Noertheast Georgia Locallygrown Availability list for March 13

The market is open.

Locally Grown - Availability for March , 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

We’re hopping on into spring this week and henceforth, so prepare yourselves for an increase in products slowly but then steadily, and then a full blow onslaught by May. Nearly 300 total products listed this week.

I really want to plug all our incredible EGG GROWERS. I know many of you have come to appreciate the sheer wonder of PASTURED organically fed eggs from hens hanging out in the sunshine eating bugs and wearing sunglasses. Ok, that last one was an exaggeration, but there’s no doubt these chickens are happier and healthier by a factor of 100 compared to store bought eggs. I’ve been in my share of conventional poultry houses and the closest thing I can compare them to is concentration camps. That’s not an exaggeration and I encourage you to visit one if you’d like to put it to the test.

When animals of any kind are either kept in undersized cages (laying hens and conventional pigs are kept this way all day and night their entire lives), or huddled so closely together that they can’t fully extend their wings without hitting their neighbor they release a nearly continuous flood of a stress hormone called corticosterone. This stress hormone is passed on into the egg (it’s called maternal stress…some of you can relate) and then we eat it. I don’t know if its bad for you (this stress hormone), but I do know that birds that have high corticosterone get sick more often including with Campylobacter and Salmonella.

If this is making conventional food sound unappetizing it should.

That’s why were encouraging ALL our customers to consider buying an EXTRA dozen eggs this week and GIVE the SECOND DOZEN to a close friend that you care about and would like to see get the enhanced nutrition of eggs from chickens that don’t have stress or disease, and have higher omega 3s in their eggs yolks because Omega 3’s come from the chloroplast of leaves and these birds eat a lot of grass.

It’s fun to share the knowledge behind the food here at Locally Grown. It takes extra time for us all to understand our environments well enough to make better informed decisions, but doesn’t it feel good to know that your supporting the kind of farms that make us healthier, the environment healthier and our communities healthier. It also feels good to show appreciation simply through opening our wallets each week, rewarding those things we want to see more of. And by doing so you are depriving your dollars to the things you think we need less of. It’s an act of sustainability, community and health planning all at the same time.

So no kidding, we hope you’ll buy some extra eggs this week (or anything else that looks good to you). Do a little google research and tell your own version of what makes these eggs special to someone you know. I’ve got the person I’m going to do this for picked out right now and I’m about to hit ORDER!

We hope you enjoy this coming week’s opportunities to

EAT WELL!

Chuck, Justin, Teri and Andrew

PS – if you do cook some eggs this week please send us a photo. I made a pretty good open face egg sandwich this morning I should have shot. And get ready to see a short video real soon on one of our egg producers. They will also be featured on this years FARM TOUR in June.

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown Availability list for Mar 6.

Good Evening Locavores
This week-end is a herald for spring with our shift to daylight savings time.
Remember to set your clocks forward Saturday night.
Lets hope that sun and warmer days for the weekend will be the start of a genuine warming trend. Every added minute of sunlight each day now is giving a boost to new plant growth.
Enjoy the weekend and eat local food.

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown Availability List for Feb.27

Good Evening Locavores
February is finishing with a deep freeze and March will be coming like a lion. While your farmers stuggle on with adversity the bakers have their chance bask in warmth and provide all manner of delicious baked goods for your enjoyment.
We are happy to have Wauka Meadows Farm of Hall County joining the market this week with pastured eggs and pork.
Check out their farm description and philosophy on Our Growers page.
Have a great weekend enjoy freash local food.

Market CANCELLED

Hi Market members,
You should already have received notification that Northeast Georgia Locallygrown market is cancelled today due to winter storm weather.
All orders will be cancelled. The market will reopen as usual on Friday evening to accept orders for next week.
Best to all.

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown CANCELED this week

Hi Locavores,
We hope you are all staying warm and enjoying the beauty of the snow this morning. We have three inches or more here in Tiger.
At this time more snow is predicted for tomorrow afternoon.
Even though the main roads may be cleared we are aware that many people have difficulties with steep driveways and secondary streets that may be dangerous for driving.
For this reason we have decided the best and safest course is to cancel the market for this week.
Be safe and we will look forward to next weeks market.

Locally Grown - Availability for February 25th, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

This last week was pretty exciting! First, there were lots of questions from both farmers and customers about whether we would carry on with Locally Grown in the freezing cold ice and snow. The answer was Yes! As long at the roads aren’t horribly dangerous we keep the Local Food moving from the farm to your fridge to your bellies nearly every week all year long. We do REALLY appreciate it when everyone works with us the way you did this past Wednesday by picking up in just a one hour time frame so we weren’t freezing to death. We had 100% support on that and we really THANK YOU. Everything went well and hopefully you enjoyed getting good fresh local food in the dead of winter.

There were some other exciting developments this last week. The first I’ll offer as a teaser. Andrew and I went to visit a farm that’ll be joining Locally Grown in just a few weeks that will have some excellent BEEF, PORK and EGGS produced on a farm that just relocated to north Hall County. It was a frigid day on our visit, but we were very impressed with what we saw and can’t wait to welcome a new MEAT producer to the market. Since they’ll be joining us soon enough I’ll save lots of other details including their name for their grand entrance coming quite soon!

