Our weekly contributor Sarah DeGiorgis emailed me earlier this week to let me know she's on vacation and away from the garden but that she could still put a short post up. What a trooper! I told her to enjoy the week off and that we're looking forward to seeing how her plants do without her around during one of the hottest weeks of the year. (Hope she has someone to water them!)

I agreed to sub in for the week and share some photos of my own adventure in urban backyard gardening. Alison and I have a set-up that is similar to Sarah's with:

A raised bed that's about 3 feet long, 10 feet wide and 18-20 inches deep...

...a wooden box we use for herbs...

...several containers with flowers, herbs or vegetables...

....four Wally Pockets that we invested in to dress up the otherwise blank cinder block wall that separates our neighbor's yard from ours...

...three rectangular containers with trellises for climbing plants, and...

...my little lavender plant in its own little pot.

Some other time I will tell the story of this year's garden (and include pictures) but to set that up, I'll share the abject failure that was Garden 2010.

2011 is our second year doing a garden. The first two summers we were in our house we spent most of the time painting the interior of the house and paid little attention to the outside. Last summer, after painstakingly removing from the bed a huge butterfly bush, a bunch of lamb's ear, some kind of evergreen shrub and more weeds than I would have thought possible, we dug out about 2 feet of dirt and discarded it by taking multiple trips to return the soil to the great outdoors in Fairmount Park. Don't worry... there wasn't any trash in the soil or anything particularly bad. We just did this because of all the things we had read about potential chemicals or other nasty stuff that could be lurking and since we wanted to grow food, figured we'd start from as clean and fertile a base as possible.

In that dirt's place we put a mixture of organic garden soil and compost that we got (for free) from the city's recycling center near Belmont Plateau (that was an interesting trip... a Subaru with ten plastic-lined cardboard boxes early one weekday morning).

Three by ten may not look big but when you need to fill it with about 24 inches of stuff, well... that's a lot of stuff. Our friend Craig helped us out and soon we had a beautiful, pristine bed of dirt and five, pretty ceramic containers. All that was needed was to plant. We got all of our plants from Greensgrow in Fishtown. Our haul included three different tomato varieties, an eggplant, two zucchini, two yellow squash, kale, Swiss chard, collard greens, a green pepper, a cucumber, basil, mint, sage, parsley and oregano. For decoration we planted a trumpet vine some vinca vine, a couple clematis and a susie mix in troughs that we stuck trellises in and put up against the bright white stucco wall of our neighbor's house. We did our planting in mid-May and sat back to wait for our bounty of tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and the rest.

Fast forward 3 months to the end of summer 2010 and we had learned a few lessons:

1. Too much water isn't a good thing. Early rain and cool weather teamed up to kill the oregano that we had in a small plant. I pruned back the dead stuff a couple times and it rebounded but finally gave up.

2. Too little water is a terrible thing. In the beginning I was Mr. Enthusiastic. I was out there at 6:30 every morning with the hose, dutifully watering around the base of all my plants and being careful not to get too much water on the leaves where the drops would turn into tiny magnifying glasses that burn holes through them. When the temperatures soared and the rains stopped altogether in mid-July through August, not only did my schedule make it tough for me to get out there every morning but the stuff was completely dry from the afternoon sun - especially in the containers. End result: Container-held kale and Swiss chard didn't die but didn't really produce. Container-held Green peppers that did grow (about 4 of them) were the size of golf balls, we got two or three eggplant before that plant died.

And tomatoes, whose plants grew like crazy in the beginning of summer in our new, rich soil, would stop growing until watered and then grow so fast after being watered that they split their skins.

Most of the tomatoes were good for nothing more than frying. The clematis went about three feet up the trellises and died. The trumpet vine did okay but also dried out. Too little water also stresses herbs like basil and mint which causes them to "bolt" or flower since they think their days are numbered and they have to hurry up and reproduce. Once basil bolts it changes the flavor of the leaves so that they are bitter (but they smell great).

3. Bad Bugs suck. There are good bugs - lacewings, lady beetles, bees, butterflies - but we still haven't really figured out how to attract a lot of those (though it's better this year). What we were able to attract last year were big black flies that would land on our cucumber and squash leaves in swarms and just sit there until you shook the plant causing them to rise up like a cloud and buzz around for a while before settling back down. I read somewhere that they were sucking the moisture out of the plant. They were also leaving disgusting droppings on the leaves (and tomatoes). The black flies basically made us not want to be back there. Fly paper caught a few but only made more of a mess and didn't stop the problem.

