I served up a bunch of these at the Greensgrow Subaru Fall Fest in Philly a few months ago at the Organic Gardening Tent and they were such a hit, I had to share this recipe for you guys! These tasty Rosemary Lemon Gin Fizz drinks would be fantastic signature cocktail at your holiday party this year.

I’m not even a gin person, but in this drink the aromatic rosemary, tart lemon, and spicy juniper flavors in the gin blend together to create the perfect winter cocktail—classy, smooth, and almost a little too easy to drink while you are hanging out by the mistletoe (just a warning!).

You can also make them sans alcohol of course and experiment by adding cranberry or pomegranate juice for a bit of holiday flair.

Rosemary Lemon Gin Fizz

To make, you’ll need:
1/4 cup of rosemary simple syrup (see below)
2 cups of Ice
Seltzer Water
6  ounces Gin
1 lemon, juiced
4 lemon slices
4  rosemary sprigs

Serves 4

1.  In a pitcher, stir lemon juice, gin and rosemary simple syrup.
2.  Fill each glass halfway with ice and distribute pitcher mixture
among the four glasses. Top each glass with seltzer water, garnish with lemon slices and stir with a rosemary sprig. Enjoy!

Rosemary Simple Syrup
1 cup of fresh rosemary sprigs
2 cups of sugar
2 cups of water
Heat up rosemary and water in a saucepan until it boils. Add sugar and stir until it dissolves. Lower heat and simmer for 5 minutes, before turning off the heat. Let syrup cool and then strain into a glass jar. You can use this right away, or keep it in the fridge in a glass jar for up to a month.

Serves 4

I’ll also be back at Greensgrow this Saturday (can you tell it’s one of my favorite places?) for their Holiday Bazaar in the Greenhouse, featuring crafty handmade holiday presents from all sorts of cool local Philly vendors. I’ll be there signing books, and selling our own Homesweet Homegrown hot sauces and smoked ghost peppers—stop by and say hello!

GMOs, aka genetically modified organisms, come from a plant or meat product that has had its DNA artificially altered in a laboratory by genes from other plants, animals, viruses, or bacteria. The first GMO crops were created in the 1970s specifically to be resistant to Roundup—a dangerous pesticide that is produced by Monsanto, a company that patents GMO crops. See the connection? New studies are showing that the past 30 years of using Roundup on GMO crops have brought on a new breed of super weeds, which farmers are treating with even more pesticides.

At the same time, more and more articles, studies and testimonials are coming out showing the irreversible health and environmental effects GMO crops are having on people and animals as they make their way through the food supply.

Until they are outlawed, we are the guinea pigs. But, if Prop 37 passes, we will finally have some transparency, and a choice to educate ourselves about what is actually in the food we are buying.

Today, according to this terrifyingly informative infographic from Nature’s Path, 80% of packaged foods contain genetically modified ingredients, from vegetables to additives. The Non-GMO project also features a detailed list here to give you the idea.

If Prop 37 passes, there is also a good chance it will go national. This could be the biggest step to date on GMO front, and will change the way America eats. We could even start to see some labeling show up at grocery stores nationwide—California feeds such a large percentage of the country, it probably wouldn’t make fiscal sense to create different labels for different parts of the country.

Around the foodosphere, alot of companies, activists and gardeners have been getting together to help GMO labeling become a reality. This year, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, the country’s largest supply of rare, heirloom seeds, created a custom seed packet for Marzano tomato seeds to help shed light on the important of Prop 37. They ended up giving away more than 125,000 seed packets in California to raise awareness and support of the original ballot initiative.

“Heirlooms are the exact opposite of genetically engineered seeds,” says Baker Creek founder Jere Gettle. Heirlooms are owned by the people and passed down through generations, while genetically modified seeds are patented and owned by corporations and distributed through supermarkets. Heirlooms and known hybrids are the keys to protecting our food supply.”

