Thank you for your interest in staying connected with MOFGA!

There are many ways to engage with the MOFGA community from utilizing gardening how-to’s and attending educational events to taking policy action and shopping in our online store. 

MOFGA’s vision is a future where local organic farming nourishes all people, and sustains thriving ecosystems, healthy communities, and fair economies. We are working to realize this vision by supporting farmers, empowering people to feed their communities, and advocating for an organic future.

Over the last several months MOFGA has been hard at work. 

• After writing a letter to Hannaford Supermarket urging them to adopt a Maine-First Sourcing Policy, and launching a petition inviting Mainers to let Hannaford know they want local food in their stores, Hannaford asked MOFGA to meet and discuss the policy idea. MOFGA met with the grocery chain on April 16 and delivered the petitions. Stay up-to-date on the outcomes of the meeting! 
• We’ve been preparing for the 50th annual Common Ground Country Fair. Join us at our poster exhibition in Augusta and Waterville. Visit our website for more information.
• MOFGA’s policy team advocated for organic-friendly policies in Washington D.C., and continued to fight against PFAS chemicals.
• We re-designed our quarterly publication, The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener, from a newspaper to a magazine. The publication is available for purchase in our online store and is also now carried in several retail outlets around the state. 

We always appreciate hearing from our community. If you have questions or ideas to share, please contact us at communications@mofga.org.

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Followers of Eliot Coleman’s farming and gardening work over the decades, as well as those interested in learning more about soil health and fertility, will enjoy this newest book from this well-known and longtime Maine farmer and gardener. “The Self-Fed Farm and Garden,” as the title implies, details the systems used at Coleman’s Four Season Farm in coastal Maine to limit outside inputs. He focuses on what can be grown on the land itself to support soil health and the crop production. It’s a quick read that might inspire you as you prepare for the growing season ahead. 

Coleman begins the book by sharing some of his own influences on the topic of soil health, specifically around the concept of a self-fed farm and garden over the years, as well as the importance of soil health in organic growing at all scales. He notes (alongside a lovely photograph of his farm), “organic farming showcases the inherent generosity of the earth.” As part of this overview, he writes about the importance of green manures (plants grown for the purpose of tilling in to feed the soil, rather than as a crop for harvest) as the key part of this self-fed farm and garden approach. 

In later chapters, Coleman provides a deeper dive about the specifics of his own farm. He reviews the various green manures used at Four Season Farm and explains the reasoning behind each choice. He gives an overview of the systems utilized, such as the timing of planting, rotation cycles, irrigation and tilling systems, harvesting logistics, and more. I think many growers will appreciate the specifics provided in those chapters, as well a later chapter on how, in his retirement from full-time farming, Coleman uses the practices developed on the farm in his home garden to utilize green manures and limit inputs. There are appendixes with further details that will also be of interest, and photographs throughout the book might lead you to try some of these techniques in your own growing adventures. 

– Anna Libby

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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Fruit exploration is more of a passion than a pastime for those of us easily distracted by roadside apple trees, relic farm orchards, or a lone pear tree standing strong where an old farmstead once stood. We often park on the soft shoulder of a gravel road to get a closer look or knock on the door of a complete stranger, seeking permission to snoop around their property when spring fruit tree blossoms catch our eye or when the flashes of colorful fruit dot the trees in autumn. Sometimes it’s completely random and by chance, while other times considerable research leads us down the path.

In “The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit,” Priyanka Kumar recounts her journey of fruit exploration from childhood visits to orchards in her homeland of Himachal Pradesh in northern India to relic orchards of the American Southwest, near her current home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Kumar takes us on her journey to discover lost trees and fruit through stories learned from local elders, history thoroughly researched, and the chance encounters made along the way.

Clearly a naturalist at heart, Kumar’s writing includes descriptions of warblers flitting about shrubs, cottonwoods gnawed by beavers, and bear scat along a river trail leading to a relic orchard of an old homestead. Her appreciation of nature is evident and clearly supported by a deep understanding of the science behind the natural world. Her underlying search for rasa, meaning juice in Sanskrit, suggesting “the vital essence of an experience, person, or a work or art,” permeates the book and surfaces regularly with her discoveries, likening to “a hidden spring of joy.”