We also had tiny, tiny white flies that landed on the leafy greens - the kale and chard and collards - and feasted.

The stress of the dry weather rendered the plants less able to fight off these invaders. At the end of the summer, really gross green worms started appearing on the tomatoes and green caterpillars with yellow spots would appear daily on the parsley (which otherwise was growing pretty well). The green worms had white things on them that I thought were part of them but which I learned were the eggs of a certain parasitic wasp that would eventually hatch and burrow into the worms, eating them from the inside while not being a threat to the plants. Considering what the worms and other bugs were doing to my garden, that process was particularly satisfying. Saw a few slugs but last summer was so hot and dry that even they seemed to retreat to moister, cooler places. Eventually we found out about all-natural, plant-based insecticidal oils and soaps which when diluted in water and misted on leaves every couple weeks would kill the white flies and repel the black ones. By then it was too late. The infestation had taken hold. I basically gave up on the kale and chard. Which leads me to lesson four.

4. Kale and chard are bad asses. I may have given up on them but they didn't give up on themselves. Toward the end of summer I stopped watering them and decided to let them go in peace. To my surprise (again... never gardened before) once the temperatures dropped in the fall and the rains came back, so did the kale and chard.

In fact, they kept on going through November and December even as temperatures dropped into the 30s and 40s. The only thing that finally did them in was 20 inches of snow (which nearly did me in too). I had just planted them at the wrong time. Kale and chard like cool weather so should be planted really early in the spring or very late in the summer, especially if you're planting seeds and need two weeks for them to turn into plants. The kale I planted from seed in April this year has already yielded three or four huge bunches that Alison estimated were worth a total of about $60 if purchased at Greensgrow (all for a five-dollar pack of seeds). The chard I planted late but am expecting it to bide its time like last year before taking off in the fall.

5. Squash plants are out of control. On the front row of the bed we planted two zucchini and two yellow squash plants. Behind them were the tomato plants and the cucumber plant. The squash plants quickly spread out with their huge leaves and giant fruit, making it difficult to reach the plants behind them.

They made a mini jungle that I'm sure was populated by mini monkeys, mini pythons and at least one mini lion (judging from the feline droppings that I occasionally found). The lesson was... fewer squash or zucchini plants.

The ones we had yielded a ton of fruit, some as large as bowling pins.

(Other lesson... don't let them grow that large on the plant. They turn woody.) So the yield was great but at the expense of being able to tend to the rest of the bed. I'm probably making a different mistake with the zucchini this year but I'll talk about that in a later post.

6. Don't let those herbs bolt. See above. You can trick the basil into not turning bitter by clipping off the first signs of flowers. Once the plant starts directing its photosynthetic energy towards the flowers, the flavor of the leaves suffers. Snip those flowers right off.

7. Apparently, letting your tomato plants grow like wild isn't good either. At first we were thrilled with out fast and tall and bushy the tomato plants got. You can see them in the photo of the whole bed above. Surely these would yield dozens and dozens of sweet, juicy, delicious fruit. Well, you already read what happens when you water sporadically. We also learned that if you let the plants grow and grow, they feel secure that they will live long happy lives and not feel pressure to make new plants. In other words - less fruit. A least a few different people told us that you should prune the tomato plants and not let them get more than three or four feet high. I'm still not sold on it. I suspect our lack of pollinating insects had something to do with the low yield. But I'm trying it this year anyway. More to follow on how that works. So 2010 tomato plants - nice big plants, very few crappy split-skin tomatoes.

By summer's end I had grown so frustrated that I couldn't wait to uproot many of the plants and send them off to the compost heap. All I wanted was to look out on the pristine 3x10 bed whose rich, black soil would hold the promise of future harvests rather than the stench of a failed season.

I left a few tomato plants in place to die and Alison pulled out the now spent zucchini, eggplant, squash and cucumber plants.

We emptied the small pots that held many of the herbs and the larger pot that contained the mint (which put up a good fight for most of the summer but finally could live with my watering schedule). As I said, I left the chard and kale, mostly because I couldn't be bothered to lift the heavy ceramic containers they lived in. And the clematis seemed so pathetic that I just cut the dead brown strands away from the trellis and didn't bother with the rest of it.

