Locally Grown - Availability for October 29th, 2013

Hey Local Food Lovers,

One of the coolest things about getting involved in local foods is how INVOLVED you can become in local foods. For example, quite a few of our customers in Locally Grown have also become volunteers over the last few years. You may have noticed that during market pickup we have many different faces that are willing to help you and help our farmers by volunteering an hour or two to help distribute food. In the process they often learn a lot about the different farms, which foods are in season, and get a very small food stipend so they can always be sure and eat up and enjoy some of good food being offered from week to week. WE COULDN’T run this MARKET without these good souls! Be sure and tell them how much you appreciate their efforts and their knowledge.

We also have over 20 volunteers that help us with the annual farm tour. This is a great way for folks to get to know at least one of the farms that grows food in our region, and establish a friendship with a farmer or two. This is why most of us enjoy local foods so much, its so much more than just good food, it’s a relationship with the people and places that produce it, and a sense of community.

One of the cooler things about an internet farmers market is the barriers to entry can be slightly less intimidating for someone who wants to become a new producer. I’ll use myself as an example. Even though I’d grown a garden for years, it wasn’t until we had begun Locally Grown (back in 2010) that I realized, why not grow a little more food and share it with people through the market. I can’t recall now what I grew that very first year, but I can remember the joy and excitement of getting my first orders, harvesting from the field the very best of my crops so that they would look crisp and delicious in the bags, figuring out how to optimize their appearance so that a customer was just thrilled when they opened the bag and smelled the fresh food within.

Locally Grown is just at its very beginnings in our region. And we need more growers and customers. We plan to grow more of both this year with the help of some marketing resources.

Fresh Local Foods and people that are knowledgable about fresh local foods don’t just appear over night. Like anything else they have to be cultivated over time, giving time for trial and error. We often have small new farms start out with just a few products, then as they gain skill and confidence and find a few niches for products that are in short supply, they grow a little more, and become a fixture in our community of farmers. This has happened many times just in the last four years, and we look forward to it happening again.

Another thing that happens is customers will sometimes become producers. This week at the Clarkesville Location we have a FEATURED PRODUCER – Leslie Montemayor of Leslie’s Garden Dream. This is the second week we’ve asked Leslie to set up DURING MARKET and share her products and her experience and knowledge with healthful and local foods. She gave a demonstration at Tiger several weeks ago, and this week she’ll be at her home market in Clarkesville where she’s been a customer since the very beginning.

Leslie was inspired to share a few items with the market, and that list has recently expanded. She is the only person we know who grows luffa gourds (or loofah), which are dried to make luffa sponges for bathing or cleaning. I keep a luffa sponge sitting on my sink at all times for scrubbing those pans that need a little extra elbow grease, these make it easy. She also sells the seeds if you’re motivated to try and grow these yourself, and I’m sure she’ll tell you how to dry the gourds for use as well.

Leslie also makes healthy dog treats out of oat and rice flour, chicken liver from locally grown organic chickens, cheese, and locally grown eggs. Recently she added some good looking breads and cakes using organic ingredients too. I look forward to sinking my teeth into either her apple cake or sweet potato bread this Wednesday.

Locally Grown benefits from efforts to slowly but steadily replace our grocery store diets with Locally Grown and Locally Made foods. We try to be very cautious not to over emphasize processed food (even if they are made with more wholesome ingredients) or non-food products on the market. Locally Grown is obviously primarily about Locally Grown foods! This market more than anything is for the farmers, to help them access customers that want fresh, farm grown fruits and veggies, and meats. But as we grow, we’d love to see more people decide, “I have something to contribute. I’m going to go out and learn how to grow WASABI root because no one else is growing that.” Blurring the lines between who are producers and who are consumers is a healthy thing. Give yourself time to become really good at it before you try and unleash your gifts on the general public, but we welcome such efforts….as long as LOCAL products and sustainability is at the core of your efforts.

We hope you enjoy our featured producer this week. We hope to get a calendar of other featured farmers and producers going for 2015. That way you can meet some of the good folks that are filling your tummies.

Thanks for shopping and …..

EAT WELL,
Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew