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My Nana’s homemade pickles ranged from the lip puckering sour green tomatoes to the smoldering dilled cucumbers. And I could devour a half jar of her picked okra in an afternoon.

Those childhood memories of my paternal grandmother’s canning abilities inspired one of my “slow living” resolutions for 2009, to start preserving my own food.

To be honest, I only remember the artifacts of her efforts, not the process itself. Only until recently did I discover the various ways of pickling vegetables (or that beets, green beans and onions could be on the menu).

I suspect that many my age have no hands-on experience with canning, fermenting, dehydrating or even freezing. I grew up for the most part on 30-minute Hamburger Helper and the pop-a-top Del Monte green beans.

Last week we launched a basic version of our new goGreenTriad.com site, which I wrote about recently. I encourage you to go ahead and bookmark the site now, knowing that we are steadily adding features and content.

The home page now features stories of the day, a multimedia player, and links to a calendar of events and list of "green" organizations. We are working out the bugs and fine-tuning the green organizations page. I encourage you to e-mail me the names and Web sites of any Triad or North Carolina non-profit or government group working on environmental or energy issues that I have not already included.

Later this week I will also start adding fresher news stories to the site and sometime this month newsletter subscribers will be able to start receiving messages. If you have any questions or suggestions about the site, give me a call at 373-7078 or e-mail me at morgan.josey@news-record.com. Don't be discouraged if you send me a story idea and I don't respond right away. I am filing some of them away for a later time when I give them the focus they deserve.

I apologize for the sparse postings over the past few weeks; my daughter has been hospitalized since Aug. 1 so I have been in and out of the office.

However, I wanted to take this moment of quietude to reflect on my experience with the health care systems in Greensboro and Chapel Hill (both of which I have been pleased with so far). I've never had a reason to be in a hospital room for more than a week at a time, so visiting the same room for weeks has been quite disorienting. Occasionally I would ponder modern medicine's relationship to fossil fuels and the "one step forward, two steps backward" feeling that a disruption to one's life causes.

I would look at the hi-tech ICU machinery and think "Will these lifesaving devices be around and affordable 20 years from now?" Or, "I can't believe I'm in a 21st century hospital and the cafeteria is still serving hamburgers and pizza with no vegetarian options."

Then I would think about the garden I planted in early summer that is now in disarray, my frequent car trips between cities and the heavily transported and packaged foods I purchase for convenience instead of my weekly trips to the farmers market. Of course, energy efficiency is low on my list of concerns right now; my main priorities are my daughter and my sanity. But I was reminded of how vital convenient and effective health care, food and transportation are to us and how we must rethink their provision so that they continue to be available when we most need them.

.... And while I'm posting, Elon University will hold a conference on sustainability in September.

FYI: My blog will soon be hosted by the Greensboro News & Record. I will provide the new URL once the blog has been successfully exported.

I started gardening for the first time in a shared space last year. My only personal association with a garden before then was through my grandmother, who used to grow some of her own vegetables. The backyard produce did not impress me as a youth (I remember my nana removing husks - and worms - from ears of corn and thinking eewwww). I considered pulling weeds and other yard work akin to slavery.

Now that I'm older, I realize you can't beat local, fresh fruit and vegetables and the work can be rewarding both spiritually and physically. So I decided to experiment with growing my own food. I tried to keep it simple: green beans, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes and herbs. I scoured seed catalogues for quality and variety, but ended up getting most of them at Lowe's. The wonderful thing about gardening is that nature is patient with one's ignorance and blunders and the return on investment (a few dollars) is enormous compared to when you shop in a supermarket. I have a newfound appreciation for the bounty of the earth and farmers' work. (In the end, my husband and I collected about 20 tomatoes, a couple cucumbers and some peppers. The green beans shriveled in the sweltering heat and the herbs didn't even come up). I hope to do it again this year.

You might consider that harvest paltry for the hours of work involved. I wondered myself, what am I doing trying to advocate for local eating among family and friends when half of my seeds bore no fruit? It's just simpler to leave this to the "experts."

But empowering us amateurs to experiment with a new way of eating and living is vital to transforming this community into one that is more resilient to global commodity price fluctuations (read: higher food costs), not even delving into the questionable wisdom of genetically modified/clone-derived and over-processed foods. What's important at this point is not so much the amount of practical experience we have, but the mindset change that precedes it. From there, we need education and tools to try it.

I would love to see Greensboro get more community gardens, such as the one in the Glenwood neighborhood. Apartment/condo dwellers need their spaces too. Perhaps several years from now I will join other residents, previously divorced from their source of nourishment, in shedding that "amateur" label.