The approach of fall and winter gave me time to step back from the whole experience and think about what I needed to do differently for 2011. In my next post - far shorter, I promise - I'll share what I did in during the winter months. Baseball general managers make trades and sign free agents to make their teams stronger. Gardeners (which I don't consider myself to be yet) also have their off-season acquisitions.

Sarah will be back next week, hopefully with her plants still in tact.

P.S. After growing and dying and growing and dying and then completely disappearing, guess what came back by October of last year:

Pretty tough stuff.

On which committee do you serve?

I am a member of the Outreach committee and most recently became part of the Board of Directors.

What do you do for a living?

I work in training and leadership development for a corporation in Center City.  I specifically work in onboarding, making sure that new hires have the tools, resources, and training they need to be successful in their new roles with the company.

How did you get involved with the food co-op?

My neighbor and partner-in-crime, Marsha Shiflet, knocked on my door and told me about the start up of a co-op in April 2010. I've been involved ever since.

Why do you want a food co-op in South Philly?

I love food! Buying it, cooking it, and eating it. Where I buy my food and what I eat is very important to me. I can't wait until I have a store in my neighborhood that I can have access to everyday to purchase the ingredients that I need and I feel good about who I am supporting.

Why should people join a food co-op?

There are many reasons to join a co-op.  For me, it's about the food. I would encourage people to join SPFC because we will provide the community with a place to purchase organic and local foods and be a place where they can play an integral role in ensuring the quality of the food and products that their hard-earned money goes towards.

What is your favorite meal to cook and why?

I don't have a favorite meal to cook (in fact, I rarely cook the same meal twice) but I love simple and fresh foods and I'm partial to Mediterranean cuisine.  My perfect meal is bread and olive oil, cheese, roasted vegetables, olives, and hummus.

 

This morning, some women from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society came to judge my garden for the City Gardens contest!  We had a nice time sitting outside discussing plants and they even gave me some tips for my two tomato plants that are not doing as well.

Other than that, I am watching tomatoes turn red, like the little guy in the picture below.

And my Beauty Queen tomatoes are finally showing some progress!  Here is the tallest:

This little monkey is about 4' tall!  I think that this counts as a "leggy" plant since there aren't too many leaves and branches, just that one main stem.  Unless I have no idea what "leggy" means in terms of plants, which is also entirely possible.  But I think that these little ones kind of got lost in the beefsteak forest behind and around them and had to struggle to get enough sun.  I've since moved things around to try to give some of the smaller monkeys more sun and give all the plants a slightly different view and neighbors.  Obviously this is important.  But seriously, I like having things in pots so that I can do that and then I notice things like little weeds to pluck out and dead leaves to clean up and things that I wouldn't notice just from looking at all the plants from one angle.

I've been thinking about this container thing a lot lately.  On the one hand, I like the challenge of growing things in containers and now I have a pretty good grasp of when plants are getting too big for their containers because they don't grow as quickly and dry out very fast.  But it would be so much easier if I could just put all these things in the ground!  In the picture above, the blue pot in the lower right-hand corner is a variety of eggplant called Black Beauty.  Those are pretty good-sized leaves, but there is nothing close to a flower on any of those eggplants.  By contrast I have a friend who has the same variety of eggplant but hers is a few feet taller, filled with lovely purple blooms, and she even has actual eggplant!  That she ate!  (Am I jealous?  Never!)  Anyway, the reason my friend's plant is so much larger than mine is that hers is in the ground and has no container restraining it so it can grow and grow to its heart's content.  Also, plants will overwinter in the ground since a small quantity of dirt in a pot will freeze much faster than the ground does.  All this rambling is just to say that I think I would like a mix:  pots for smaller plants and beds for larger things, like, ahem, tomatoes.

These are the nasturtiums I got in West Philly a few weeks ago.  I have somehow turned into the type of person who buys plants everywhere she goes and then carries them around the city like a crazy person (note:  if you don't necessarily like strangers talking to you you should probably restrain from carrying plants around the city and on public transportation.  Take it from someone who knows.)  I never thought I would grow, let alone buy for a dollar, a nasturtium in my life.  My parents had them when I was growing up and once, upon learning that you could eat the flowers, I stuffed a whole red flower into my mouth and thought it was just about the foulest thing I'd ever tasted.  The taste is so strong and peppery that I could taste it for hours after and for years even the smell of nasturtiums used to make my stomach turn.  But looking out at my garden the other day I decided I needed more flowers and nasturtiums, besides being good companion plants for tomatoes, also love hot, full sun.  And they are bright and cheery!  So I willingly purchased a plant that I vowed as a little girl to never go near again.  Getting older is weird.

