Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

My local toast—this morning’s breakfast slice of whole wheat from local baker Barb, along with a tall glass of supermarket-orange-juice-not-from-concentrate-with-pulp, and all-from-the-store orange pekoe tea with cream and sugar. The toast is spread with industrial peanut butter (smooth!), Gloria-Jean’s Sundae in a Jar (strawberries, raspberries, sugar, pectin, from the farmers’ market…mmmm!), and expensive transfat-free margarine. Altogether not so local, and nothing from this farm, but the bread is delicious… Some things I’m compelled to plan, like changes to the market garden. But when it comes to eating local, there is NO WAY I’m going to sit around with lists and notes, calculating food miles, looking up arcane food processing ingredients, interrogating local producers and the like. “Planning” my diet and, uh, FOOD STRATEGY to be Local would reduce the pleasure of eating to a chore, and that’s not fun! My personal preference for local food seems to be emerging as a natural extension of tiny farming and eating what I grow, which is cool. My instinctive approach to local food is…laid-back, figure it out as I go. Let’s see what happens!

Today was the farmers’ market’s annual winter market, held indoors in town. It’s supposed to be local produce and locally made crafts, no reselling of manufactured stuff, and for the most part it is. I go to hand out CSA flyers. On the food side, there are storage veggies, like potatoes and carrots, and lots of baking, condiments and preserves. So I did some shopping. Every Saturday during the market season, I buy from other vendors, but winters I’ve trailed off. This year, with the small but purposeful start on the way to a CSA root cellar, my mind’s more on personal, year-round “eating local”, and I’m doing something about it. One way is to stock up when you can. I bought half a dozen bottles of a really fine maple garlic mustard that I’d tried before, and a variety of preserves (we’ve been eating local jams and jellies almost exclusively for a while). I’m also trying a Scotch bonnet hot pepper sauce (it has a slow, steady burn, gonna get a six-pack!). There’s two liters of pure maple syrup (I’ll check out the farm it comes from, down the road, when the sap is running this spring!). I also picked up several loaves of whole wheat, multigrain and Ezekiel bread, which I’ll slice and freeze (and I can order a minimum of four or five loaves from Barb, custom baked, for pick-up when I’m in town). With the stored veggies in the basement and in the freezer (like the simple, tastes-like-summer tomato sauce), it’s a pretty good start. And local food feels excellent. I absolutely look forward to the taste of everything or I wouldn’t be eating it! From reading and from watching the garden grow, I really do believe in the superior nutritional quality of non-industrially raised food, even if it’s something you mightn’t SEE on the day-to-day. And the satisfaction of knowing my food right to the people who make it and the raw ingredients they make it from is deep and really fun. This to me feels like luxury, and it’s only getting started!