To get the best you need to be there early as this is a popular venue for people of all ages.

Farmers’ markets have proliferated in recent years from the first one in Bath, UK established in September 1997 in response to discussions about the Local Agenda 21 Commission. There are now over 500 in the UK.

Only a mile from Chicago’s downtown skyscrapers, the Lincoln Park market stalls are full of a wide range of produce and provide a marvellous contrast of colours.

Sustainability and environmental issues are key concerns for producers and many of the farms have full organic credentials or are certified green.

Farmers’ markets are not-for-profit bodies and have been increasingly popular in the US. They are overseen by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In the last seven years they have increased from 1755 to 7175, making a 17% increase in the last year alone.

But this is not big business like the average 450 acre farms in the prairies of Illinois and Iowa, where millions of tons of field corn (or maize) are grown every year for home beef production, for the rapidly expanding Chinese market and for ethanol production.

Typically farmers’ markets are made up of small producers with orchards or perhaps a 7 acre garden farm – with intense cultivation of tomatoes, peppers, onions, carrots, fruits etc – or others breeding cattle and pigs with specialist production of smoked meats. Most farms are under 50 acres and have to be within a defined radius; in Chicago’s case this is 300 miles, though for other markets it is a lot less.

A campaign of the market at present is to encourage shoppers to pledge to be ‘locavores‘, only buying and eating produce from within a defined local area.

Often the vegetable producers will be supported by CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) schemes where members of the local community guarantee to take a box of vegetables every week during the growing season. While people on benefits with food vouchers can shop here, prices of the produce are on the high side and tend to attract shoppers with more disposable income, higher qualifications and an interest in environmental issues.

The same however does not apply to the farmers’ markets in rural areas where jobs are limited and wages low and unemployment, well over the national rate of 9%, is hitting communities hard.

A New York Times article “Vegetable gardens are booming in a fallow economy” (9th September 2011) describes the situation in East Kentucky in the Appalachian foothills.

Here rural residents are turning over their ground and selling the surplus from their gardens at low cost to the elderly and unemployed, who look to squeeze their budgets to make ends meet.

As Tim Woods, Professor of Agricultural Economy at Kentucky University puts it: “You won’t see certified organic products or fancy marketing here. It’s a very different world.” But the growth is similar with a doubling of markets there since 2004.

Now only hours later I have just opened my iPad to read the depressing front page story in today’s Guardian that unpublished data produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicates that global carbon emissions increased last year by 5.5% from 29 gigatonnes of CO2 to 30.6 Gt. And this despite a worldwide recession of great severity.

This will mean, according to the IEA chief economist, that the chances of keeping average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees celcius are now wishful thinking and unachievable. Above that we have to anticipate large scale climate change with massive effects on lands and populations across the globe. 

Sadly it is unlikely that this news will stir up sufficient concern for political  leaders to plan and agree actions to tackle global warming effectively.

This includes a searchable database. You can type in your postcode and find out more about local practice and the policies of your local authority for the recycling of different kinds of materials. This is useful because these are changing as new techniques of sorting enable more to be collected and saved.

Allerdale local authority had managed in 2009 to achieve a recycling rate of 45%, but last year the figure dropped to 44%. When I asked Stephanie Fleming, Allerdale’s recycling officer about this, she replied “the weather’s got to take the blame here”. 

With so much flooding in November, the Council was overwhelmed with the sheer task of getting areas cleared and houses habitable. Water was covering huge areas and recycling for a while had had to take second place. Hard to argue about that!

But there is a bigger question here we need to ask. The EU has set a 50% target by 2020 for household recycling for the UK as a whole, but both Scotland and Wales have set their own higher targets of 70% for 2025. With no targets set for English authorities does this mean, say Friends of the Earth that we’ll shelter under the skirts of the Scots and the Welsh and lag behind? 

We know this Government is averse to the ‘nanny state’, but let’s see a bit more forceful direction on this front! Surely we need this if we’re going to create a green economy, which Ministers tell us they want.

Two other good Government websites on green issues are worth looking at. A more technical waste data flow site, (http://www.wastedataflow.org/) provides additional information about waste management across the country.  You need to register to get access to the data.

The second is for the Department of Energy and Climate Control  (http://www. decc.gov.uk/). This includes information about the Government’s Green Deal programme, with more details due out soon.

A new year’s resolution got us finally to move! And when the roof was stripped the rotten soffits and some defective joists proved how right we were. 

It’s been interesting to pull back the curtain of time to get a glimpse of how the house was built over 125 years ago and to see how roofing techniques while modified, still retain much of the traditional practice. Perhaps the biggest difference comes with the weather and wind proofing. 

