Locally Grown - Availability for July 1st , 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

Happy Happy Summer! We had an absolutely stunning weekend for the Farm Tour! Huge thanks to all of you who attended or helped spread the word, or volunteered. It takes a huge number of supporters to pull off an event like this and clearly the Farmers themselves deserve most of the credit for being willing to host visitors to their farms, planning good parking, setting up a place to sell food, and giving the tours.

In my lifetime of interactions with people I’ve yet to find more generous, friendly, and gracious people than farmers. You know what I mean? It makes sense I guess. Sustainable local food farmers truly want to feed and nourish people with good food. But it goes beyond that. They generally want to nourish people all around. There is a sort of innate spiritual depth to many of them. That combination of a true love for the earth, and a wonder with what the earth can provide to humanity when it is well cared for by hard working, dedicated and disciplined folk. You just can’t help but absorb some of the good cosmic vibe they give off when you are around them.

I’d like to think that Locally Grown, the Clarkesville Farmers Market, Simply Homegrown, the Gainesville Historic Downtown Market….these are all places where we are fortunate to experience the commerce of local foods. It’s where farmers make themselves and their foods available. But to go out to a farm and be a guest, is where the cultural depth of the local food movement comes into focus. Farmers are often too busy to be full time educators, but they have a knowledge of sustainability in practice that few of us get to experience. Figuring out how to access and use water, but to use it efficiently, to make the soil the best it possibly can be to grow the best possible crops, learning how the rising and the setting of the sun makes different parts of the farm best suited for particular crops.

One thing that really struck me this year is how much some of the farms have changed in the years since we started doing the FARM TOUR. Each year, new practices come into focus, little improvements made that add up to create a complex beauty resulting from the lessons of trial and error.

Before signing off and encouraging you all to order BIG this week, I just want to say that these things, this special knowledge does not belong to farmers and farmers alone. We all have yards, we all eat, we all generate excess organic matter. Experimentation is good. A small pile of compost in the corner of your yard can slowly change the fertility and environmental benefit of your entire property allowing more rainfall to penetrate the soils, more photosynthetic productivity, more shrubs and herbs scattered about that produce berries and spices. A rain barrel to recycle the rainfall will give you a deeper relationship to the water than that coming out of the tap and its better for your plants and your soil too. Each year see if you can’t turn your red soils a little blacker, create an oasis for animals, flying insects, and nature! And in the process you’ll be creating a little oasis of sustainability for yourself. One that you’ll be proud of and will nourish you.

Huge thanks to our area farmers for giving us a snapshot of their own “oasis of sustainability” they have created. And in the process inspiring us to glean a little bit from them.

Now go out and buy everything they have left to sell this week. I’ll share just a few quick things I’ve been enjoying. Last night we had angel hair pasta with squash that had been sliced in a madolin (you could use a chesse grater too) and cooked with butter and lots of pepper, a little salt. Then all mixed together with parmesan. Simple. Delicious. Fried pardon peppers on the side. We’ve also been eating lots of diced cucumbers and tomatoes tossed with balsamic and basil. My favorite summer salad. I’ll share my wife’s eggplant dish in garlic sauce next week.

Thanks and EAT WELL,

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew