“Grower” or “Kitchen Gardener”? Doesn’t Matter – You Can Still Qualify to use the Eye-Catching Alaska Grown Logo.

You know how it goes: one link leads to another. So link by link, this morning I landed at a blog called Money Changes Things and a post by BPT titled : The Book of the Year: The Earth Knows My Name.

I haven’t read the book but I might add it to my pile. The full name of the book is The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans. The author is Patricia Klindienst. You can read a collection of reviews here. But be sure to order it through your local bookseller, The Babbling Book (766-3356).

What caught my attention was BPT's attempt to name a special kind of grower - the kind of grower who I think lives in Haines and just might sell a thing or two at the Haines Farmers Market:

English lacks a word for people who grow their own food while working a day job… . “Gardener” connotes flowers more than edibles; “farmer” and “grower” suggest full time professionals, and “subsistence farmer” conjures up hardscrabble sharecropping. Our closest term is kitchen or cottage gardeners.

I am trying to get my toes wet as a professional grower, but really, I am a kitchen gardener. So when Amy Pettit, State of Alaska , DNR, Division of Agriculture, Alaska Grown program, called me this morning, we talked about business licenses. “Do all Alaska Grown users have to have business licenses?” I asked.

I didn’t know the term at the time, but I could have asked if kitchen or cottage gardeners who occasionally offer Alaska grown produce for sale at the Haines Farmers Market have to have business licenses. According to Amy, the Alaska Grown program will “work” with you even if you don’t have a business license. I think it would be pretty neat to see a lot of vendors sporting Alaska Grown logos at the Haines Farmers Market this season. It’s easy. Follow this link. Leave the business license line blank. Then snail mail or email the application: amy.pettit@alaska.gov or kirk.brown@alaska.gov. If you want some local help, give me a call and we can do it together. If you come over, we can look at my introductory Alaska Grown package that is being snail mailed to me today.