Georgia Organics had their huge annual conference this past weekend in Athens (about 1,000 in attendance) and Chuck and Andrew and I had the privileged opportunity to go down and give a presentation on the role of FARMERS NETWORKS in building Local Food Systems as one of the conference sessions. Many of you may not yet be aware of the Georgia Mountains Farmers Network (GMFN) that we started back in January 2012 and how important that has been in creating regional collaboration amongst sustainable farmers. To give you an example of how important, the GMFN is the reason that Locally Grown expanded to Gainesville this past year. Our little group would vote every year on our top priority projects to collaborate on, and every year COLLABORATIVE MARKETING to get more products to more customers was voted as a top priority. The more we discussed how to do it, we realized that 1) We wanted to reach URBAN customers to increase our sales potential and; 2) We wanted to continue to sell RETAIL (as opposed to Wholesale). We discussed many ways to accomplish that goal, and eventually discovered that expansion of the Locally Grown market to Gainesville was our best possible opportunity.

It’s taken a lot of effort, but our collaborations have paid off in just the 3 years that GMFN has been around. We have a board of directors, our FARM TOUR (mark your calendar now for June 27-28) is a huge event promoting local food farms regionally with over 500 people attending last year. And in less than a month our little group (it’ll be about 50 people) will have our annual meeting at Harvest Habersham, enjoying a really good meal of food grown from their own farms to discuss what we want to accomplish in 2015 and onward.

Rather than try and re-give the whole talk here, feel free to take a look at the SLIDESHOW

If you’ve got an hour to kill and would enjoy plugging your headphones into an MP3 describing how our local farming community has grown over the last 3 years here’s the AUDIO from the talk.

That’ll do it for this week. Our item count is a little low this week. Obviously the coldest week of the year stifles the growth of fresh veggies, but order big of what we do have and get ready. We are just days away from the beginnings of spring crops. I can feel the excitement in the air.

EAT WELL,

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown Availability list for Feb. 20

Good Evening Locavores
Your market managers and volunteers want to thank everyone for coming to pick up your orders early this past Wednesday. It was a blessing to finish the market earlier than usual and get out of that brutal cold and wind.
Be safe this weekend and stay warm.

Locally Grown - Availability for February 18th, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

Baby it’s cold outside. We’re getting the tail end of winter this week. Please be kind and pick up your orders as early as possible this week to keep our market managers from standing in the cold any longer than they have to (the low on Wednesday is predicted at 6 degrees, YIKES!).

That said, the warm spot of your week could and should be picking up some good Local Food. We have a special guest FARM on the market this week, LoganBerry Heritage Farm from up north of Cleveland are featuring their SOY FREE pastured eggs. We don’t see LoganBerry listed here often so show them some love and order an extra dozen this week. Give some to a friend as a way to let ‘em know you’re thinking about them. I think if anyone gave me a dozen fresh eggs, I’d know instantly that they really, really care.

This week we’d like to ask all of our CUSTOMERS to do a small something extra that will HELP US ALOT and should turn around and GIVE RIGHT BACK TO YOU.

It’s a 2015 CUSTOMER survey! This is the best way for us to get a read on what products each of you would like to see more of in the year ahead. Farmers can peruse this list and grow more of the items that they see are in high demand. The SURVEY also asks a few questions about other ways to improve LOCALLY GROWN and if there are ways you’d like to get more involved and help the market grow.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5ZTGCKH

The survey will be open for the next several weeks, but please TAKE IT TODAY! Cold weather is good for dreaming of spring and summer’s bounty. The sooner we know what’s in demand, the quicker we can start planting it in the field.

Locally Grown also has several new VOLUNTEER opportunities open for the right people.

The first is an “early market helper” at our Clarkesville Location to help us receive goods from farmers on Wednesday’s starting at 1:45pm until around 4:30pm (and they could stick around for customer pickup if desired). This individual needs a strong back as work would involve pulling coolers from our shed and once full from farm deliveries loading them onto a truck. It’s a fun job as it involves interacting with all the farmers during delivery. The volunteer will receive a small food stipend. If you or someone you know would be interested send an e-mail to soque@windstream.net.

The second is one or more people who’d be willing to help put together some BASKETS that we’ll fill with Locally Grown products for submission in several Hall County charitable SILENT AUCTIONS as a way to promote the market. We’re hoping someone with a creative flair would be willing to make these really zing giving Locally Grown a great impression around town. Here’s a photo of something we like, but feel free to bring your own creative ideas. E-mail Andrew if interested at Andrew.NGLG@gmail.com

That about does it for tonight. Stay warm. Enjoy the snow if we get it. And don’t forget to….

EAT WELL,

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown Availability list for Feb. 13

Good Evening Locavores
Arctic temps,wind chill, snow and ice Oh My! What a week we have ahead. At least we can all plan to spend more time indoors this week and what better way to beat the winter chill than with comfort food, hot and savory from the stove.
The market offers all the ingredients needed to beat the winter blues; from fresh vegetables to meats, eggs, baked goods, and prepared foods. And don’t forget those power packed micros and sprouts from Baker Springs.
You can indulge your sweetie all week with mountain honey and sweet treats from biscotti to cakes.
Have a great Valentines Day and warm your heart with someone special.