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 When Frederick and Dee Dee Herman
removed plaster from an interior wall in their
11th St. home, they discovered a surprising
advertisement. Photo: Andrew Lightman
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OMG! Holiday season and gifts are upon us! Top of my list is donation gifts: tax deductible, further your own agenda, and don’t burden the recipient with STUFF. Donating to the political party of your choice is maybe too transparently agenda-furthering.
Best, give trees. If the recipient actually has space and you love them very much, arrange with your favorite landscape person to plant a fruit tree. Then the loved one can eat their landscape…But beware: this is an expensive gift so you might want to plant the tree in your yard and send an announcement card. Be sure to select native species.
If you want budget and quantity, give Oxfam $30 to plant 50 trees. They’ll figure out where to plant them.
To be edgier, and cheaper, give Oxfam $12 for soap, $12 for manure, or $18 for crabs. Goats and sheep are pricier for closer friends. www.oxfamamericaunwrapped.com/home.php.
Of course, there’s the perennial favorite: beautifully wrapped regifting. Enjoy the upcoming holidays and remember gifts that keep giving!
Q. Removing plaster from an interior wall in my home recently I found an advertisement for a general store painted on what was an exterior wall of the neighboring house before my house was built in 1905.
The mystery is the location of the store: 135 B Street SE. No such address turns up in an internet search except for an obit from Congressional cemetery.
The name E. Steffen did not turn up anything either. Perhaps the name and the address belong to the artist? How and where I can get an answer? - Found
A. To investigate further, hie yourself down to the Washingtoniana Room at the MLK Library. Look up E. Steffen in city directories beginning in 1905 and work backwards and see if you find a listing and what it is for (i.e. Steffen a sign painter or a purveyor of pork...)
If you don't get anything there, you can go to the tax records and look up the address (B Streets South and North were renamed Independence and Constitution. Constitution Avenue was renamed in 1931, but I’m not sure about Independence.)
That address is where the 1980 Madison Building of the Library of Congress is now. If you can get through to them you can also look at the extensive collection of historic photos at the beleaguered DC Historical Society.
Anyway, tax records are by address/lot and square (which you can figure out from real estate maps at MLK) and you should be able to follow that address back into the 1880s/90s and find who owned it. I'd estimate a couple of hours at MLK will do you. The staff are fantastically helpful.
This sign is your own interior piece of decorative archeology. Congratulations!
Q. I want to eat organically and locally. Where can I find a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)? - Locavore Wannabe
A. Warning: Migrating into tree-hugging land: if you’d rather not pay taxes, listen to Rush Limbaugh as you drive your 8 mpg SUV to play 18 holes of golf, better stop reading now lest you get annoyed.
What an excellent impulse for a resident of the ultimate local neighborhood. We subscribe to the South Mountain Creamery CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) serving Capitol Hill. You never know what you’ll get, so when weird veggies arrive it’s an exercise in adventurous eating.
We happened on the Frederick County dairy farm, South Mountain Creamery, several years ago searching for a toilet during a historic-barn crawl. Found the facilities and discovered the creamery (isn’t Creamery seductive?), their ice cream, and that they deliver milk in glass bottles! We created our own South Mountain coop at the office, spreading the delivery charge among several of us. Their chocolate milk is over-the-top and milk-drinking friends tell me the milk is really, really good. Maybe it’s the lack of growth hormones and early-and-often antibiotics. And you can admire the source with a picture of Cookie, the cow, on their web site.
As preservationists, we also love the functional anachronism of milk in glass bottles, delivered, not to mention that the South Mountain farm is in the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Program. What’s not to love about rural preservation reducing McMansion proliferation?
Then South Mountain added an organic veggie CSA. In the traditional CSA, an upfront fee buys a share of the farmer’s crop for that season. You get a lot of produce during bumper years and less in years of too much or too little rain. With the typical CSA, you go to a central location weekly to collect the produce.
South Mountain put their own twist on the CSA. First, it is very electronic. In the service of local and organic you can sign up and do business by internet. They don’t always have shares so you may have to join the waiting list. They email you what’s coming in your small, medium, or large bag.
Our delivery one week in November included: concord grapes (from Michigan as it turned out), cauliflower, button mushrooms, celery, broccoli, arugula.
Second, you don’t have to commit to the entire season, winter or summer, but buy weekly. Finally, South Mountain delivers in green fabric bags that you return the next week when the next batch of veggies arrive.
Another local/organic option is to contact Capitol Hill homeowner Farmer Penelope (smci77@verizon.net) who started raising chickens after moving to her family home in Prince Georges County from Philadelphia Row. Amazingly, Penelope is living an agricultural life just 19 miles from Capitol Hill. They deliver, too -- in a Prius. They are not certified organic, but use organic practices—no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides.
Their beef is “grass fed and naturally grown—no antibiotics, hormones, or harsh words” and moved to fresh pasture daily. Grass-fed beef is healthy: lean and high in omega-3’s, vitamin E, CLA (conjugated linoleic acid—a cancer fighter) and beta carotene.
Penelope said about her chickens, “We move our laying hens to fresh pasture daily (except during the winter months when they are moved into a cozy strawbale house). They eat feed freshly ground from an Amish feed mill and kitchen scraps as well as the fresh grass, bugs and worms they meet each day on the pasture.”
Penelope just finished a season of heirloom tomatoes and is beginning the cool season vegetables. She has fresh salad greens and a spicy mesclun mix of piquant greens as well as firewood, mulch, and seasonal flowers.
Penelope is not a CSA, yet, but is a (not certified) organic, local farmer who will deliver eggs (year round), meat (small quantities or half or quarter sides of beef), and veggies to you.
Sources:
www.localharvest.org/csa/ lists all sorts of local CSAs, delivery as well as pickup, veggy, fruit, eggs, meat South Mountain: www.southmountaincreamery.com and www.southmountainveggies.com
From Penelope:
Mike Klein , Good Fortune Farm in Brandywine, (301-579-2105), an organic vegetable CSA.
Michael Heller, Clagett Farm, (301-627-4393), vegetable CSA.
Look at the "Amazing Grazing" directory by Future Harvest listing farms with locally raised meats. www.futureharvestcasa.org Many of these farms have CSA's as well as meat. |