Here are some squash blossoms.  I'm sorry for all the squash blossom pictures but they are just so bright and happy-looking.  And here are lots and lots of tomatoes:

I'm looking forward to these guys all turning red.  Tomato harvest!  Friends, get ready to help me eat these!

Sarah DeGiorgis has lived in Philly for five years and is finally starting to feel like a true Philadelphian, though she still detests cheesesteaks.  She enjoys reading, watching bad tv, eating and cooking good food and digging in the dirt. Catch up with her continuing efforts to grow food in South Philly by clicking here.

With the weather forecasters calling for a 100% of rain (really? 100%?), the organizers of the Music in the Park event have decided to postpone. Barring similar rain events, the rest of this month's events will continue as scheduled. When we know when tonight's event will be rescheduled, we will pass the info along.

July is cooking up to be full of great music and good food at Gold Star Park. The park, located at 6th and Wharton, underwent major transformation this spring and now has a fabulous green space perfect for Thursday night picnics and listening to music! The South Philly Food Co-op is partnering to bring food fun to the well-established summer music series organized by Friends of Gold Star Park. We’ll also have membership applications and volunteers on-hand to answer questions. Bring your checkbook or your credit card and join the co-op on the spot! Tonight features the following food and music: July 7 - Local Fruit and Veggie Tasting Music: Artístas y Músicos Latino Americanos (AMLA) Youth Latin Jazz Ensemble We'll be providing samples of in-season fruits and vegetables for everyone to sample. Bring your friends, bring your neighbors, bring your kids - this is a great way to become familiar with what is in-season in our region and maybe try something new. We will also feature a blind "Taste-Test" pitting Local/Organic versus conventional produce. Do you think you can tell the difference? Special thanks to Pennsylvania Horticulture Society for providing the grant to purchase the produce, and to Birchtree Catering for sourcing and cutting up the veggies and fruit. Hope to see you there!

After months of committee meetings with hopefully a dozen people attending, it was truly a delight to walk into the EPX office last week for our first general member-owner meeting and see the room full of unfamiliar faces.

Alison introduced the meeting and asked everyone who was a committee member to raise their hand. Plenty of hands went up, though even more were in the air for a show of members-owners and even more again for those who were attending their first SPFC event.

It wasn't just those that had already become member-owners who voted last week. Nearly a dozen of our new member-owners joined that night by filling out their application and submitting their first equity payment to make them eligible to vote. Patty and Maria sat at the front the whole night talking to those that were interested and taking payments from those who had decided to take that all-important step.

Come 8 pm the ballots had all been submitted and after some exhaustive counting and collating by members of our Election Committee, David Woo happily announced the results of the first election.

Sadly several newly elected board members were not still present, but as the evening wrapped up I did manage to gather our new board together.

SPFC Inaugural Board
L to R: Jay Tarlecki, Julia Koprak, Cassie Plummer, Joe Marino, Mary Beth Hertz, Alison Fritz, Maria Camoratto. Not pictured: Erika Owens, John Raezer, Josh Richards, Stephanie Rupertus.

Thanks again to all who came out last week including those who were just interested and especially our new member-owners. Remember, it's never too late to become a member-owner yourself.

When I said soup season was over for me, I really meant it. It's hot. It's too hot for soup. Or pasta. Too hot for any kind of a sauce. It's salted radishes, hunk of cheese, piece of bread season.

But then there's gazpacho. Gazpacho is all the brightest and crispest flavors of Spanish and Latin American food with none of the heaviness. It's not just cold, it's raw. Like all soups, and most other things I cook, it's customizable. Extra spicy? Sure thing. More of this flavor and less of that one? Go for it.

I started with plum tomatoes. Plum tomatoes are the ones I can reliably find this early, and they have fewer seeds and more "meat" than the others anyway.

I also cut up a cucumber (I peeled it and took out the seeds first).

 And a bunch of tiny red onions. Like a quarter of a big red onion.

Skinning tomatoes reminds me of the late summer sauces that fill my freezer. I have this great elderly neighbor who brings me the ugliest tomatoes you can imagine from his garden. I face the heat and stand over a hot stove and make up enough sauce to last through the fall, and then spend my winter staring at cans and doing my best. So first, I get some water boiling, and have an ice bath on hand, and I make an X in the skin of each tomato with a knife.

 Then I drop the tomatoes into the boiling water for just a minute - the skin wrinkles up quickly and that's when you know they're ready to peel. Quickly into the ice water bath for another minute.

 And then they're pretty easy to peel by hand. I peeled them right into a strainer, where I smushed them and haphazardly seeded them, letting whatever juice accumulated cover the cucumber and onion.

I rinsed the tomatoes to try to clear off a few more seeds (it's really no big deal if a few get in) and chopped them up. I also minced three cloves of garlic.



All of that was added to the cucumbers and onion, with some additional flavors. Salt and pepper, cumin, balsamic vinegar and vegan worcestershire (I owe the addition of the worcestershire to Alton Brown - you can certainly get by without it, but it adds depth).



And a jalepeno. Note that since we've had a few incidents with peppers, the jalepeno is cut on a separate cutting board. Better safe than sorry. I pretend it's raw chicken.





It needs liquid, you know, to be soup. I use vegetable juice. I think it has more to it than tomato and for whatever reason, even in glass bottles, I think tomato juice tastes like metal.  Maybe I've had too many cans of it on airplanes? So I added some veggie juice, enough to make it soup. Like a cup and a half.





I added a tablespoon of olive oil and the juice of half a lemon. I put a bowl cover on it and let it be in the fridge.



You can blend it now or blend it later, but either way, it needs to sit a bit. I made this mostly in the morning, before work, and then came home and tended to it for a bit (added the jalepeno, blended it) left for two hours and then ate it. I think 12 hours would be perfect, but an hour would be fine.

Either scoop out about half of it and throw it in your blender on puree or smoothie or whatever, or use an immersion blender and hold back.  I really wanted half of it to be liquid and half of it to be chunky.



Then I just stirred it for a bit to get the chunky parts integrated.



I sliced up some avocado and topped it with that and cilantro.



And served it with grilled cheese on the funny t-shirt shaped bread I made a few weeks ago.



This made four meals worth. It was super bright, crisp, and refreshing.

This recipe is cross-posted at Saturday’s Mouse, where I’m working on making food out of food. 

Ingredients

• 10 plum tomatoes


• 1 jalepeno, diced


• 1 cucumber, skinned, seeded and chopped


• 1.5 cups low sodium vegetable juice


• 1/4 large red onion, diced


• 1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce


• 3 teaspoons balsamic vinegar


• 3 cloves garlic, minced


• 1 teaspoon cumin


• 1 teaspoon black pepper


• 2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice


• 1 tablespoon olive oil


• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Instructions

Skin and seed tomatoes, reserving any liquid. To skin tomatoes, make an X in each, drop in boiling water for 1 minute then in ice bath for 1 minute, then peel by hand.

Dice tomatoes, cucumber, jalepeno, and onion. Mince garlic. Add everything to a bowl, and blend half of it. Refrigerate for at least an hour, 12 is better. Top with sliced avocado and cilantro, if you have it. Serve cold.

Details

• Prep time: 25 mins


• Cook time: 0 mins


• Total time: 1 hour 25 mins


• Yield: 4 servings

 

Hellos!  This week I picked the first red tomato!  As you can see from the picture, it's pretty small for a beefsteak but I picked it because I noticed that the bottom was getting weird...

A little online research revealed that this is called Blossom End Rot because it occurs at the blossom end of the tomato (opposite the stem end, where the tomato is attached to the plant.)  Here's a look at the cross section:

From the cross section you can see that I caught this before it got too bad and I was able to just cut off the brown section and eat the rest.  For breakfast.  The good news is that the rest of the tomato tasted just as I remember:  sweet and tangy with that slight acidic bite.  And yes, I cut the tomato in half so I could see the rotted part but then I took big bites out of it like I promised I would.

