Everything and the Moo: Sunset’s Margo True on Urban Farming

We found out that we could legally keep our Jersey named Holly at Sunset Magazine

By Sara Deseran
7x7SF
March 03, 2011

Excerpt:

Until recently, Margo True, food editor for Sunset magazine, hadn’t done more gardening than tend to a pot of basil in New York when she worked at Saveur. Today, she’s got a year-and-a-half of vegetable and fruit gardening, chicken rearing, bee-hive caring and even cow milking under her belt and is the author of the new book The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table (Ten Speed, $25). Sunset is currently holding the One Block Party contest, inviting people to live as local as they can get. Check out their blog to follow their trials and tribulations of urban farming.

What were your back-to-the-land preconceptions before you started this project at Sunset wherein you and the staff start out by deciding to learn to make everything for an end-of-the-summer feast?
For me personally, having not really ever having gardened, I just had this hubris of a cook. Basically, I thought you could think about the things that grow in spring, and then you would write up your menu based on that. But what I didn’t realize that is you grow things first, see what you get and then compose the menu. And nature totally rules. In the book, we have these four different seasonal menus. All the crops got ripe and grew for two, but for the fall menu, a lot of things ripened really late. And we ended up having tons and tons of butternut squash, so you’ll see we have like three butternut squash recipes. By the end, I was like, ‘Wow.’

Link to story here.

Sunset’s One Block Feast website here.