The old roof was sealed throughout by parging. This is a method of coating the batons and the undersides of the tiles with parget – a mortar of lime and horsehair. Nowadays this has been replaced with a much simpler and quicker method, where a breathable membrane sheet is secured under the batons and the slates are nailed to the batons.       

Fortunately the original Borrowdale slates (about 10 mm thick) were strong and of good quality, as Frank the roofer had predicted, and the majority could be resized and reused without breakage. In this way the vernacular style of a graduated roof can be retained with the largest slates being used at the bottom and the smallest (and shortest) ones covering the top rows of the roof. Replacement ones are primarily for the bottom rows.

Since modern slates are almost invariably thinner (to reduce costs), second hand Borrowdale slates, suitable for environmentally sensitive areas and similar to the ones we have, are hard to come by and now sell at a premium price of £3,000 a ton.

The photos below show the back roof ready for the slates, the roofers working up the rows from the bottom, the look of the completed roof after a chimney has been removed and finally the filled lorry after the scaffolders have spent a morning dangling acrobatically from poles as they dismantled the scaffold and boards. It’s been fascinating to walk all round the house at roof level to see the work, but now we’re glad to be back to normal.

Both areas are equidistant from their nearest large cities, Manchester and New York and provide second home and weekend destinations for many from these conurbations. They both are a mixture of wild mountain terrain and populated areas, unlike the normal US National parks, which are entirely wilderness. Houses are often tucked away in the woods (See photo).

Established initially in 1885 by New York State, the Catskill Mountain Park (CMP) has now a Forest Preserve (FP) of 450 square miles, of which the NY State owns 41%. With an overall size of 1,095 square miles and population of about 50,000, it is a little larger than the Lake District National Park (LDNP), with its 885 square miles and population of 42,000.

A NY State resolution of 1894 stated that the FP had to be kept as wild forest lands and 400 black bears now live in the area as well as bobcats, coyote and rare birds. But across the park, farming is important – as it is in the LDNP – with apple and pear orchards covering large areas of the Ulster County section of the park.

Land and property is cheaper in the Catskills than in the LDNP, where strict planning regulations make it difficult to build housing outside of existing settlements and inhibit unsuitable development. One consequence of this is that the Catskills has attracted artists, idealists and others who are seeking simpler living and an alternative lifestyle; the memory of the 1969 legendary Woodstock Festival (in the centre of the Park) attended by ½ million people has lived on.

Major controversy at present in the CMP surrounds the practice of ‘fracking’, a process which involves pumping millions of gallons of water with chemicals into the ground to fracture the rock and extract oil from the ground. The worry is that the chemicals will contaminate the water table and endanger water supplies.

The Catskill Mountains are only two hours’ driving from New York and well worth a visit. If you are wanting walking and mountains, there’s plenty of hiking on offer – woodlands, trails, lakes and mountains. Slide Mountain is the highest (4,180 feet) with 34 others over 3,500 feet and a total of 98 peaks over 3,000 feet. It makes the Lake District seem quite modest with only Scafell, Scafell Pike, Helvellyn and Skiddaw over 3,000 feet. Despite this, it’s not as popular an area as the LDNP receiving only half a million visitors a year compared with the Lake District’s 8½ million!

Are we doing enough though to create that inclusive world that recognises the needs of all, rich and poor alike? Recently retired UN climate negotiator Yvo de Boer thinks not. In an interview (24 November 2010) with the Guardian’s John Vidal, he argues that slow progress has been made with climate change negotiations because developing countries are suspicious that rich countries use the issue as a way of keeping them poor and are not sufficiently committed to green growth economies.

The follow-up international conference on climate change is to be held in Cancún, Mexico next week and already there’s a mood that the high hopes of last December’s Copenhagen conference have to be replaced with more modest objectives if anything is to be achieved.

In The Economist’s lead article this week “How to live with climate change”, there is the sobering conclusion that climate change ” . . . remains the craziest experiment mankind has ever conducted. Maybe in the long run it will be brought under control. For the foreseeable future, though . . . the human race must live with the problem as best it can.”  

A New York Times article (18th February 2010) reported on the disappointment of many that progress in the US on green issues was too slow and concessions too numerous. But let’s acknowledge at the outset that some key developments have taken place. The Christian Science Monitor (17th April 2010) points to a number of significant moves taken at a federal level. These include:

● Formal recognition of the dangers to health from greenhouse gases, which has paved the way for regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency.
● Setting of a new clean car standard, which will promote future efficiency and innovation in the industry and bring substantial reductions in emissions
● Commitment of $90 billion Recovery Act monies to accelerate adoption of renewable energy sources – like the 30,000 acre solar energy scheme in San Joaquin Valley, California – and support high speed train developments.