They also made Prop 37 a huge part of their second annual National Heirloom Exposition, a not-for-profit event centered around the pure food movement, heirloom vegetables, and anti-GMO activism.

“The National Heirloom Expo is all about developing a safe food supply,” says Gettle. “It was natural for Prop 37 to be a major component of the Expo to promote pure food and educate about the dangers of genetically engineering foods.”

What You Can Do

If you live in California: Vote Yes to Prop 37 on Election Day!

No matter where you live: Join the Right to Know campaign.

Grow as much of your own food as possible: Try growing heirloom varieties, so you can save the seed each year and have your own sustainable garden.

Educate Yourself: Check out the Non-GMO project, a non-profit organization committed to preserving and building sources of non-GMO products, educating consumers, and providing verified non-GMO choices.

Choose Organic: Anything with the USDA organic cannot contain GMO’s, so choose organic vegetables and foods at the supermarket.

Making Fridge Pickles in the Homegrown Skills Tent at Farm Aid

Farm Aid has a great site called Homegrown.org, and at each event they host a Homegrown Skills tent featuring fun workshops, speakers and demos from local gardening gurus and experts. I was in great company that day—the lineup included an heirloom seed saving demo by Tim Mountz of Happy Cat Farm, a soil workshop by the experts at the Rodale Institute, a presentation from PASA’s Buy Fresh, Buy Local Campaign and many other farm/foodie rockstars.

Tim Mountz of Happy Cat Farm led a workshop on heirloom seed saving

There was quite a crowd that wanted to get their pickle on, and I was thrilled to meet so many first timers who were excited to make pickles from their own gardens this year. I answered a ton of gardening questions, and made a quick batch of green tomato pickles and pickled jalapenos (which I just picked that morning).

Ready to make your own batch of rockstar pickles? Here’s the recipe we made at Farm Aid, from my book Homesweet Homegrown:

Easy One Step (Rockstar) Refrigerator Pickles

6 cups chopped or sliced vegetables (any kind will do—try cucumbers, green tomatoes, jalapenos, beets, whatever is handy!)

1 onion, thinly sliced

2 cups of white vinegar

1 cup of sugar

3/4 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of mustard seeds

4 garlic cloves, sliced

Optional spices to add: Habanero pepper slices, peppercorns, dill, etc.

Makes 4 pints

Pack vegetables, spices and garlic clove in sterilized jars. Combine vinegar and sugar in a small saucepan, stir well and bring to a boil. Cook 1 minute then pour into jars and put the lids on. Let cool and then store in the fridge.

These pickles are a great alternative to traditional canning because the veggies stay crunchy, and you don’t have to drag the canner out, but, because of this, they need to stay in the fridge. Enjoy!

Last week, I taught a class at the Rodale Test Kitchen to help spread the tomato insanity (which I am calling the great Tomatozilla of 2012) and we had so much fun canning up a storm!  Our class made quick work of more than 100 pounds organic, heirloom paste tomatoes and Patrick Montero, the photo editor at Organic Gardening, was on hand to document the whole scene.

We kept things simple, and started by blanching and skinning all of the tomatoes before adding half of them whole into jars,  with a few tablespoons of lemon juice. The other half we whipped up into a tasty salsa using local organic garlic, jalapenos, onions, and cilantro. Both recipes were from this great USDA guide for putting up tomatoes, and in just a little over two hours, we had canned more than 30 jars!

Now is a great time to have a canning party with friends and stock up for the year. In just an afternoon, you can can a huge amount of tomatoes, enjoy homegrown tomatoes all winter and have plenty to give away as gifts—if they last that long!

Our next stop took us to Portland, Oregon, home of food trucks, kombucha on tap, vegan minimalls, pedal-powered coffee roasters, and speakeasy style pickles. Put a bird on it—we were in love.

City Farm, located in North Portland, Oregon, specializes in medicinal and edible varieties.

