Seward Co-op has begun the countdown to spring! Starting your garden from seed and then watching it mature from seedling to fruiting plant can be rewarding, economical, and fun. Considering Minnesota’s relatively short growing season, it can be beneficial to start seeds indoors in spring to give plants a head start before transplanting them in to your garden. Each plant has its own unique growing requirements and therefore its own timeline. Refer to Seward Co-op’s Seed Guide, as a resource for when to start seeds indoors and transplant outdoors.

Browsing Seward Co-op’s seed racks, surrounded by fresh-cut flowers and an abundance of fragrant citrus, can make the experience of picking out the seeds for your garden inviting—many of the potential options look so delicious and interesting! However, before you get whisked away by the idea of it all, learn more about Seward Co-op’s seed offerings to determine which brand aligns more with your values and is best for the vision of what you hope to accomplish with your garden—High Mowing Organic, Seed Savers Exchange, or a combination of the two. Is your primary concern the health of your family, or is it more broad to include environmental biodiversity or healthy habitats for pollinators? Learn more about our unique seed producers’ intentional cultivation practices to the right.

Now, the fun part—make a list of all the crops you desire to grow and plot them out to create a feasible plan for your space. We recommend marking a calendar with the dates to start and transplant different crops, using the chart provided on the back-side of our Seed Guide. Please note some root crops, such as carrots, beets and radishes do not tolerate transplanting. For more home gardening information and resources, please visit the University of Minnesota Extension website.

Join us at the Seward Co-op Creamery Café for a dinner featuring our April SEED recipient, Dream of Wild Health, a Native American-led, nonprofit farm and youth-leadership program. We’ll enjoy a three-course meal featuring Indigenous ingredients and hear stories about Dream of Wild Health’s work recovering knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines and lifeways. Tickets are limited, so reserve your seat now.

Purchase tickets via Eventbrite.

Three-course dinner: $40
Nonalcoholic kombucha drink pairing: $9
Beer and wine also available for purchase.

Like most people are doing, here at Seward Co-op we are getting our ducks in a row to welcome spring—reconnecting with partner farms and making room on our shelves for many springtime local, seasonal goodies!

For many Minnesotans, this time of year is all about cleansing and purifying the body with bitter greens and giving the home a thorough top-down deep cleaning after a long winter of being held in captivity. Try to get the boring stuff out of the way sooner than later, so you can enjoy spring break when it comes around. Whether you are planning a staycation or a vacation, stop by Seward Co-op’s semi-annual Bulk Sale on Thursday, March 22. It’s a great opportunity to stock your pantry with healthy snacks to feed the kids while they’re home on break or for nourishing road-trip fare.

Whether shopping in bulk is a new prospect or you’ve been shopping bulk for decades, you don’t want to miss this sale. All day—for one day only—everything in the Bulk department (even sale items and select Wellness bulk items) is 10 percent off.

*The March 22 bulk sale does not include reusable glass and plastic containers or items sold per pound in other departments, such as Produce and Meat & Seafood.

Click for recipes below:

In past years, Twin Cities area food co-ops have participated in the Minnesota FoodShare March Campaign, a program of the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches that provides funds, food and educational materials to more than 300 food shelves across the state. Last year the 14 Minnesota food co-ops that participated together raised a total of 125,464 lbs./dollars for food shelves across the state!

This year campaign’s collaborative efforts include food co-ops throughout Minnesota. This means that co-ops across the state will be running similar campaigns for their communities, and the food drive will make an even bigger impact on Minnesotans!

All donations made at any of Seward Co-op’s locations will go to the March SEED recipient: Sabathani Community Center. Sabathani provides food, clothing and housing to 26,000 neighborhood residents each year in South Minneapolis. We feed the chronically poor, those on disability or chemical dependent individuals and families. Sabathani Community Center has been providing basic needs services for nearly fifty years.

Midwest Food Connection (MFC) is a local education nonprofit founded by local food co-ops, including Seward Co-op. MFC provides lessons in cooking, gardening, and eating healthy food to elementary school students. Since 1993, they have reached more than 60,000 children.

