Oxbow Workshop Featured on Crosscut.com!
Can Farms Save Puget Sound Shellfish?
Green Acre Radio: An unusual new program is using upriver sustainability measures to improve conditions for salmon and shellfish downstream.
IN THE fertile Snoqualmie Valley, east of Redmond and thirty minutes from downtown Seattle, a winter treat is almost ready for market. Organic farmer Luke Woodward with Oxbow Farm, snaps off a shoot from a crown of open, pollinated broccoli. It’s the most amazing tasting broccoli you’ll ever eat in your life. You show up at market in March or late February with all this broccoli that’s purple and nobody has anything and people just go crazy, he says.
It’s been a good year for winter crops at Oxbow, which supplies organic food to restaurants, farmers markets and CSAs. That’s not always the case. There were no one-hundred-year floods to contend with this year, a phenomenon that has become common on an annual basis, and no heavy rains followed by a freeze.
Today Oxbow Farm is hosting a tour, not for tourists, but for other farmers. Long a model of ecological farm practices that nourish the land and improve habitat for fish and wildlife, the farm is the perfect backdrop for a clever new farm and forest sustainability program: Where Cows Meet Clams. … to read the full story click here.