For decades in the Gulf of Maine, Damien Parkington has seen lobsters follow the same migration pattern in the spring and early summer, coming in from deeper waters to find a more shallow spot to release their eggs.

"The first migration of lobsters is generally egg-bearing females that are searching habitat to go lay their eggs," he explained.

Seventeen-year-old Isaiah Peters is worried about local herring.

"I went to get some herring, I got like around like 15 of them and I was gutting them and then I realized halfway through that most of them, their roe, their eggs were just mis-colored and polluted."

The roe was a pasty grayish pink color—not the vibrant range of whites, oranges, or reds that Peters had seen in healthy fish.

When people talk about reasons to buy local fruits and veggies, they often bring up flavor. A tomato from the grocery store doesn’t taste anything like a tomato fresh from the garden. But Francie Randolph of Sustainable Cape says there’s a big health difference, too.

For the past two weeks on the Local Food Report, I’ve been airing pieces from an interview I did this winter with apple expert John Bunker. The Maine gardeners I grew up with spoke of Bunker’s apple knowledge with awe and reverence, and when I finally met him, I understood why. Bunker—founder of the mail order nursery Fedco Trees—grows an estimated 450 varieties of apples on his farm outside Augusta, Maine. When I asked him if he had any favorites, he named two—and added in a little history. Here are Bunker’s favorites, in his own words.

Meet John Bunker — a farmer in his 70s who arguably knows more about apple varieties than almost anyone alive in New England today. I’ve always wanted to meet him. Growing up in Maine, I’d hear about people driving up to John’s farm outside of Augusta, bringing him apples from old trees on their property, and hoping he could help them figure out what variety they were — and how to reproduce them, since apples don’t grow true from seed.

To keep many of our keystone nut trees dominant on the landscape, we need to burn the woods periodically. The same prescribed or “cultural” fires that make our sandy pine and oak forests less likely to succumb to catastrophic burns also help species like oaks, hickories, and hazels thrive. These trees are “fire-adapted”: they share traits including thick bark, the ability to resprout vigorously from deep roots, resistance to rotting after fire scarring, and seeds that germinate well in fire-created seedbeds.

Foraging for hazelnuts is really more appropriate in late summer/early fall, so around September, but this time of year their catkins— the male flowering component of the plant that produces all the pollen—are really obvious and dangling from the branches, and with no leaves on any of the trees or shrubs this is the time of year you can actually see them.

Barnstable County has one of the highest child food insecurity rates in Massachusetts. Today, Tammy Leone is Executive Director of Cape Kid Meals and says it’s grown quite a bit since Pastor Johnson first reached out to the elementary schools in his community of Dennis.

Barnstable County has one of the highest child food insecurity rates in Massachusetts. Today, Tammy Leone is Executive Director of Cape Kid Meals and says it’s grown quite a bit since Pastor Johnson first reached out to the elementary schools in his community of Dennis.

That’s the goal of the recently formed South Coast Food Policy Council — to get every part of the regional food system functioning and communicating. In the immediate future, Liz says, the most likely change is that Massachusetts residents will see big cuts to services like the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, which helps feed more than 12 percent of Mass residents or almost a million people. And to address this the council is dusting off pandemic-era approaches to making food assistance more local.