I love this article in the Wall Street Journal about a woman selling CSA shares of her sheep’s fleeces. For $100, people could buy 1 percent of the Fiber Farm’s spring shearing, either as yarn or as spinning wool. “I had no idea it would take off the way it did,” said Susan Gibbs, creative shepherdess. “We definitely tapped into something.” This may sound as kooky to people as selling raw milk as “bath milk” or selling raw-milk cheese as the unappetizing-sounding “fish bait” or “pet food,” but really, guys, it’s all about how you spin it. There are people out there spending $58 on a skein of yarn made from the shed underbelly hair of a musk ox, and you just need to know how to reach them. Gibbs sure has.

On the other side of the CSA spectrum, I’d like to shout out to cut-flower CSAs, which don’t get enough attention. The conditions—environmental, chemical, human—under which most of the world’s flowers are grown are appalling, and cut-flower CSAs are a lovely way of assuring a constant supply of fresh flowers that haven’t been flown over in an air-conditioned environmental destruction machine. They doesn’t solve the problems of the people working in cut-flower sweatshops on the other side of the world, but at least it doesn’t perpetuate them.

Let’s hear it for The New York Times’ sustainability reporting over the last few days and weeks, too. Granted, Earth Day has pushed things to a head, but the Grey Lady has really upped her coverage, from Andrew Martin and Kim Severson’s article on rising food prices to Anne Raver’s paean to vegetable gardening to the magazine’s recent Green Issue, with the aforementioned inspirational alarm bell by Michael Pollan.

Finally, I’m thinking of a friend of mine who owns a bar in town and just bought another bar. This one’s in the countryside, on a ten-acre plot. He plans on divvying up the land into allotments, leasing those out to amateur gardeners, and turning the bar into a place where they can come for a drink during or after their gardening day. In his long-term vision, there’ll be a restaurant where people can bring in their produce and have it cooked.

If we all keep coming up with creative solutions, the future will start to look a little brighter…