What I enjoy most about this book is Kumar’s vivid descriptions of the trees, the cultivation practices, the people, and the terrain of the arid Southwest, starkly different from my home in the humid Northeast but somehow very familiar. Her recount of journeys with friends, like Gordon Tooley leading her to the Real orchard or Dave Kenneke and the Chase orchard, sound so similar to me it’s like I’ve met that person before — but the Maine version. “The Light Between Apple Trees” has helped me to realize that fruit exploration and preservation work holds a common thread, spanning across borders and cultures, and connecting us like roots in the soil.

– C.J. Walke

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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In his latest novel, Wendell Berry, 91, again invites the reader into the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. Renowned as an essayist and poet, Berry, through a trove of eight novels and dozens of short stories, captures the history, pride, and heartache of this small, rural community spanning time from the Civil War to the present. 

“Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” begins in 1906. Farmer Marcellus — Marce for short — and a neighbor set out at midnight on a hopeful yet apprehensive journey to Louisville. Traveling first on horseback, then train, and finally by foot, the pair eventually stands beside their hogsheads of tobacco that have traveled ahead of them from their small farms to the auction warehouse. A single bidder representing the American Tobacco Company buys the entire crop for a few pennies per pound, only enough to pay the farmers for the cost of sending it to market and the commission on its sale. “Its purchase, properly named, was theft,” writes Berry. 

This short novel, peppered with essay-like interludes, weaves together three generations of Catlett men — Marce, his son Wheeler, and his grandson Andy. It is from the perspective of Andy, an autobiographical stand-in for Berry, who is now an old man, that the story unfolds. In part lyrical lament, part celebratory remembrance of his family’s history, Andy reckons with the profound outside influences, mainly that of the post-World War II industrialization of agriculture, that have transformed Port William’s unique regional culture and economy. The town has changed from a patchwork of self-sufficient homesteads making their livelihoods from tobacco and other crops to one in which, Berry writes, “the traditional subsistence economies of households and neighborhoods were supplanted by the global economy of extraction, consumption, and waste.”

Neither Wheeler, who becomes a lawyer (as did Berry’s own father), nor Andy can make a living farming full-time, although they’ve been shaped and schooled by Marce’s dogged determination to make a living from the land. The reasons for this failure lie beyond the fact, Berry acknowledges, that tobacco is found to cause cancer, and include “the technical romance of the corporate giants, the millionaires and billionaires, who would conquer the earth, conquer ‘space,’ invade Mars, a place better known to them than the country that grows their food.” 

Through one brilliantly constructed sentence after another, Berry again captures a place in time that has existed nowhere else and will likely never exist again: stories about tobacco-stripping rooms; dug cellars where the cream was brought to settle; Marce quizzing his grandson about what makes a solid mule team; and neighbors united by a shared history and occupation. A sense of loss pervades the book despite its melodic celebration of a family’s deep connections to their little place on Earth. Berry writes that the three men — Marce, Wheeler, and Andy — were made brothers by their failure: “their discovery that the vision, as each one of them in his own time has seen it, could not live beyond them, so hard upon them has been the force of the changing times.”

– Sonja Heyck-Merlin

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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Sometimes when I am eating a fruit or vegetable, or especially a mushroom, I wonder, “Who ate this first? How did they figure out that it was safe to eat? How did they know that it takes three batches of cooking water to render this edible, that two still makes you ill?” I suspect curiosity, trial and error, and a very deep level of listening to the plants were involved. 

“The Curious Kitchen Gardener” by Linda Ziedrich takes the reader on a garden adventure and a culinary exploration that safely ends in the kitchen and at the table. She encourages one to look at gardening, cooking, and preserving food as an integrated way of life, and spices things up with some interesting, possibly more resilient, plants. 

