Spring is around the bend in Western Washington, which means it’s time to plan your garden. Growing your own food is fun and rewarding, and it can help offset the rising cost of food (and everything else). If you haven’t set foot in your garden yet, you may have some catching up to do.  Here’s a list of things to do around the garden in March:

Clear out any winter weeds that grew in while you weren’t watching.

Till your soil only if it’s dry enough (if it crumbles in your hand into smaller pieces it’s ready, but if it compacts and stays in large clumps – wait until it’s a little drier

After tilling your soil, fertilize your garden and mix in compost. Try a bag of fertilizer with 15-10-10 or a 6-10-7 (percentages of nitrogen-phosphate-potash) at around a pint per 30 square feet. Just get whatever fertilizer is inexpensive (and non-synthetic). For your compost, use last years grass clipping and food scraps – or buy a bag.

Prune and feed your roses.

If you haven’t started cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower indoors – start them now with a fluorescent lamp. Also start tomatoes, pepper and eggplant indoors under lamps.

Outside, sow beets, chard, lettuce, onions, peas, potatoes, radishes, spinach and turnips.

This is a lot of work, and there’s much more to do – so plan ahead and break it up into sessions. If possible, get friends and family involved in your garden, it’s less work and more fun. Now get out there and see what grows!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I would argue that a good bar of chocolate is worth a thousand love letters. On the 14th of this month, many will substitute writing sweet notes with giving sweet treats. But which chocolate to choose? And why?

Here's the low down on chocolate, and how you can help save the world (or parts of it at least) by the chocolates you choose. 

Choose shade-grown and give your sweetheart a rainforest 

The great flavor of chocolate comes from the beans of cacao plants (click here for more background from our chocolate page). More than two thirds of the world's cacao beans are grown in western Africa, with the majority of the rest coming from Indonesia and the northern countries of South America. In these tropical regions, the cacao plants have historically grown in the shade of the rainforest canopy. But when chocolate production grew to global proportions, so did the cultivation of the cacao plants. In order to supply the demand, the rainforests, which have the greatest biological diversity of plants and wildlife, were replaced with monoculture landscapes solely planted with cacao plants.

Not all chocolate is sourced from these plantations, in fact many chocolates are certified "shade-grown" - which is the sweetest gift you could give your sweetheart (a safe and protected rainforest). Buy shade-grown chocolate and support the movement for sustainable chocolate production.

Please care about fair

Another important chocolate attribute is how it's beans were traded. Many workers in the cacao growing industry are not treated fairly and do not make livable wages. In an effort to improve the working conditions and wages of those in the cacao industry, we support and promote chocolate producers that are third-party certified as "fair trade" - your chocolate dollars will go to improving the conditions and wages of the great people who make great chocolate possible.

Here are a few of our favorite chocolate makers to look out for...

Dagoba Organic Chocolates

Endangered Species Chocolate

Scharffen Berger Chocolates

The forecast is calling for a very bike-friendly day tomorrow. It's time to lube the chain, pump up the tires and get your bike ready for cycling season. May is bike month and tomorrow is the big day for biking to work, school or wherever it is you're going.

Check out The Mount Baker Bike Club Web site for more information on the locations of celebration stations and goings on around Whatcom County.

Also check out Everybody Bike Web site.

Have fun out there and be safe. Remember to wear a helmet and obey traffic laws and signals when riding in the street.

Ingredients

• 1 cup dried chickpeas or 16 oz. can of chickpeas or garbanzo beans.
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 3 tablespoons of fresh parsley, chopped
• 1 teaspoon coriander
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 2 tablespoons flour
• Salt
• Pepper
• Oil for frying

Today is Earth Day. For some people, that's everyday. For others, that's ridiculous. But if there's one day to whisper to a patch of dirt and say, "thanks for raspberries," or yell out to a tall Douglas Fir, "thanks for oxygen!" - Today is that day.

Earth day is a day of service. It’s an opportunity to teach and learn – and a chance for us to identify problems that face our communities and work together to find lasting solutions.

If you want to do something, but you’re still wondering what that should be – the first step is to get outside. Most of the stewardship activities of Earth Day take place outdoors, such as picking up trash, joining a work party to remove non-native vegetation, planting trees or volunteering at an event.

While you’re outside, consider how the natural environment supports your life – providing food, shelter and all of the resources needed to live out your daily life. Our environment sustains us, and we simply can’t live without it. Earth Day represents the recognition of this relationship between people and their environment – and the need to give back to the Earth in return for providing our sustenance.  