Critically there still remains the task of persuading Congress to agree reduction targets and penalties – as there are in the UK – to ensure compliance. However as with the Health Bill changes, Obama is by no means assured of success and for similar reasons.

There are powerful US interests, willing to fund those opposed to the thrust of Obama’s environmental policies, even though they have been watered down to win wider support. The best current example is the Proposition 23 (P-23) campaign in California. Here Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has steered through the legislature a commitment by 2020 to reduce CO2 emissions to the levels of 1990. This target is part of Assembly Bill 32 (AB32) of the Global Warming Solutions Act, but is opposed by a variety of oil and other interests.

The P-23 campaign seeks to reverse the AB32 reductions commitment until unemployment levels in the State, now above 12%, have dropped below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters, a level only seen three times in the last three decades.

This month two brothers, David and Charles Koch, have come forward with a $1 million contribution to the P-23 campaign. A small step maybe but typical of the way that they and others with oil, energy and refining interests seek to influence public attitudes about climate change. Their Koch Industries conglomerate is the second largest privately owned company in the US with a $98 billion annual turnover; and has provided over $50 million to climate opposition groups.

A report in Grist (17 August 2010), a Seattle based NGO, describes this as a battle between clean new technology and old fossil fuel thinking and points to growing support from green entrepreneurs for California’s landmark global warming initiative.

With recognition from amongst the US military that existing global energy supplies have now reached a peak (Guardian report, 11th April 2010 ), – and will decline – the California AB32 programme could be seen by the P-23 campaigners as an initiative for making up the likely deficit in traditional fuel supplies, but the chances of this in a highly polarized debate are minimal.

In an excellent article in Global Dashboard (18th June 2010) Alex Evans argues that there are costs, inconvenience and limits involved in a transition to something positive on climate and that there will be clear (and noisier) losers. He makes this interesting point. “What will open the political space for comprehensive solutions – alas – will be impacts: impacts that are tough enough to frighten people badly, but not so bad as to overshoot irreversible tipping points.”

If he’s right, let’s hope that we can get there quickly enough.

Cars remain the travel method of choice for most in the US, so we train riders are not typical. The average US citizen takes only 1.3 trips by train a year compared with the 30 taken in the UK. But despite this it’s starting to look like the US is taking issues about congestion, travel modes and CO2 emissions more seriously. Several states like California are developing specific high speed rail policies.

President Obama kicked off the issue in January with a $8 billion plan under the Recovery Act, offering support to schemes giving priority to upgrading existing rail routes. The thinking is that high speed trains mostly on the East and West coast would provide an incentive for more travellers on shorter journeys to leave their cars behind in the garage.

But trans-continental rail travel is a different ball game. It’s a journey of 2400 miles from New York on the east coast to Seattle. Opening up the west took place in three stages. First came the expeditions of Lewis and Clark in 1804-06, followed by the journeying across the plains by the settlers with their horses and wagons. The steam trains arrived in the 1850s and by 1869 the first transcontinental line had been completed. The Great Northern railway finally reached Seattle in 1893.

The railroads created over 100 years ago are still owned by private companies, which concentrate on moving 40% of the nation’s freight slowly around the continent on huge long trains. There’s an inherent conflict here with the needs of high speed passenger trains, which need dedicated lines for a faster service and defined journey times. Providing such high speed routes in Europe and Japan has been a long term investment costing millions of dollars, which are now in the post global financial crisis not available in the US or anywhere else.

This is an area to watch over the next five years and could not only help to reduce US carbon emissions but also provide thousands of jobs for Americans to replace those lost in the motor industry, as it goes into long term decline. In the meantime we’re looking to try out the train next year from Chicago to Seattle.

It may sound like a Gardeners’ Question Time but it was a real question – until today when I met up with the Brookmans who have given me a new lead. “Why not try a tepee of bamboo sticks and grow your green beans up them?”, said Ali. It looks a great solution to judge from the photo opposite of Anna as she picks some beans for our Sunday lunch.

Today’s blog post represents a bit of a milestone – it’s the 50th entry since we started! We’ve not quite met the deadline we set of a posting every week, but we haven’t been too far short.

Like everyone else in the blogosphere we’d like people to read our posts, whether or not they want to stay at The Larches or visit the Belvedere. We like feedback as it helps us respond and find out what people are interested in.

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