Local food

Virtual local?

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This morning, there was a phone company tech at work on the junction box at the top of the drive into the farm. I’m not sure what the guy and his logo-truck were up to exactly, but the picture made me think about tiny farming and the Web.

Right now, Bell and an independent telecom company are in an extravagant, introductory-offer battle for subscribers to the newly available DSL broadband service. High speed Internet access has been in this area for years, in towns and even villages, but dial-up was the only easy, painfully slow connection for most farms (we’re on the edge of a village, so we’ve had cable modem all the while).

Now, word-of-mouth is that people on farms are signing up for DSL—will more abundant web access mean more interest in having a web presence? This could be interesting because, out of 30+ vendors at the farmers’ market, I think this farm is still the only one with a web site. An odd situation, considering that online is really the only practical place for small producers to let people know what they’re up to. With the novelty of DSL, maybe more farms will finally get around to getting online, which is probably a good thing, because it takes more than a few people to make a local market thrive.

Just as Tiny Farm Blog has rapidly become embedded in my farming life (BTW, TFB isn’t the farm site), maybe this technology, where you sit in front of a screen and TYPE, is what it takes these days to hook people up in the communities where they actually live… I suspect, in some ways, to at least some people, you’re not all that REAL if you’re not represented online. Even if you’re practically next door! A little weird, but whatever works!

Not turkey, beets!

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While a bit of a tradition of leftover-turkey crepes were being cooked up for brunch this morning, I was eying the leftover boiled beets. It was something about shapes and the muted, earthy shades of purple, and maybe the bowl helped along the effect. Soothing. Mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop staring. Guess I’ve got veggies on my mind… These were beets from the basement, roughly cut up as you can see, a mix of red (probably Scarlet Supreme) and white-with-red-stripes Chioggia, which were colored by the red beet juice. Boiling this time round was easier, though baking is the favored way to cook ’em. Anyhow, possessed by the beets, I brought them out into the light to take a picture, grabbed the first suitable surface to stick in the snow (a wooden bushel basket, upended), and took a pic. The color is sort of as I saw it, but you really had to be there for the full effect. Stare into the beets… Like I said, veggies on my mind! :)

Local toast

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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!

Local food luxury

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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!

Putting food by

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With the farmers’ market over, time to turn to fall-and-winter things. This year, I’m for the first time organizing a proper veggie selection for storage (it’s about time I started…training for that future CSA root cellar!). Instead of the usual bushel baskets of this and that, casually left around the barn to take their chances with temperature and location, now, there’s a bit of plan. For a root cellar, the basement of the farmhouse, the side with a dirt floor that used to be filled with potatoes when this was a fully working, big family farm. For the veggies, today’s haul has a mix of potatoes, assorted winter squash and pumpkins, various carrots, onions, garlic, plus apples picked up at the market. It’s a first step, there’s still lots more in the field: beets, spinach, collards and kale, herbs, and more carrots to go… Harvesting isn’t history just yet!

Basic barbecue

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In my continuing series of small, curious steps backward, yesterday, I acted impulsively on an idea that’d come to me a couple of days earlier. Instead of the usual junk food “treat” that’s become a Saturday afternoon ritual on the way back from the farmers’ market , we stopped in at a local, independent butcher and bought small portions of beef, pork, chicken and four types of sausage, and at the mega-hardware store, a cheap, old style barbecue ($20CDN). Back at the farm, the meat got skewered, along with farm onions, mostly hot peppers, and three types of zucchini—a prepared rub on the meat, salt, pepper and olive oil on the veggies—and then it was over the coals instead of the usual propane treatment. There was enough to do it all over again late this morning for…brunch, to feed four. It may be a little silly, enjoying every turn to the seemingly simpler, like doing away with fast food and propane tanks in favor of a marginally more basic cookery, but it feels…good. I think this is tiny farming-induced behavior. Demand simplicity!!

Share of the week

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CSA harvest share

A specially Thursday-picked Large share, tiny farm flexibility in action for a shareholder who missed the weekend pick-up. A Large is about one and a half the size of the standard Single share. This week: carrot (Touchon), beet (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme), tomato (assorted heirloom), mesclun (9-lettuce), spring onion (Ramrod, Red Baron), summer squash (Sunburst, Golden Dawn III, Ambassador), potato (Gold Rush), pepper (Ace), onion (Stuttgarter), garlic (Music). The shares have been pretty good this year, not over the top (in a superabundant way) as they have been at times in the past, but definitely solid value for the fresh, local, organic dollar!


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