Trina Sargalski

Earth Learning, a Miami-based sustainability group which focuses on food and agriculture, hosted the third annual Greater Everglades Community Food Summit, which ended last week. The summit included a tour of local farms and gardens.

The farm tour visited Frank Macaluso's Kendall home. Macaluso has turned his lawn, which sits on an approximately ¾-acre lot, into an edible garden.

If you’re a regular listener to WLRN, you might recognize the voice of Phil Latzman, anchor and host at WLRN.  Phil also happens to be one of NPR’s go-to guys whenever there’s a hurricane anyplace near South Florida. But it wasn’t always that way.

On the weekend before Hurricane Andrew hit in August 1992, Phil was young, living on South Beach, having a good time, playing basketball, going to the beach and listening to a lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers.

We’ve been listening to your stories and memories of Hurricane Andrew and life afterward. Many people have told us that one of their strongest memories from after the storm is how neighbors–who might have usually just walked from their car to their door without saying hello–banded together.

In one Cutler Bay neighborhood, people were already friendly and helpful. As the storm was coming, they helped each other put up shutters. But after the storm, the neighbors became a kind of surrogate family.

Danny Rivero is our social media editor here at WLRN. You don’t hear his voice on the radio, but Danny’s is the voice of WLRN on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

Music teacher Mario Ortiz has been teaching classic salsa tunes to elementary and middle school students for 14 years.  Outside the classroom, Mario plays trumpet in a salsa group. He learned music from his father, who was also named Mario Ortiz.

The elder Ortiz was a well known salsa bandleader (for the Mario Ortiz All Star Band)  in Puerto Rico in the 1960s.  He died in 1999.

We asked you about your experiences with Miami-Dade’s canals.  A couple of people wrote in on Twitter to tell us about some of the fish they’ve caught for sport in the waterways.  @Vice-Queen Maria mentioned peacock bass.

If you’ve ever visited Little Haiti, you’ve probably seen Miami muralist Serge Toussaint’s work, which is sprinkled throughout the city. How can you tell it’s his work? His signature is a dollar sign instead of an “S” in Serge. He spends most of his time in Little Haiti, but his work can be seen in Liberty City, Little River, Allapattah, the Miami River and all the way to Fort Lauderdale.

It’s mango season in South Florida. Thanks to our humid climate and poor soil, this region excels at mango growing – only rivaled by Hawaii. The man who knows most about mangoes in Miami is Dr. Richard Campbell, the senior curator of tropical fruit at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables.

After January’s massive earthquake, thousands of Haitians fled to the United States. More than 2,500 of them were school-aged kids who were quickly placed in classrooms across South Florida.

The new students were suddenly immersed in a foreign language, culture, and school system.  It could have been a bewildering experience.  But at Boyd Anderson High School in Lauderdale Lakes, the Haitian students who lived in South Florida before the quake took the recent arrivals under their wings.

Good food and good stories are two of life’s greatest pleasures.  I usually write about food at Miami Dish, but today Under the Sun ventures into the culinary world.  Last Sunday, I saw Liliane Nerette Louis present at the Historical Museum of South Florida.  She is all about good food and good stories; she is both an honored storyteller and a masterful cook.