BEND, Ore. (AP) — A proposed wilderness encircling Oregon’s Painted Hills has the backing of local leaders.

The Bulletin newspaper reports the Wheeler County Court and the city of Mitchell support the plan for the Sutton Mountain Wilderness. The Bend-based Oregon Natural Desert Association is now trying to win over the state’s congressional delegation.

The federal designation of a wilderness requires an act of Congress and approval by the president.

The planned Sutton Mountain Wilderness would cover nearly 60,000 acres around and in the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

The Bureau of Land Management currently oversees the land.

ASHLAND, Ore. (AP) — The last time Logan Linker and his fellow Ashland High School students got their hands on the 2-foot-tall incense cedar trees growing in the ScienceWorks’ shade-house nursery, they were little starter plants barely one-third their current height.

“Things grow all the time,” says Linker, 17, as he plops a milk crate full of cedars and similar-sized Ponderosa pines into a pickup bed.

Starting next week, these trees will be growing along the banks of Bear Creek, where they may create shade, cooling and cleansing the creek for future generations of wild chinook salmon.

“Doing this is a way I can help the environment, do something for salmon,” Linker says.

Linker and hundreds of other Rogue Valley students will be doing much of the same over the next seven days as the Ashland-based Lomakatsi Restoration Project embarks on its seventh annual Streamside Forest Recovery Week at five sites throughout the Bear Creek Valley.

Students will take more than 1,000 native plants, ranging from Oregon ash and incense cedar, as well as shrubs such as Oregon grape and Pacific ninebark to fortify streamside riparian zones either torn up over time by development or choked out by non-native Himalayan blackberries.

It’s a hands-on lesson in ecology and stewardship for grade- and high-school students who adopt these projects and get to watch them blossom into living sentries warding off stream degradation.

But you can’t plant ‘em until you grow ‘em.

And that’s just what Lomakatsi workers and their teenage volunteers do painstakingly at four greenhouse sites at ScienceWorks and nearby Wellsprings, as well as at Ashland High and Helman Elementary School.

Volunteers take native starter “plugs” bought from area nurseries and put them in pots for two years of coddling before they are prepped for planting and driven to the restoration sites, where armies of young hands will choose where they will take root.

It’s a formula Lomakasti has used, and expanded on, since 1997 at places such as the confluence of Paradise Creek as it wiggles into Bear Creek in southeast Ashland.

“Some of those trees along Paradise Creek are now well over 50 feet tall,” says Alicia Fitzgerald, Lomakatsi’s outreach and communications manager.

After Linker and his classmates carry crate after crate of trees and shrubs to a Lomakasti pickup, they get down and dirty with Lomakatsi Education Director Niki Del Pizzo in the nursery’s center.

“Now you will be, basically, restoring this nursery,” Del Pizzo tells the group.

Kyle Levin stops taking inventory to take stock in ensuring a Pacific Ninebark plug gets properly potted so its root ball has room to grow for 2016’s round of streamside plantings.

“When I think about what’s happening to the Earth, it makes me angry,” says Levin, 19, who has volunteered with Lomakatsi for three years. “Being able to do something like this makes me feel better.”

That’s a theme among teen volunteers on projects like this, says Jennifer Wahpepah, who teaches the alternative program at Ashland High.

“It’s a big self-esteem builder,” Wahpepah says. “They’re overwhelmed with a lot of negative things, like global warming. This helps them push through that wall by taking part in small actions to help change things.”

Consider Jesse Applegate a convert.

“They’re keeping nature as close as they can to original, not artificial,” says Applegate, a 15-year-old sophomore. “I love what they do, and I’m excited to be part of it

In a letter to it’s growers Mariani announced a base price of $16…up from a base price of $12.50 for the 2013 crop. the letter also states that the concentrate bonus is expected to be and additional $2-3 dollars.

Congrats to Mariani!  Their business must be doing well and their growers will see the benefits of a rising market. $19/barrel is a step in the right direction,

Book Review: 'America's Founding Fruit: The Cranberry in a New Environment'
Barnstable Patriot
The cranberry, however, has proved itself perfectly adaptable to other growing spots, and now the fruit is grown in such far-flung places as Wisconsin, New Jersey, Washington State and Oregon. Cranberries have been harvested by an international crowd ...

The Oregon Board of Forestry voted unanimously Nov. 5 to proceed with a new plan to create specific timber harvest and conservation zones on 600,000 acres of state-owned forests west of Portland and along the north coast.

The Oregon Department of Forestry currently uses a single management strategy to pursue both timber revenue and conservation goals, but officials concluded in 2012 that approach was not generating enough money. The new concept is known as land allocation. It grew out of recommendations from a stakeholder group that included representatives from the timber industry, environmental organizations, anglers and county governments.

During the board meeting in Portland, some of those stakeholders said they are concerned at the lack of detail in the proposal. State officials said that will spend the next eight months filling in details of the plan and forecasting how it would affect timber harvest revenue and conservation goals.

The forestry board would still need to give final approval to a detailed plan, before it could take effect.

“What’s before you here is not a management plan,” State Forester Doug Decker said. “We do have the broad contours of a management plan.”

A year ago, Gov. John Kitzhaber asked the board to look for opportunities to increase conservation in the northwest region, which includes the Tillamook, Clatsop and Santiam state forests.

