Locally Grown - Availability for July 16, 2014

Hey Local Food Lovers,

We have lots of new curious customers checking out the market this week on the heels of the Gainesville Times excellent article in Friday’s paper about our recent expansion.

If you haven’t seen it you can read the article by clicking here

Before I give a quick intro of the market for all the newbies let me put in some plugs for some brand new products this week. We’re beginning to get some items in huge abundance and tremendous variety. Take beans for example. We have 5 different beans from 5 different farms, including some real rarities like the beautiful red noodle bean. Potatoes have recently been dug, and one of our farms specializes in potatoes providing their seasonally popular red, white and blue mix (perfect for around the 4th of July), which features a unique blue potato called Adirondack Blue that you can also buy by itself if you want to surprise your friends. I just added some to my cart to put some color on my plate this week.

It’s also cucumber time and even though the straight up pickling cucumber is my favorite I love to see the lemon cukes (they look like round lemons), marketmore and other unusual varieties are beautiful and delicious. We just had some mediterranean food this weekend and I’ve been saving some dill from my garden to make tzatziki which is just a peeled, seeded, chopped and squeezed cuke, with plain greek yogurt (I drain the whey), dill, lots of garlic, and a bit of olive oil and lemon. It’s delicious as a dip with pita chips or drizzled on a salad. It’s the sauce you add to gyros of course.

Before I get on a long tear on what I ate good this week (Mill Gap chanterelle mushrooms in a homemade alfredo sauce), let me welcome those who are finding us for the first time and try and explain who we are.

Locally Grown is a collaboration of farmers all over the North Georgia Mountains. Believe it or not just 4 years ago we didn’t all know each other that well, but thanks to this market (we started in 2010) and the Farmers Network we started in 2012 (which hosts the Farm Tour from two weeks ago) now we do and we’re collaborating to get more local food to more customers who want it.

Locally Grown accomplishes two things for farmers and customers. First, this brilliant website designed by our friend Eric Wagoner in Athens, GA allows us all to post what items we have available every week to a central ordering place. It also consolidates the orders, lets us know, and even generates these nifty little labels that we affix to every item so we know who gets which order. Second, we all live kind of far apart and even further from the customers we’d like to sell to. This market allows us to distribute food all over the place with two simple shuttles driven by our market managers.

Each week on Wednesday several hours before customers get to market, farmers drop off their orders at two locations (whichever is closest to them) one in Tiger, GA (outside Clayton) and the other in Clarkesville, GA. At each of these locations farmers gently place their orders in one of three sets of coolers, those headed to Tiger, those headed to Clarkesville and those headed now to Gainesville. After all their orders are sorted they get a check and get to head back home. Then the market managers drive the first shuttle between Tiger and Clarkesville and do a great big swap. Once that is done, the final shuttle from Clarkesville to Gainesville is driven. And that’s how food picked way up in the Georgia mountains (and barely into North Carolina) on Tuesday or Wednesday morning can make it Gainesville by Wednesday afternoon without each farmer driving it all the way down there.

The system has been working well for 4 years, and has been growing steadily each year. We’re also open 12 months of the year which is a little unique (lots of farms have greenhouses now), so you can eat fresh healthy food all year long. And our farms are required to follow chemical free standards, as well as other important practices like grass-fed livestock. We encourage you to check out our standards on the GROWERS page in a document at the top called GUIDELINES FOR GROWERS. As you’ll see if you shop here for a long time, we’re constantly trying to improve our standards as well requiring more and more local ingredients in all our various food products, because one of our goals is to build a local food economy that sustains beautiful and functional landscapes.

Before we go we wanted to ask EVERYONE to help us with a small task. We are looking for a couple of VOLUNTEERS at our GAINESVILLE location who might be willing to help us distribute food beginning just before our market hours between 4:45-7pm. Individuals could volunteer each week or an every other week schedule. Each volunteer would receive a delicious local food stipend (you can choose what you want right from the website) that would keep you eating well in exchange for a couple of hours of service. If you or someone you know is interested please send an e-mail to me at soque@windstream.net or send them this PDF . This might be perfect for college students, or really anyone that would like to learn more about local food and farms and get involved in a great new community effort.

We’re really enjoying expanding Local Food to Gainesville. It’s going great so far and new items keep popping up every week.

Thanks for supporting us and EAT WELL,
Justin in Habersham
Chuck in Rabun
and Andrew and Teri