But on to the blossom end rot.  As you can see from the article linked above, blossom end rot is caused by a "calcium deficiency induced by water stress."  At first I was all like "oh no, my soil needs more calcium!" and started researching how to add calcium to soil.  But a lot of things I found claimed that tomatoes don't actually need that much calcium and it is very rare to have calcium-deficient soil.  Especially in my case, since this particular tomato was grown in potting soil with compost...potting soil, unlike dirt in the ground, is formulated to have the correct nutrients and while a calcium deficiency is rare in regular dirt from the ground, it is even rarer in potting soil.  [This goes out to my friend who, when I told him I needed to buy dirt responded with "Why don't you go buy some air, too?"  See?  Potting soil is important.  But I digress...]  The important part of that bolded statement above is the water stress, which means basically uneven watering.  Now I'm trying very hard to water a little bit every day but there are factors beyond my control, namely all that rain we got a few weeks ago and temperatures ranging from super hot and dry to cool and overcast during these past few weeks.  A lot things that I read also said that blossom end rot tends to happen to the first few tomatoes but should clear up once temperatures start evening out in July and August.  Besides the one link above on blossom end rot, which comes from Texas A & M, both Penn State and Ohio State have great agricultural schools with lots of resources on their websites (I am partial to the Penn State HortReport and not only for the rhyming name; here's a particularly good issue on tomato disorders.)

On to the rest of the garden!  Above is a picture of a corner of my garden with some of almost every plant I have.  From left to right we have:  tomatoes, sunflowers (the tallest plants, against the fence), eggplant in the bright blue pot, squash against the slightly mossy fence behind the tomatoes with lots of orange squash blossoms, mint and lemon balm on the far right, then a newly-acquired fig in the bottom right corner and in the middle bottom of the picture, basil.  There are obviously lots more tomato (and basil, and eggplant, and squash) plants but this one corner was a pretty good representation of all the plants I have right now.  (It is also a good representation of how crowded things are out there.)  I'm trying to branch out into more flowers - last weekend I bought a little nasturtium for a dollar at a tag sale in West Philly and I got some shady flower seeds (wait, not shady shady like they're gonna pull a knife on you but shade-loving) so I can have some flowers under the tree.

That's it for this week.  I have lots of green tomatoes about ready to turn red so I'll update you all on those next week...hopefully they will be rot-free.  I'll leave you with another shot of my basil because I am quite proud of it.

Thanks for reading!

South Philly Food Co-op is happy to announce the election of the co-op's inaugural Board of Directors. After fifteen months of exhausting but rewarding work, the Steering Committee has handed off leadership of the organization to the newly elected board. It's an important milestone and one that will help propel us forward in our goal of opening a member-owned cooperative grocery store here in South Philly. We were thrilled to see the huge turnout last night, with 75% of current membership voting, including the several new member-owners who joined on the spot. If you weren't able to come to the meeting last night it's not too late to join the co-op. If you're already a member-owner, or just want to check out what we're doing and become more involved, please volunteer or attend one of our many events. The 2011 South Philly Food Co-op Board of Directors:

• Alison Fritz
• Cassie Plummer
• Erika Owens
• Jay Tarlecki
• Joseph F. Marino
• John C. Raezer
• Josh Richards
• Julia Koprak
• Maria Camoratto
• Mary Beth Hertz
• Stephanie Rupertus

Numbers for election results are available upon request. Stay tuned for photos of last night's meeting.

Please join us on TONIGHT at 7:00PM for the first ever General Membership Meeting of the South Philly Food Co-op where we will be electing the Inaugural Board of Directors. With membership now open to the public it is time to elect the first group of people who will guide and mold the personality and character of what the South Philly Food Co-op will become. While you must be a member-owner to vote in the elections, it's not too late to pay at least $25 toward your $200 equity and be considered a member-owner in good standing. In fact, if you show up to the meeting with your checkbook or five 5-dollar bills or a 20-dollar bill and a... (you get the picture), you can become a member in good standing right then and there. Much more information such as directions on how to vote and who is eligible are available on the Board Elections page. Below you can find the candidate statements of all those currently nominated for the board.

• Alison Fritz
• Amy Henson
• Cassie Plummer
• Erika Owens
• Jay Tarlecki
• Joseph F. Marino
• John C. Raezer
• Josh Richards
• Julia Koprak
• Maria Camoratto
• Mary Beth Hertz
• Shani Ferguson
• Stephanie Rupertus

Directions to the meeting (held in the offices of East Passyunk Crossing Civic Association who were kind enough to lend us their space for the evening) are here. In the words of our Election Committee:

In twenty years many of you may still be around and will probably still remember this first meeting and election. Take part, join the co-op today and become eligible to vote and have a say in how this local food cooperative will be run.