for me. On the recycle day after Christmas I saw a normal garbage truck picking up recyclable materials. No sorting, just dumping into the truck. I chalked it up to stretched resources, figuring with all the Christmas garbage the city needed to free resources to collect all the garbage.

I was really witnessing the opening shot of the City’s effort to reduce recycling in favor of just throwing the stuff in a landfill.

Five Reasons Why The City Should Not Stop Recycling

1. Short term gain, long term loss: in the end we’ll have more junk in landfills, all to save a few bucks.
2. It’s bad public relations: these are the times when we should stay strong and show the country we’re a progressive city. Instead we’re shuttling a major indicator of a city’s devotion to eco-friendliness.
3. Recycling help’s curb water pollution: for a city who’s major asset is water, this sure is a kick in the groin to the river.
4. Disrespectful to your residents: at least I feel disrepected. I try hard to recycle as much stuff as possible, even though this city limits what you can recycle. Now my City is telling me I’m doing it all for nothing.
5. Bad for national image: trying to attract innovative talent from around the country just got a little more difficult. Would you want to relocate to a city that halted it’s recycling program?

The news story concludes with the reporter asking if Jacksonville will stop collecting recyclables? The answers is no, but if things get too bad, more recycled material will be dumped into landfills.

I’m always debating about which things I can and can’t throw in my recycle bin. Sometimes, instead of looking it up, I just toss it in the garbage. I’m sure you do too. But no more! I’m making it easy to look up the COJ Recycling information so next time you have a question you can just ask Urban Jacksonville.

After I post this, anyone should be able to just search for recycle to find this info again.

• Plastic food, beverage, detergent bottles and jugs with narrow necks and screw-on tops that are labeled with a 1 or 2 (no tops or lids and no butter tubs or similar items)
• Glass bottles and jars (green, brown, and clear; no tops or lids)
• Metal & aluminum cans
• Newspapers & inserts
• Magazines, catalogs & telephone books
• Corrugated cardboard (flattened and cut in pieces 2′ by 3′ or smaller)

Tip: If you have too many items to fit in your blue bin, separate the items into brown paper bags.

COJ also provides these handy Recycling Do’s and Dont’s for Jacksonville that the scary people on the page are waiting to tell you about like:

• Don’t place plastic bags in recycling bins– return them to your local grocer.
• Don’t use plastic bags to hold your recyclables. Place all items in your blue bin and/or brown paper bags.

Also if you need a blue recycling bin you can get one by calling (904) 630-CITY (2489). Now you have no excuse for not knowing what to recycle. Does anyone know if downtown has a recyling program yet?

Beginning in mid-May, city commuters in Washington, D.C., will have an alternative to stuffy bus rides and long traffic lines.  Clear Channel Outdoor (an outdoor advertising company), partnered with the district’s Department of Transportation, will launch the country’s first bike-share service, SmartBike DC.

Bike sharing services offer urbanites low-cost access to bicycles within the inner-city to ease traffic congestion, curb pollution and boost physical activity.  Bike sharing operates on a self-serve model (no attendants) and is geared toward short-term uses.  New technologies including GPS and RFID tags (radio-frequency identification) and automated payment kiosks make the systems more secure and user friendly.

The SmartBike DC system will offer bicycles at key locations in the central business district.  Bicycles are parked at docking points which use a proprietary locking system to ensure that each bicycle is securely stored.  The service is accessible via online subscription and subscribers will receive a SmartBike DC user card that provides access to every station of the program.  An individual annual subscription is $39.99.

Bike stations consist of a horizontal rack with docking points.  The docking points, as pictured above, are parking slots with locks, and they secure the bicycle when it is parked at a station.  An operational team manages the rotation of bicycles for each station to assure a proper ratio of available bicycles to drop-off locations.

How could most cities afford this?  As mentioned before, in the case of Washington, D.C., the district’s Department of Transportation partnered with Clear Channel Outdoor, a private advertising company.  The contract allows the private company to provide advertising on as many as 800 bus shelters.  Public-private partnerships are common among existing bike-share programs, according to Paul DeMaio, the founder of MetroBike LLC, a bike-share consultancy based in Washington, D.C.

Bike-share programs have proved successful in many other countries so far, including France, Spain and Austria.  Leading street-furniture company JC Decaux launched its Paris operation, Velib’, in 2007.  Today, more than 20,000 bikes are available at 1,400 stations.  Paris has four times more bike-rental stations than subway stations and the system is completely financed by advertising and rental charges.

The market in the U.S. is wide-open right now.  Most recently, Clear Channel secured San Francisco as the next city for which to develop street furniture plans, most likely including a bike-share component.  Chicago has expressed interest in bringing a bike-share program to its streets as well.

If Jacksonville had a bike-share system around its core neighborhoods, traffic and pollution would decrease and our city would be populated with a healthier group.  Some commuters would not be forced to wait for a bus if they did not have far to travel.  Also, commuters who bike already would not waste time locking their bike up properly and worrying that it might be stolen.

So.  Who wants to step up with the sponsorship?

I received an interesting email from a woman named Marielle Brinda who will be coming to Jacksonville to film for her upcoming documentary Homestead Road Trip.

We are setting out to interview citizens from over twenty different communities across the United States to find out how much they love living where they live. For we predict that if people lack that connection and value to the place they call home, then they are less likely to take care of it.

We would like to bring forth these issues to the public so that we can all help make our communities a better place to live, environmentally and socially.

Jacksonville is one stop on a 20+ city tour. Other cities include: LA, Las Vegas, Austin, Charleston, D.C., Chicago, Minniapolis and Portland. If you feel strongly about this topic and you would like to voice your opinion on this topic, leave a comment on this post. I will send a Marielle a link to this post so she can see your interest and get in touch.

More information on Homestead Road Trip or follow along with them on the Homestead Road Trip blog.

Image courtesy of pumpkinoodle

I was going to post my Nicky G’s review today, until my friend Jennifer from RADO sent this event to me. I’ll keep my Nicky G’s review for Monday.

The Climate Change Symposium at UNF, Saturday November 10, 2007 will discuss “How Should Jacksonville Adapt to Climate Change?” In addition to the all that talking crap there will be food! Here’s where it gets interesting:

Jacksonville Carbon Neutral Initiative is catering an all-local lunch. The menu is intense. It’s not even all vegetarian, believe it or not. Vegan chef Philip is making a beef stew (alongside a tempeh stew, and pecan crusted fried eggplant and an intensely awesome sounding coleslaw…) all from within 100miles except for the cooking oil and some of the eggs (which are all from Florida). I boiled ocean water to get local salt last night.

I’m not sure if there is a cost associated with the symposium/lunch. Yummm!

Wednesday September 26th Nikki Benoit of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy will be hosting a free volunteer training session at Inertia in Springfield. This session aims to recruit people from all over the state to attend any and all candidate events to ask questions about global warming and our need for clean energy initiatives.

Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes responsible energy choices that solve global warming problems and ensure clean, safe and healthy communities throughout the Southeast. If you can’t come tonight but are still interested in volunteering, here are some details on getting involved.

This event is free and starts at 6:30. Here is a map to the new Inertia location in Springfield.