We are entering our fifth week of our successful North Hartford Community Kitchen program. Participants meet on either Tuesday nights or Wednesday mornings at Parker Memorial to receive hands-on cooking lessons that promote healthy cooking on a limited budget. Currently, the Kitchen is featuring a sister program, Cooking Matters, for a six week block. For more information about the Kitchen visit the North Hartford Community Kitchen page. Check out some of the fun we’re having!

Hartford Food System

If you were wondering where to obtain fresh and local foods during winter in Hartford, look no further than the Winter Market at Billings Forge. Previously hosted in the afternoon, it will be moving back to 11am – 2pm every Thursday. To celebrate the market’s new time, Billings Forge will be giving away 10% off coupons for the Firebox Restaurant and the Kitchen at the Groundhog’s Day edition, February 2nd market. As always, the value of SNAP benefits will be doubled! Plan your Super Bowl cooking this year with locally sourced foods!

Rodger, who runs our Grow Hartford program, posted this on the Facebook event page, about what to expect from local vendors.

Chaplin Farms will have kale, spinach, squash, apples (Macoun, Melrose, Ida Red, Mutsu, Golden Delicious) and farm made jams!

Lucky Taco will be serving up some great winter SOUP! Roasted pablano and winter squash soup with cilantro drizzle and Pico de gallo (vegetarian) & Chicken Tortilla!

Stonewall Apiary will have their unfiltered fall wildflower honey, creamed honey, and their delicious honey butter! If you’ve never tried any of these items stop by for a free sample of any of them.

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Hartford Food System

HartfordFood.org in 2001

Building the new website meant research. Certainly we have a bountiful amount of information on our current programs, but what about our old programs? A good place to start turned out to be archive.org and their Wayback Machine. The first version of our website that’s available comes from February 2001.

Buried in the deep tombs of cyberspace is a valuable and fascinating history of our organization, with plenty of information about past programs including Project Farm Fresh Start (aka Farm-to-School), the Grocery Delivery Service that we administered, and our involvement with the Farmers Market Nutrition Program. Loading on the Wayback Machine is unfortunately and unsurprisingly a little slow. To save some time, you can browse through our Past Programs page, which compiles a lot of the information about these programs along with some “Where are they now?” components. Further digging can certainly be done through the Wayback Machine, especially if you are searching for information about specific events in the past.

The structure of the website remained relatively untouched over this history. We had information on programs, some relevant events and important updates, but what

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Hartford Food System

Welcome to the new HartfordFood.org! As you can see we have cleaned up our website and modernized it quite a bit. Here in our news section, you will find the latest news about Hartford Food System, as well as articles regarding food security issues in Hartford and our surrounding areas. You can also check out information on our new North Hartford Community Kitchen program, currently in its third week with some help from Cooking Matters. And be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

As a welcoming salute, here’s a video of a couple of our regular musicians playing at the last day of the North End Farmers’ Market this past October. Enjoy!

Hartford Food System

The Hartford Courant:

At The Hollander, Grow Hartford — a community-supported agriculture program — has been delivering bags of fresh vegetables to residents in the building this summer who have purchased shares in the program. Common Ground, a nonprofit group dedicated to creating housing and ending homelessness, renovated and now manages The Hollander.

“It’s created some great buzz in our building,” said Katy Frankel, project manager for housing development and operations at Common Ground.

The Hollander had hoped to open a green grocer in the building by this summer in commercial space that it has renovated on street level. A workable plan has not been found, but it is still a goal of the organization.

Instead of waiting to open a grocer, Frankel said, The Hollander is trying other ways of getting groceries downtown. The CSA program has been successful, but a “buying club” did not pan out because after a few weeks, it became clear that buying items in bulk wasn’t going to work long-term.

Hartford Food System

The New York Times:

Until recently, small corner grocery stores were seen by public health officials as part of the obesity problem.

The stores, predominantly family-owned, offered convenience, but the accent was on snack chips, canned goods and sugary drinks. Now, because they are often the sole source of groceries in areas with no full-size supermarket, the stores are becoming linchpins in public health campaigns.

. . . The idea of using corner stores in campaigns to improve diets has spread from a few cities over the last decade — among them, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Hartford and Oakland, Calif. — to “probably a hundred or more organizations that are now either starting interventions or that are in the planning stages,” Ms. Siedenburg said.

Hartford Food System

Grow Hartford is an urban agriculture program that grows fruits and vegetables on formerly vacant lots. All of this food is distributed to low-income Hartford residents. The chart above shows the number of pounds of fresh food that Grow Hartford has yielded since Hartford Food System began the project in 2004.

Our original field is located on Laurel Street between the Frog Hollow and Parkville neighborhoods. Two new sites were added to Grow Hartford in 2008, bringing the project’s urban agriculture sites to a total of three. Both of these new fields are located in Hartford’s inner city, one at 1072 Broad Street (between Jefferson and Madison Streets) and the other at 199 Zion Street (at the intersection with Catherine Street), and are owned by Southside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance (SINA).This additional land has greatly expanded the Grow Hartford project, which has harvested 7,067 pounds of organically grown fruits and vegetables in 2009. This amount represents our largest yield ever, well beyond our 2007 harvest total of 3,694 pounds and 2008 total of 5,696 pounds.

We are currently working with the city of Hartford to repurpose a large vacant lot on the

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Hartford Food System