To learn more about what you can do, visit:

Local Earth Day Events (Western Washington) – Department of Ecology

Ingredients (serves 6)

• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 3 cups cooked white rice
• 2 cups cooked black beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 2-3 tablespoons vegetarian worcestershire sauce (regular can be used as well)
• salt & freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• fresh cilantro (optional)
  sliced green onion (optional)

More important than how often you eat organic is which types of organic produce you choose to eat. The Environmental Working Group recently released a shopper’s guide to minimizing exposure to pesticides from produce. The guide ranks the pesticide contamination levels of 47 popular fruits and vegetables based on an analysis of 87,000 tests for pesticides on these foods, conducted from 2000 to 2007 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.

The ranking was based on composite scores of the following six measures:
    * Percent of the samples tested with detectable pesticides
    * Percent of the samples with two or more pesticides
    * Average number of pesticides found on a sample
    * Average amount (level in parts per million) of all pesticides found
    * Maximum number of pesticides found on a single sample
    * Number of pesticides found on the commodity in total

The group created two lists based on the findings of each produce item’s score. The first list contains the top 12 fruits and vegetables with the highest levels of contamination – which they recommend as the most important to buy organically grown. The second list shows which out of the 47 items consistently have the lowest concentrations of pesticides. These items are assumed to be safer to eat when organic is not an option.

Every one of our produce departments is a state certified produce handler, accredited by the Washington State Department of Agriculture and third-party audited. We offer a wide selection of organically grown produce. Meanwhile, we understand that eating organically grown produce is not always practical. For the times when it’s not an option, you can minimize your exposure risk by choosing items with lower contamination rates and washing your produce thoroughly before consumption.

I don't follow soup recipes. They're more of a source for inspiration, serving as an amendable plan or a general aim. Although doing this has lead me to cook a few irreversibly damaged soups, I still find that the most enjoyable soup-making style is to simply build the flavor one ingredient at a time without a recipe (which is why you won’t hear me talking too much about exact quantities - I just eyeball everything!).

Last night, I had a plan to make a Thai-curry style soup. I knew I wanted it to be somewhere between a red curry with vegetables and a Tom-Kah style soup (my favorite). Each have complex flavors, and they take a while to build - but taking it one step at a time makes it very easy.

First I chopped a yellow onion and threw it into an oversized pot that I had heated up with a few ounces of butter. I let the onions brown while I prepped my veggies, potatoes and mushrooms. Then I poured in a large container of chicken broth, two cans of coconut milk, a can of fish stock and a few cups of water. I brought that to a boil and added chopped carrots and Yukon Gold potatoes. Then I added four cloves of garlic (chopped), a few ounces of red curry paste, and palm full of grated ginger. Things started smelling more soup-like at this point, but the flavor was still in the early stages of development.

Ginger in soup seems lonely to me without lime, so I zested two and squeezed the juice in with the zest. To balance out the citrus and ginger, I added brown sugar. It tasted a little oversweetened at first, but after adding soy sauce and some coarsely ground pepper, the broth was taking on a well-rounded flavor and aroma. Overall, it was still a little thin, so I added a few cups of quinoa to absorb some water and give it a thicker body - and a boost of protein.

Next I added chopped parsnips and sweet potatoes - ingredients uncommon to this type of soup, but I was feeling brave (and hungry). Then I tossed in julienned bell peppers and sliced shitakes. Five more minutes simmering and I finished it off with a handful of baby spinach leaves and some chopped cilantro.

In the end, the flavor had become rich and savory with a warming spice from the red curry. The sweet potatoes and parsnips turned out to be a risk worth taking. It was a successful new version to a comfort soup I can’t get enough of. If only all of my experimental soups could end on such a good note.

Research and development in genetic modification of plants and animals has stirred up great controversy around the world. Proponents of having genetically modified organisms in our food supply chain claim that advantages achieved are safe and could end the many hunger crises around the world. Critics, on the other hand, believe GMOs could lead to human health and ecological disasters of great proportions.

There is a diverse range in which scientists are modifying organisms, from pesticide, drought and frost-resistant fruits and vegetables to changing animal growth rates and nutrient content. No GMO animals are permitted by the USDA to be sold as food in the U.S. today, however, significant percentages of genetically modified food grains are being consumed daily - most often unlabeled and consumed unknowingly.

According to the Center for Food Safety, "The haphazard and negligent agency regulation of biotechnology has been a disaster for consumers and the environment. Unsuspecting consumers by the tens of millions are being allowed to purchase and consume unlabeled genetically engineered foods, despite a finding by FDA scientists that these foods could pose serious risks."

At The Markets, we value full disclosure of labeling information and want to make sure that customer health and safety is our first priority. We are actively researching what we can do, as a retailer, to urge more responsible government oversight on this issue. Furthermore, we want to know how you, as our valued customer, feel about the safety of having genetically modified foods in our food supply.