Ziedrich profiles 33 often overlooked, little-known, or under-appreciated garden plants and shrubs that may just fill new niches in your garden, yard, and pantry. They are delicious, possibly disease- or drought-resistant, or insect-tolerant, or just may add a touch of eclectic diversity to your everyday fare. 

The book is more about the garden than recipes. Each chapter focuses on a unique plant food, many rarely available in a store, and includes snippets of history, personal stories, color photographs, and tips on growing, harvesting, and preparing foods in shared recipes. Plants like sorrel, parsnips, beets, and chard are familiar to seasoned gardeners. Some like oca, quince, honeysuckle berries, chicory, bamboo, and angelica are less common. The recipes offer new approaches for the familiar plants and intriguing flavors for those lesser known. 

The chapter on quince talks about varieties; cultivation; how it was once a common source of pectin; its many past and present, sweet and savory culinary uses; and a recipe for roasted quinces and sweet potatoes. It was a cozy wandering conversation with a friend who generously shares her wealth of knowledge. The personal stories and observations bring you towards the possibilities of adding quince into your way of life. Could it be a lemon substitute for Maine?

“The Curious Kitchen Gardener” is an excellent read if you are pondering what is next or are just in need of an escape to other possibilities. Ziedrich sows the seeds of new adventure. 

– Roberta Bailey

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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Every winter I stock up on black oil sunflower seeds and fancy mix for the feeders. It’s meant for the birds, but gray squirrels and red squirrels are frequent visitors. Squirrels are common backyard visitors no matter where you live, yet scientists know surprisingly little about their behavior and ecology in their native range. They are, says Nancy Castaldo, understudied and underappreciated and that is what inspired her to write “Squirrel: How a Backyard Forager Shapes Our World.”

“Squirrels of all species, small and ever present, do much to strengthen the health of our forests,” Castaldo writes. By caching individual acorns in scattered locations, gray squirrels disperse seeds far enough from their parent trees to get the sunshine and room they need to germinate and grow. Those oak trees play an important role in the lives of other forest animals, providing food and shelter for birds, butterflies, moths, wasps, lizards, and raccoons, to name a few. Squirrels also disperse pine seeds and fungal spores. And they help shape forest biodiversity as part of the food web. 

Castaldo organizes her book around the different roles squirrels play in our world: as people greeter, keystone species, and even a dinner entrée. Read aloud, the table of contents sounds like a poem: 15 ways of looking at a squirrel. “It felt like a natural way to structure the book,” Castaldo says. “If you ask anyone about squirrels, they’ll likely mention one of those roles.”

Some scientists are studying squirrels, and their findings are woven throughout the book. My favorite studies happen to be those conducted on university campuses. For example, students at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, have been collecting data about squirrels on campus since 2010. The participants in “Project Squirrel” capture, measure, tag ears, and attach radio collars to resident gray squirrels, then follow them over the course of the year. When professor Noah Perlut started the project, he was astonished to learn that there was not a single published ecological study on gray squirrels in New England: nothing about how large their home ranges were, how long squirrels lived, or how the seasons influenced their behavior. On other campuses, students are collecting information about squirrel nut-caching behavior and intelligence.

As vital as they are to our North American forests, gray squirrels can be unwelcome in other environments. Over the years, gray squirrels have been imported to England. They are larger and heavier than the native Eurasian red squirrels, emerge earlier from hibernation, and deplete the food supply. As gray squirrels increase their population, the native red squirrels become less common. One solution: Put gray squirrel on British menus! Reintroducing pine martens, a native predator in the weasel family, has been successful as well.

Unfortunately, many squirrel species are experiencing declining populations due to the global effects of climate change. Castaldo ends her book with a call to protect our common squirrel species while they are still common. 

– Sue Smith-Heavenrich

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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Alicia Kennedy’s “On Eating: The Making & Unmaking of My Appetites” is a memoir that, like all good memoirs, explores culture and politics via stories of the self. In it, Kennedy reflects on some of the foods that have impacted her life: apples, lamb, mushrooms. Within her personal stories are well-researched food histories and acute perspectives on today’s global food scene — both of which have shaped Kennedy’s own desires in food and in life. Stories of eating chocolate invoke stories from young adulthood, which in turn invoke stories about feminism. In another section, a story of loss is told alongside local histories of oysters.

