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Don’t you just love this time of year when the local growers present their goods at the Farmer’s Market? Still it can be a hassle to plan your week around the Market schedule and buy gas for an extra outing.

Well, what if the Farmer’s Market came to you? What if, for a subscription fee, luscious, tasty organic veggies showed up on your doorstep once a week? What if this went on for the whole growing season? Would that be a deal, or what? Some friends of our, Tim and Diane Rebman, have come up with just such a fantastic deal! To top it all off, they’ll send you weekly e-mail updates about what’s happening in the garden interspersed with interesting facts about the vegetables you’ll be eating that week, and about gardening, organics, and life in general, all in Tim’s inimitable style.

To sign up for veggie delivery, or their newsletter, or just to find out more, drop them a line: timothyrebman at earthlink dot net (you’ll have to use the standard @ and period when you format the address - writing it like that is supposed to make it a trifle harder for evil spam robots to snatch the address from this post).

Have you joined the growing club of coffee connoisseurs? Joe Farthing, local owner and roaster of J&S Coffee, discussed “The New Connoisseurship: Specialty Coffee and Tea Industries in the 21st Century” in our Public House lecture series recently (what is it?). You can watch a video of his talk here.

Caleb Stegall, editor of The New Pantagruel, gave a talk in our Culinary Culture series on “Culinary Politics: Prairie Uprisings and Agricultural Revolts in Kansas History”. This fascinating presentation centered around the farm economy of the 1890s in Kansas and might challenge us to rethink our modern political labels of “conservative” and “liberal”. The talk was videotaped and is available now to view online.

On Monday, October 2, the weekly Public House “Culinary Culture Lecture Series” featured Tom Wheat, director, farmer, importer, and roaster for Nueva Mission, Inc. in a talk entitled Thinking Locally in a Supranational Industry: Venezuela Biointesive Coffee Farm Communities and the American Consumer. Nueva Mission is a non-for-profit organization which links the people of the Caripe region in Venezuela with the community of Lawrence, KS, by growing, producing, importing, and roasting Venezuela coffee for the Lawrence market while using organic, sustainable, and community-focused methods. Wheat’s talk focused on the sharp distinctions between “conventional” farming techniques and “sustainable” farming techniques, and the impact each technique has on rural coffee-growing communities.

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This fall, Signs of Life in downtown Lawrence is offering a new series in its free Public House weekly community forum entitled, Culinary Culture: Pursuing Excellence and Sustainability from Farm to Plate. Each Monday night at 7:30 pm starting September 11, the series will feature one of our community’s foremost authorities on issues surrounding our pursuit and appreciation for local culinary culture and agriculture. Below is a description of the series:

“Excellence is a God-given virtue of a mature, sustainable, and fruitful culture, and should be pursued in all areas of life. This especially includes humankind’s relationship to the earth and its fruit. The pursuit of excellence has implications for the way we prepare our food and the way we eat, especially in relation to the intimate connection between sustainable, local agriculture and healthy, quality culinary culture. In order to explore these ideas in the context of our community, this fall, Signs of Life is offering a free, weekly lecture series that showcases some of our community’s foremost authorities on excellence in culinary culture.”

Speakers and topics will include:

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