These days, it seems everyone is talking about “going green.” Never has such a simple sounding term had so much meaning.  For nonprofit overnight Jewish camps, their staff and lay leaders, this means changing old habits, teaching campers about how and why to make changes, and ensuring a vibrant future for their camps.

Many camps have begun to implement green practices, taking action to decrease their carbon footprint, and impart a positive environmental message to their campers.  Steps have included forgoing paper, plastic, and Styrofoam in favor of using reusable tableware and reducing non-biodegradable waste, using solar power for heating, providing campers and staff with environmentally friendly water bottles, changing light bulbs to reduce carbon emissions, and more!  Several camps have also planted gardens and are teaching their campers about healthy cooking and organics.

The other day my boyfriend and I were enjoying a Sunday walk in Brooklyn when we ran into his friend Ana, her partner and their adorable new baby.  Among the introductions and pleasantries she mentioned that she was distributing her film FRESH.  “Here, tell me what you think of it,” she said handing me a copy, knowing I was a food writer.

So, one night a while later my boyfriend and I tucked into the sofa and watched FRESH, the new film by Ana Sofia Joanes.  As someone who has seen Food Inc and has read a lot of Michael Pollan, the material was not new to me, however I found the material’s presentation (forgive the pun) fresh.  I had found Food Inc to be a good film, but heavy on the propaganda.  I felt that FRESH got its message across in a far more even-handed way.  The film invoked a pretty good discussion, and I was happy to see on their website they had some additional educational materials and even a call for recipes.  But you don’t have to be a Jew and the Carrot writer or have chance encounters with the director to see this film.  If you live in the New York area there will be a screening this Tuesday.

Q: What do you do when you have so many home grown zucchini your friends won’t answer the door when you try to share your harvest?

A: Find a car with an open window.

The triumph and the tragedy of the summer growing season is the sheer fecundity of gardens and farms. How to partake of fruits and vegetables at their peak without relying on the same old recipes?

Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers offer a mouth-watering solution with their book, Too Many Tomatoes . . . Squash, Beans, and other Good Things; a Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes.

Locavores in Los Angeles should take note of a class, California Native Seasonings and Condiments offered by the Theodore Payne Foundation from 2 to 3:30 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 29.

Taught by Connie Vadheim, an adjunct professor of biology at California State University at Dominguez Hills, the class will be a discussion of native plants that can be used to flavor and enhance your food.  Recipes will be provided.

The class costs $20 for foundation members and $30 for nonmembers.  It will be held at the Payne Foundation, 10459 Tuxford St., Sun Valley, CA 91352. For information, call (818) 768-1802.

Dan Barber’s recent editorial ”You Say Tomato, I say Agricultural Disaster” in last Sunday’s the New York Times reminds us that even when we try to  opt out of the agribusiness system, we’re still part of the eco-system.  In our efforts in the Northeast to grow our own tomatoes, it looks like we home gardeners may have inadvertently contributed to the tomato blight plaguing our local CSA’s and other small farms.  I had really been looking forward to the tomato harvest, but instead I’m reminded sharply how sharing the harvest especially this year is sharing the risk. How are others dealing with the tomato blight crisis?

An August garden is pregnant with expectations.

The garden I share with my friends, Karen and Kate, has a tomato jungle. The three plants have over run three concentric layers of “cages.” They’re now trying to colonize the carrots.

Unrelenting weeks of sun and heat have battered our 10 by 14 foot plot in Karen’s backyard. LA’s water rationing has taken its toll as well. No matter. The tomatoes seem to ripen from pearl green to bloody red as you watch.

Late last month, Portland Tuv Ha’Aretz hosted its first Jewish Garden bike tour, focusing on gardens in NE Portland. 25 riders, ranging in age from pre-teen to, well, older than pre-teen, met at a local park. The ride was both conceived and led by Tuv Ha’Aretz member Beth Hamon, with help from Joel Metz. Beth is a bike mechanic and co-owner of Citybikes, a co-operatively owned bike shop here. She’s also a serious old-school bike geek and thought our first bike tour should be commemorated in true bike geek fashion, so she made spoke cards for all the participants (everyone thought they were cool, and you can check ours out at the top of this post; extra points if you can figure out what the Hebrew says)

The other day, I met a gardener who used to ply the same community garden as I do. He had recently stopped by the old growing grounds, and noticed that many more of the plots were in use this year than last.

I could think of quite a few explanations for more folks growing their own veggies—from the economy to greater awareness about local foods—but this guy believed we owe the rapid increase primarily to one cause. “It’s Michelle Obama,” he said.

Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought flowers were for vases – not plates.

Oh, sure, I read the articles showing a cheerful chef tossing a nasturtium blossom on a pile of lettuce. Surely a tasteless bid for attention, I sniffed.

A recent web search for organic pest riddance has given me a new taste for ripe nasturtium blossoms, leaves and seed pods.

Gardeners have long loved nasturtiums as companion plants to keep insects off of collards, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, fruit trees and radishes. Nasturtiums themselves are as edible as the vegetables and fruits they protect.

The flavors are not dramatic. Blossoms, tossed whole or torn into salads, taste like mild radishes. Sautéed nasturtium leaves processed into a cold vichyssoise are peppery. Bined or pickled seedpods make a poor gourmet’s capers.

Here is one of my favorite recipes: nasturtium butter.  The petals give the butter a wonderful gold color.  This is excellent on freshly steamed vegetables or fish.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Plastic tables at the farmer’s market are straining under their bounty, colors are popping from veggies of every stripe and new garlic is out of the ground, drying on racks and tarps and hanging in braids in barns around the country, the smell of fresh heads mixing with the with last year’s pungent hay.

The plants in the photo grew from seeds out of a packet that was marked “melons” and printed with a picture of round, yellow-skinned fruit. I consider it a miracle. Not that cucumber plants sprouted forth from melon seeds. Rather, the fact that I have cucumbers in my garden. My several previous attempts to grow cucumbers had resulted in plants that yielded maybe one or two measly, pale fruits before turning brown and shriveling up. However the cucumber seeds got there, the guilty party seems to have considerately provided a fungus-resistant variety. And they’re actually pretty tasty for cucumbers, which, lets face it, are generally more crunchy than flavorful.

Americans waste more than more than 100 billion pounds of food every year, at every stage of production from field to store to plate. That number doesn’t include the produce thrown out or left to rot by the millions of home or community gardeners. Wouldn’t it be great if all those leftover tomatoes and cucumbers in your backyard could be linked with local food pantries and shelters?

Gary Oppenheimer had just that inspiration. He’s the founder of Ample Harvest, a project aiming to help home gardeners donate their unwanted produce to food pantries. Gary is a master gardener and the head of the West Milford Community Garden. I spoke with him about Ample Harvest and how home gardeners can make a difference.

I met someone special at Purim this past year.  It wasn’t love at first sight, not at all (after all, I was wearing a mask when we met). And it took some persistent and clever wooing on his part, but I am now very smitten.

It’s been a few months now, but my heart still races whenever I see him.  I get this big goofy grin on my face when I am with him.  He makes me want to be a better person.  In the past I’ve described myself as a conscientious omnivore, but he really challenges me (in good ways) to think about my food choices.   Needless to say things were going quite well.   We had gotten to the point in our relationship where he offered me some space in his apartment to keep some of my personal items, like a toothbrush and some clothes, stuff like that.