Locally Grown - Availability for March 3rd, 2013

Hey Local Food Lovers,

I want to start out by welcoming Leah Lake Farms back after a short hiatus (that felt long). Even though there’s just a few offerings in each category, make Brook’s feel your love by buying up everything that he has. I just spoke with him an hour ago and he mentioned that he loves selling out. We all do!

I’ve been talking to a lot of farmers on the phone today and getting some amazing insight into their farms. For instance, Sid Blalock at Burton Mountain Farms reminded me today that he has 3,000 tilapia fish that are probably just 2-3 months from being harvestable size. What’s amazing about it is that they’ve been primarily fed organically grown vegetable matter from his greenhouses. Everytime a plant like chicory grows a little to large to be sold for human consumption he can feed it to the fish! Heck, those tilapia are eating healthier than most people I know. Not only that, but the water from the fish tanks is then filtered over rock beds where he grows his watercress. This helps clean the water for the fish, while helping the watercress get all the nutrients they need. It’s an amazing system, and the first of its kind in our whole region. Sid’s a real pioneer. I keep telling him to send me a great recipe for his watercress for those who haven’t tried it yet. Anyone who has or finds a good watercress recipe send it in.

Speaking of recipes, we have some other new ones on our recipes section of the website this week. One is for yummy Cream Scones using Sylvan Falls own organically grown and water wheel ground whole rye flour, and whole wheat flour. One of the cool things about the recipe section is it links to products available through Locally Grown and you can click to order the products as your read the recipe. Another interesting one is a Microgreen soup which incorporates microgreens from Mighty Micros, Kale available from 3 or 4 of our farms this week, Jerusalem artichokes from Chuck and Amy and cilantro available from Leah Lake Farms. That’s four products in one recipe all available this week. Big thanks to our customer Cristy Damron for submitting that great recipe. And finally, lots of people at the Clarkesville pickup got to taste test Jerusalem Artichoke Hummus thanks to Amy Mashburn sending some down. That recipe is also available for all those that fell in love with it thanks to its submission by Patricia Howell.

If you’ve got an awesome recipe, please post it to our RECIPES page. Sarah Gillespie had an outstanding idea to one day in the near future to publish a cookbook of the great Locally Grown recipes that feature the favorite foods of local farmers with their local produce. I think that would be awesome. Anybody with some free time on their hands should step right up for that project!

Ok, before I go I want to try some technological shenanigans. I haven’t tried to paste a You Tube video in a message yet, so if this doesn’t work my apologies. I’ll put the link below just in case. But you’ve got to check out this amazing video of Ronnie Mathis the farmer behind Mountain Earth Farms feeding kale chips and green smoothies to middle schoolers at Wilbanks Middle School. This is part of the brand new FARM 2 SCHOOL program where Habersham County school kids will hopefully get to eat a lot of fresh local food this year. They are off to a great start. We’re proud of Ronnie for being the inspiration behind this program getting started and for changing forever these kids understanding of where food comes from.

If you enjoy this video please spread it around to everyone you know and encourage them to buy and eat local food in 2013!

or

http://youtu.be/2OX8qJN1Azs

AND DON’T FORGET TO EAT WELL,
Justin in Habersham
and
Chuck in Rabun