Kennedy’s distinct voice is hard to turn away from. She has a masterful ability to cut to the heart of a complicated topic without omitting nuance or sacrificing narrative. Kennedy’s own professional experience — formerly an owner/operator of a vegan microbakery, and currently a prominent food writer — has made her an expert in the realm of food and food writing, and her expertise is clear throughout the book. Her love of food shines, and her writing is rich enough to make the reader hungry.

“On Eating” continually circles back to the idea of home, and the food and the people who make up that place, wherever it is. She writes, for instance, of the farmers’ market on Long Island, where she “learned every land gives food of some sort; every land provides a culture.”

For readers who call the Northeast home, the second chapter, “On Apples,” may be of particular interest. Covering the history of apples in the United States of America and especially in the Northeast, the author’s early tastes for different varieties, and the growing prevalence of public fruit, this chapter is a refreshing look at a fruit that is both often overlooked and deeply beloved by many.

Fans of both memoir and nonfiction genres can find something to love in this book, which spans the intersections of food media, globalization, climate change, gender, and workers’ rights. “On Eating” is a joy to read. In learning about Kennedy’s own journey as an eater, cook, and food writer, readers might learn something new about their own place in the food system. 

– Madi Whaley

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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When I started reading Paul Hawken’s “Carbon: The Book of Life,” I settled in, expecting an extensive description of how carbon impacts our lives and the planet. The first sentence made that clear: “Carbon moves ceaselessly through the four realms—the biosphere, oceans, land, and atmosphere.” However, after only 30 pages, I was thrown for a loop. 

Hawken began veering off the carbon script and into the realm of something much larger. First it was the life of amphibians, then single-celled life forms, then noise. This was followed by partial or whole chapters on food and agriculture, the technology of Bucky Fuller, trees and plant life in general, fungi, insects, the Earth and its soil, Indigenous wisdom, and even language and the Civil Rights Movement. What’s that got to do with carbon? When I looked at the book’s index, almost all listings under “carbon” were in that first 30 pages. 

In my opinion, this book was mis-titled. I was ready to curse Hawken and stop reading. But I pushed on, and I’m glad I did. I renamed the book for myself — “The Nature of Nature” — and decided the real goal of the book was not to tell us about carbon but instead to say: If we want to change direction on the climate, we need a different attitude and relationship towards nature. Our connection to the natural world must be based on mutualism and reciprocity, not exploitation of resources. That was a consistent theme throughout the book.

Hawken likes to expose myths, such as the one that humans taste different flavors on various parts of their tongue (tastes are consistent on the tongue). Or that animals are more complicated genetically than plants (actually less). Hawken has lots of memorable one-liners, like “87 of the 115 most important food crops depend upon a declining pollinator community.” Or, “Bees count with numbers, remember human faces, have dialects, and only see green when flying but full color when they land on blossoms.” And he loves lists, especially ones of half a dozen points or more, such as a dozen soil-residing insects, most of which I had never heard of. “Carbon” is a smorgasbord of noteworthy quotes and commentary, and they leap out at random. The appeal and excitement of the natural world comes alive in this book, even though the author jumps around. 

One slightly bothersome issue: In the case of two women scientists, Hawken frequently refers to them by their first names but uses last names for those who are male (except in one case he uses a man’s nickname). It reads to me as sexism, possibly, on a small but noticeable scale. 

Still, Hawken’s final words are prescient: “We can’t save the planet; it will save itself.” But we can be a “midwife” in helping the Earth to survive by honoring nature and how it operates whenever possible. 