The Oregon Department of Forestry also needed to increase revenue from timber harvests, which have not kept up with the cost to manage the state forests over the last decade. Financial Analyst Joan Tenny said the department’s $27.9 million annual state forest budget is approximately $6 million short of what the department needs.

As a result, the department has cut back on forest thinning, research and monitoring and improvements related to recreation, Public Affairs Program Manager Dan Postrel said.

State officials have not determined how much of the state forests might be designated for conservation or for timber harvest, despite an earlier version of the plan developed by the committee that would have roped off 30 percent of forest land for conservation and 70 percent for logging. Officials said there also might be more than two types of management zones.

One difficult question state employees face is how to divvy up timber harvest revenue among counties, if the state shifts to land allocation management. The state keeps one-third of the timber revenue to cover its management costs, and sends the remaining two-thirds to the county governments where the forests are located. If some forests are designated as conservation land where logging is reduced or banned, those counties would lose revenue unless the state and counties find a way to share timber money among counties.

Tim Josi, a Tillamook County commissioner and chairman of the Council of Forest Trust Lands Counties, said the council supported the land allocation concept. However, Josi said, “there are still some trust issues with some of the counties about changing the revenue sharing formula.”

W. Ray Jones, vice president of resources for Stimson Lumber Company, said the new management proposal would likely meet the goals to increase both conservation and revenue. However, Jones said he is concerned about proposals by Oregon Department of Forestry employees to include habitat conservation plans and expanded no-cut buffers along streams in the new plan.

“I’m having a hard time connecting the dots of why those no-cut zones would be expanded,” Jones said.

Bob Van Dyk, forest policy manager at the Wild Salmon Center, said at this early stage, the new management plan is like a Rorschach test: because there are few details, everyone who looks at it finds different potential problems.

“We support continued exploration of this,” Van Dyk said. “There’s at least a chance we can find something not anyone’s happy with, but everyone’s happy enough with.”

State officials currently plan to bring a detailed version of the plan back to the forestry board in June.

COOS BAY, Ore. (AP) — The Coos County, Oregon, sheriff’s office says a Bureau of Land Management employee was fatally injured when a falling tree at a logging site struck her Ford Explorer.

The sheriff’s office says 55-year-old Estella Morgan came upon a logging operation in the Blue Ridge area east of Coos Bay on Tuesday. A tree that had just been cut fell on her SUV, crushing the driver’s area. She died at the scene.

The accident is under investigation.

Curry County Reporter
Oregon cranberrys are OK'd for China 102214
Curry County Reporter
Oregon cranberries are OK'd for China By Sean Hall Thanks to a re-working of federal policy, frozen cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, and cherries can now be shipped to China. Until recently, fresh products could be shipped to China, but in order ...

Reports detail strengths, challenges in local food systems
Coos Bay World
Alternative markets for cranberries – Oregon cranberries are in large supply but nationally there is a glut of product. Growers say their product is sweeter. A feasibility study could help determine if Oregon cranberries have the potential to be a ...

PORTLAND – Just over a year ago three participants in the AmeriCorps Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) program began intensive projects to detail the food issues and assets in …

Let’s be clear about something... When making stuffing, it’s always better to slice and dry your own bread cubes. Hands down, the taste and texture are better.

Cheer: Berries for everyone

If you live in one of our urban communities, you may think what goes on at the county doesn’t matter. It does, and it does a lot. County government is our voice to state and federal officials …

Apparently we don’t. Personally. I was just cleaning out my desk and found our Estimated Allotment Certificate for our own personal crop for 2014. Our allotment was virtually the same as the crop we delivered! I’m assuming a lot of Wisconsin growers are in the same boat.  Mother Nature delivered where the USDA Secretary would not.  Of course I hate it for WI, but everyone will benefit from this smaller crop.   As the final berries get counted, we are all waiting and wondering just where the crop will end up (or down..)   Congrats to those growers who had a great crop.

Whatever the result, we will have less concentrate and less dried cranberries in the marketplace.

Area growers now allowed to ship frozen berries to China
Coos Bay World
Cranberries just harvested from a bog at the Tobiska Family Farm near Bandon are loaded into the back of a truck Monday morning. The annual harvest is in full swing along the South Coast. 2014-10-28T10:33:00Z 2014-10-28T16:40:06Z Area growers now ...

and more »

COOS BAY — Thanks to a collaborative effort between a Curry County cranberry harvester and government officials at the county, state and national levels, farmers of cranberries, blueberries an…

Dec. 16, 1953 - September 2014

Capital Press
Cranberry farmers struggle with high supply, low prices
Capital Press
LONG BEACH, Wash. — Cranberry farmers, growers of the only commercial ground crop in the southwest corner of the state, perpetually battle the cool climate and limited acreage. Now, they have an even bigger problem — a global glut of cranberries so ...

and more »

From Food Network magazine!
We will still produce a lot…but maybe not 60% !

http://pact.oceanspray.com

Interesting.

http://www.bevnet.com/news/2014/ocean-spray-freshbev-collaborate-on-new-cold-pressed-juices

Interesting bottle and name…can’t wait to see the ingredient/nutrition panel. Will they actually put cranberry in the bottle or something else? Calories? added sugar? So many options, such a tart berry we grow. Interesting that Spray is partnering rat