We trekked down to City Farm, a new urban nursery in the St. John’s part of town. Owner Nik Hahn opened City Farm last February and is already off to an amazing start—this little shop is packed with everything urban homesteaders need to get their garden on, including a full line of canning supplies, organic mulches, soils and amendments, composters, bins of cover crops available by the pound, ducks, chicks, coops, bees, beneficial bugs, and a beautiful selection of books to get you started on basically any food/farm project you can think of. Oh, and the seeds!

City Farm owner Nikki Hahn.

As a self-described “plant nerd,” Hahn has a fantastic variety of rare medicinal seeds, annuals and perennials, eclectic heirlooms, fruit trees, flowering plants, and more—all with a focus on hyperlocal, sustainable, and organic growing. City Farm even has a whole wall dedicated just to local seeds, featuring seeds from Nichols Garden Nursery and Wild Garden Seeds, two Oregon-based companies.

When Hahn had the chance to move into the house next to City Farm last April, the first thing she did was rip up every last bit of lawn and start growing food.

“It was all sod as far as the eye could see,” says Hahn.

Well, not anymore. In its place, she planted a massive front-yard garden featuring potatoes, tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, eggplant, kale, herbs, edible flowers, and raspberry bushes. Melons now grow in the big, cooked-down pile of sod, and tomatoes climb bamboo trellises along the sidewalk out front.

Owner Nikki Hahn removed all of the sod in her front yard to build a massive garden.

It’s this vision that Nikki used to helped transform this little industrial corner of Portland into a thriving urban nursery store. Today in true Portland style, the store even has its own food truck parked out front—The Garden Well—which serves up local brew from St. John’s Coffee Roaster and Free Salad Fridays, featuring greens and edible flowers grown in the City Farm garden.

“The building itself used to be a muffler shop, and before that it was a Harley shop, so it’s been a lot of fun to take a space that was so machine-based and so mechanical and turn it into something green and repurpose it,” says Hahn.

This is definitely a running theme in the city, and it’s so refreshing to see people turning vacant spaces into something beautiful (and tasty). As we walked around Portland, I was amazed at all of the ways Portlanders were fitting in food—nasturtiums along the side of storefronts, trellised cucumbers along the front sidewalk, and raised beds built up around curbs.

A beautiful example of a front-yard garden at 22nd and Pine Street in Portland.

Emily Townsend picks salad greens from her front-yard raised beds in Southeast Portland.

Thanks to a new program we saw in Portland called Farm My Yard, there will be even more gardens popping up in Portland (and hopefully across the country). This genius program pairs urban farmers with vacant lawns and unused spaces throughout the city. It’s pretty simple, actually: If you have a patch of lawn that you’d like to offer up, you just put a Farm My Yard sign out, and an interested gardener can claim your space. Both parties sign an agreement, and the homeowner gets a share of all food grown—it’s a total win-win. Spread the word, and you can help bring a little bit of Portland’s front-yard garden charm to your neck of the woods.

Farm My Yard signs have started popping up in Portland.

Next Stop: Portland, Part II: Heirloom cocktails and restaurant farming at Besaw’s.

All Photos by Paul David, except the Farm My Yard, courtesy of FarmMyYard.org

Written by Grow Indie.com founder Robyn Jasko, and illustrated by Jennifer Biggs, Homesweet Homegrown is a new DIY food book that empowers people everywhere to grow their own organic food, whether they live in a high-rise city apartment or an acre in the suburbs.

About the Homesweet Homegrown Book Tour

To launch a national book tour for their new book Homesweet Homegrown: How to Grow Make And Store Food No Matter Where You Live, author Robyn Jasko and illustrator Jennifer Biggs created a Kickstarter campaign which catapulted to almost 400% past their goal, with the help of gardeners and DIYers around the globe. So, this summer, they hit the tracks on an epic Amtrak book tour to host signing events across the country.

From Seattle to Philadelphia, they met with urban farmers, front yard gardeners, city beekeepers, community gardeners, farm to fork foodies, and hung out with countless city chickens.

Here are their experiences from the road.