– Larry Dansinger

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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“Botany of Empire” by Banu Subramaniam situates the history and practice of botany in the larger context of European colonialism and its ongoing impacts and continued structure in our current world. Laid out in five parts, with multiple chapters in each, Subramaniam begins each new section with quotes, some botanically based and others drawing from novels or esteemed authors. This sets the framework for this well-researched and detailed book to go beyond just the history of the plant world. It also includes personal stories from the author’s own beginnings as a scientist and botanist. She received her doctorate in evolutionary biology in the United States but grew up in urban India, unlike many of her student peers. Finding feminist science and technology studies deeply influenced her continuation in the field, which she felt she often didn’t fit in, and the reader can see how these areas of study overlap in her work.

The book critiques a few major areas of scientific process. One of which is how plants are named in the Latin binomial system developed by Carl Linnaeus. She goes beyond echoing what others in the field have said — that many plants are named for white colonists — and expounds on the whole system of naming as problematic in that it commodifies plants and reduces them to objects. She also critiques how binary the language has been around plant reproduction, and its basis on human colonial sexual norms, and how herbariums, botanic gardens, and other such institutions continue to uphold colonial standards of taking and exoticizing.

Subramaniam questions another binary: “native” and “non-native.” She likens this thinking to fostering xenophobia and says we should instead challenge these labels with new vocabularies. She also points out the often-overlooked aspects of the “invasive” plant problem, questions why they are turning invasive, and states that environmental degradation is leading to a shift in plant diversity. She says that more effort should be directed to challenging economic and development policies rather than eradicating plants. 

The heart of the book is enmeshed in the questions Subramaniam raises but boils down to how to decolonize botany. She states, “decolonizing necessitates many solutions, no one size fits all.” This book is very heavy in theory and well suited for readers with a deep interest in botany as a science and how the current scientific system was created by those with power. It is a thorough examination of the history of botany in the West and ways to rethink it.

– Denise DeSpirito, Of the Spirit Herbals

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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“The Salt Stones” begins with an initiation: A ewe gives birth to two lambs. One lives. One dies. Helen Whybrow, the shepherd and author of this book, knows she will have to tell her toddler, Wren, about the death, and that they will go see the living and dead lambs together. With that, Whybrow steps forward into the story of her shepherding life, bringing the reader along with an ever-present tension of birth and death.

Following the arc of her life, “The Salt Stones” begins with Whybrow’s own childhood and quickly moves to the beginnings of Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont, where she and her husband Peter start a nonprofit rooted in social justice as she grows her flock of Icelandic sheep. Whybrow writes that “food, ecology, and activism are all intertwined with our love of art and words.” As a new mother and young shepherd, Whybrow finds herself one day in the bookstore, and serendipitously picks up an old copy of “The Serpent of Stars.” Published in 1933, this story of shepherds becomes part of Whybrow’s own book, each chapter starting with an epigraph from the novel.

In this way, readers feel a sense of weaving. Whybrow constantly looks to the past as she writes into the future, which in many ways is a practice required of any modern farmer. How do we tend the flock while making a living in a society that sees farming as quaint? How do we bring ancient knowing into the present day? How do we find balance with predators like coyotes while also managing judgement from people who’d prefer to keep the realities of farming at a distance? And how do we find belonging when the land we love faces irrevocable loss from climate change? As Whybrow grapples with these questions, we see her answers unfold across decades of daily chores and changing seasons.

Towards the end of the book, when Whybrow is faced with saying goodbye to her dying mother, while simultaneously saying goodbye to her grown daughter leaving the farm, she writes, “I don’t want loss to upend me.” And perhaps that’s the pulse of this book — being witness to loss and refusing to stop loving. Being witness to loss and discovering what remains, and what becomes, as you write it down. Placing words like seeds that may open and bloom in a hundred years when another new shepherd, tired at the beginning of all this life requires, picks up “The Salt Stones” in a used bookshop and finds a way to listen deeper, to keep going, to create a life with Earth and all her beings. 

Whybrow writes that the shepherd’s mind “is about finding a way to listen, to tend, and to immerse in the living world.” She offers this to readers — the possibility to belong to the living world as an antidote to loss. An antidote that must be taken day after day, like a shepherd moving the flock to fresh pasture.

– Katie Spring

This review was originally published in the winter 2025-2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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