MFC receives many thoughtful and caring letters from students. Through drawings of fruits and veggies, colorful hearts, and earnest writing, they show their appreciation for the food that we shared together and their newfound interest in cooking and gardening.

Every kid deserves this kind of education, but MFC receives requests to teach in schools that cannont pay for lessons. Show area students some love by supporting food education. By investing in students, as the co-op does with sponsoring MFC, we support the next generation of conscientious eaters, farmers, and food workers! The money you give directly enables more access to food education in underserved schools.

Give online at: givemn.org/organization/Midwest-Food-Connection

Send a check to:
Midwest Food Connection
P.O. Box 18749
Minneapolis, MN 55428

As many co-op shoppers know, soil is a valuable natural resource essential to agriculture. Healthy soil helps plants soak up essential nutrients, capture carbon from the atmosphere, and resist drought and disease. Many in the organic and natural foods industry are increasingly focused on practices that enrich, rather than degrade, the Earth’s soil. A conversation has begun around agriculture moving beyond sustainable, and towards true improvement or regeneration of the resources it uses. (See links at right for further reading on a proposed regenerative organic certification.)

From Feb. 14-27 at the Franklin and Friendship stores, 3% of all Cascadian Farm purchases will be donated to The Land Institute, supporting healthy soil. The Land Institute is focused on introducing perennial grains and transforming agriculture with regenerative, more sustainable production. Some of the grains used in intercropping systems include Kernza ®, sorghum, silphium, perennial wheat and legumes.

The Land Institute and their partners are not working to tweak the current predominant industrial, disruptive system of agriculture. They are working to displace it.

Due to agricultural processes including higher volume tillage and the use of pesticides and fertilizers—the health of our soil is decreasing at an alarming rate, and without healthy soil, we face more pollution and less cultivation. For over 10,000 years humans have depended on soil. Today, soil depends on us.

It is possible to provide staple foods without destroying or compromising the cultural and ecological systems upon which our society depends, but only if we understand and work with the constraints and capacities of the natural systems.

At Seward Co-op, we love being able to help local vendors and farmers distribute local honey throughout the year. While Minnesota honey is definitely sweet, there are so many different types of honey throughout the world, each one unique to the region it’s produced in.

Patagonia Bee Products is one such company working hard to bring in some of the tastiest honey out there. This small-scale business is based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. They specialize in importing honey straight from cooperative farms in the Chilean region of Patagonia. They bring us mostly Ulmo honey and a few other monofloral honeys. Monofloral means that the majority of the pollen in the flower comes from a single flower species. Ulmo is a tree located throughout the Patagonia region with the flowers blooming between February and March. Ulmo honey particularly is prized in South America for its medicinal value, having anti-bacterial properties comparable to the legendary Manuka honey. Lab tests have been shown to reduce the bacterial activity in both MRSA and E. coli.

Aside from the medicinal value, Ulmo honey has a very unique flavor, with hints of lavender and mint shining through the butter-like consistency of this 100% raw honey. You don’t get that sort of subtlety from typical clover honey. This honey is so delicious because they do a direct “Hive-to-Hand” operation. Patagonia Bee Products works directly with farmers from the Cooperativa Agricola Apicultores Del Sur in southern Chile, where each individual jar of honey is produced by a single beekeeper with the utmost concern for the bees and their environment.

There is no homogenizing in this honey at all which helps protect the delicious nutrition locked inside, including active digestive enzymes and aromatic pollen. Each batch is then tested by a third party in a laboratory to ensure the legitimacy of the pollen and that it is, in fact, monofloral honey. Most of the honey you find in a conventional supermarket has been heat-treated, destroying almost all of the nutritious enzymes, and then strained or filtered to remove any traces of pollen, and then blended with other honeys from all over the world. This means you can’t even test the pollen to determine where the honey possibly came from. What you’re usually left with is more of a honey-syrup with no nutritional value that has a flavor that barely tastes like honey at all.

Patagonia Bee Products’ commitment to the beekeepers and their community is a step above the rest, ensuring you get the rawest, most nutritious, most delicious, humanely and ethically produced honey around. Check out more about them at http://patagoniabeeproducts.com/.

Content adapted from Ozark Natural Foods Co-op original post: http://onf.coop/patagonia-bee-products/.