First Stop: Seattle!

After just making our plane by a mere 4 minutes, we were en route to Seattle, WA to kick off the Homesweet Homegrown book tour. Our first stop was June 21 at the Village Green Nursery in southwest Seattle to sign books, chat with fellow gardeners and host a demo about making tasty heirloom cocktails from the garden featuring spirits from Bainbridge Organic Distillery.

Heirloom cocktails made with spirits Bainbridge Organic Distillery, antique roses from Village Green, and rosemary simple syrup. Photo by Joseph Geiger

The event began with joint talk with Colin McCrate and Brad Halm of Seattle Urban Farm Company, a company they started in 2007 to answer the question: “Does anybody need help setting up an edible garden?”

Since then, McCrate and Halm have started hundreds of gardens throughout the Seattle area, and have even begun working with local restaurants to create rooftop gardens in the center of the city. Their new book Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard, helps readers at home set up their own little microfarm, anywhere.

Group Shot: (from left to right) Hilary Dahl, Colin McCrate, and Brad Halm if Seattle Urban Farm Co., Vera Johnson of Village Green Nursery, and Robyn Jasko and Jennifer Biggs, of Homesweet Homegrown Photo by Joseph Geiger

“We structured the book based on with what we go through with any customer during their initial consultation,” says Halm. “We started with the initial site analysis where we take you on a walk through your yard and find the best sun exposure and a good microclimate for growing vegetables. Then we move on to the process of building the garden, adding shade or winter coverings, trellises, organic practices, pest management and more.”

Halm and McCrate are also expanding into other realms of urban agriculture.

Village Green. Photo by Joseph Geiger

“Right now there is a huge growing interest in people wanting to connect to the food that they are eating,” says McCrate. “In an urban setting, you have limited space, but there’s still alot you can do. We figure out the best way to make that happen on their property. It can be a combination of vegetable beds, fruit trees, strawberry bushes, grape vines—anything from a couple of containers on a deck to an entire landscape renovation of edible plants.”

They’ve also begun to set up rooftop gardens for restaurants in the center of Seattle, most recently at Bastille Cafe and Bar.

“In a part of the city with pretty limited growing space, Bastille can grow enough food for the restaurant to be harvesting year round. They pick produce that afternoon and serve it that same night,” says McCrate. “We are really trying to promote projects like that. Any new, creative way to produce food out of Seattle is our ultimate goal.”

I also had a chance to meet up Vera Johnson, owner of Village Green Nursery, who has created a rare gem of a city nursery, with organic, local and rare varieties of perennials, annuals and antique roses on more than 2 lush acres right in the heart of Seattle.

“Since I bought it, I’ve really turned it into my own space,” she says. “I started keeping honeybees, chickens. We started an organic kids vegetable garden,” says Johnson. “We are a perennial nursery, but with the strong interest in growing your own food we’ve started focusing on edibles as well.

Throughout the season, Village Green hosts several classes and educational programs for the community, from urban chicken keeping to making your own compost tea. On Fridays, they invite children from the neighborhood to be part of the kids learning garden, start seeds, dig, weed, feed the chickens, and do whatever needs to be done. All of their perennials, herbs and annuals are grown organically, and they source their plants from as nearby as possible.

“Organics, sustainability and keeping it local is my focus,” says Johnson. “If I can’t grow it myself, I try to find the product that I need within 50 miles. And, if I can’t find it within 50 miles, chances are really good that we are not growing it here on Seattle and it’s not going to thrive or survive here anyway.”

Next Stop: City Farm and Besaw’s in Portland, OR!

Robyn mixing up Heirloom Cocktails. Photo by Joseph Geiger

About the Author

Robyn Jasko, is a local foods activist, community garden starter, and co-founder of Grow Indie, a site promoting sustainable lifestyles, homesteading, eating well, and living local. Her first book, Homesweet Homegrown: How to Grow, Make and Store Food, No Matter Where You Live, was published on May 1, 2012.

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