Locally Grown - Availability for January 23rd, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

As cold weather sets in a bit this week, consider getting some Locally Grown specialties to warm and cure your body. Here’s some quick tips:

The Herb Cottage Garden has some Cold & Congestion Fighting Herbal Chest Oil. I’m about to use some right now.

Jumpin Goat has about 6 different varieties of locally roasted COFFEE some in whole bean some in ground.

Apparently eating lots of garlic is good for a cold. And we have LOTS of GARLIC.

I don’t know much about the HOT CHOCOLATE ON A STICK-VARIETY PACK from Leslie’s Garden Dream, but it’s got to be good right?

A glass of tea with some good local honey from PURE MOUNTAIN HONEY is probably my favorite night time soother.

And if all that fails and your still feeling a bit cold and dreary, get yourself a bottle of BLOODY MARY MIX from the VEGGIE PATCH and add some other specialty ingredients and that ought to the do the trick.

Thanks for supporting and enjoying LOCAL FOODS.

and EAT, DRINK and in every other conceivable way LIVE WELL!

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew

Locally Grown - Availability for January 21st, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

I hope everyone gets to enjoy either a little time off for the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, or is participating in the MLK Day of Service! I’ll be doing the latter tomorrow at a Garden Workday in Clarkesville at our GreenWay Garden. Anybody looking to enjoy the warm afternoon in the sunshine is welcome to join us from 1-4 pm if you’re close to Clarkesville and would like to see an organic garden and what winter chores look like. It’ll be a combination of mulching fruit trees, digging up raspberries (in fact you might be able to take a few cuttings home with you) and some shed clean up!

I really like the MLK Day of Service slogan, “make MLK a day on, not a day off.” Though we didn’t organize a unique MLK event just for Locally Grown this year, we are in the process of developing several activities that supportive community members could be a huge help to us and our farmers in 2015. Here’s a short list and if you have special skills or interest in any of the above please let us know.

• We’re considering how to BUILD a SHED somewhere near our Gainesville location that would allow us to store our coolers, shelving, boxes and signs in between markets. A shed would also allow us to start receiving items from farms and producers located closer to Gainesville which we hope to do by spring.
• Grace Calvary Church in Clarkesville has been the best possible host for our market there we ever could have imagined. To show our appreciation, sometime in 2015 we would like to help take care of the CARPORT where we have our pickups. A WORKDAY would consist of cleaning the roof of some little trees starting to grow on it, and painting some or all of the outside.
• June 27th is our 2015 FARM TOUR and this year we are planning to do help some of the farms that participate in the tour by organizing a handful of CROP MOBS to help them clean up their farms, and get a handle on the weeds, etc. before the BIG TOUR. If you are interested in being involved in helping farmers during their busiest point in the season get in touch with Andrew the 2015 TOUR COORDINATOR at foodandfaces@yahoo.com
• Locally Grown is hoping to attend several events in the Gainesville / Hall County community this year just to get our name and mission out there. One of them is coming up soon, the BUY LOCAL SAFE and GREEN EXPO on FEBRUARY 5th. If you’d be interested in helping us hand out fliers and business cards at this event please let us know. There will be other opportunities this year for customers to lend to our little market some new faces and testimonials. You guys have always talked us up better than we ever could ourselves.

Well that’s about it for tonight. This week I really enjoyed cooking up some collard greens, having some Cheddar Dill Bread from Habersham Bakers, and adding fresh cilantro to my meatballs instead of parsley.

Have a Great MLK DAY and
EAT WELL,

Justin, Chuck, Andrew, and Teri

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown Availability List for Jan. 16

Good Evening Locavores
We hope you all were able to enjoy the glorious sunshine today. The farm animals and struggling vegetable plants sure did.
As always, thanks for supporting your local producers and enjoy local food.
Your Locallygrown market is now open.

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown Availability List for Jan. 16

Good Evening Locavores
We hope you all were able to enjoy the glorious sunshine today. The farm animals and struggling vegetable plants sure did.
As always, thanks for supporting your local producers and enjoy local food.
Your Locallygrown market is now open.

Locally Grown - Availability for January 14th, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

Oh, it was good to be back on Local Food this week. Tonight for dinner we had some of Mill Gap Farms broccoli raab and The Veggie Patch’s napa cabbage. Last night we had some of BG Farms Ribeye’s with some beautiful broccoli crowns from The Veggie Patch. Then since we had some leftover steak last night it was steak and KP Farms eggs for breakfast. Beyond good!

I love getting a great recipe idea from our Locally Grown FACEBOOK posts. The one I saw today from Leslie Montemayor was ironic because I already own Jamie Alred’s cookbook “Field Kitchen” but I’ve yet to make a single dish yet. The sunchoke soup with broccoli raab is perfect for the season we are in! I was short one pound of the sunchokes so they are in my basket as I speak so I can follow in Leslie’s footsteps while making a dish that many of you may have tried as Jamie has offered the soup for sale through the market a couple of weeks in the past.

We hope that in 2015 we get on average one good recipe a week from our customers! Not only does it help to inspire all of us on some new things to eat, it really makes the farmers feel good to see their food whipped up into a wonderful experience on your plate. You can post them to the RECIPES section of this website or to our Facebook page at

https://www.facebook.com/NGLGmarket

I’m gonna keep it nice and simple tonight! Thanks for eating local in the new year and we hope you enjoy all this week’s great offerings.

EAT WELL,
Justin, Chuck, Amy, Teri and Andrew
and the rest of the NGLG crew

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown Availability list for Jan. 9

Good Evening Locavores,
One more cold night and we can look forward to some warmer days ahead.
The frigid temps and especially cold wind we experienced this week have set back some of the vegetables outside but, it also makes some of the root crops sweeter.
Many of your farmers are also growing vegetables in hoophouses and their value for providing wintergrown vegetables is now paying off with winter vegetables.
Now is also a good time to enjoy extra dishes of grassfed meats and eggs.
The delicious baked goods will top off a hearty hot winter meal.
This is a good time to stock up on the all natural skin care products to relieve chapped lips or hands.
Thanks for supporting your local farmers through the bitter cold this past week.
Keep warm, safe and enjoy local food.

Locally Grown - Availability for January 7th, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

Welcome back to Locally Grown after what feels like a very long break! My fridge is nearly empty of local food which is downright painful. Time to stock it back up!

We are bringing in the new year in style with the first of what will be numerous exciting changes and improvements to Locally Grown in 2015. I’m sure all of you have noticed the change in the appearance of the website. While everything functions exactly the same (please let us know if you found something that isn’t working properly), the site should look and feel just a little bit nicer. We also want to point out a very cool new logo designed by Andrew Linker. Very well done! Many of our Gainesville customers have already met Andrew, but you’ll be seeing a lot more of him in 2015 as he’ll be taking my place (Justin) as the full time manager at Gainesville. I’ll definitely be stopping by from time to time, but will be concentrating more energies in some of the logistics of growing the market this year.

I’d like to mention a couple of other things as we bring in the New Year. Locally Grown is supported by a huge fleet of volunteers and way underpaid managers. Since we’ve expanded to 3 locations now I thought I’d slow down long enough to mention all of our crew that makes the market possible.

Here’s how the LOCALLY GROWN CREW breaks down:

Justin and Chuck are co-managers of the whole market
Amy is the Tiger market manager
Teri is the Clarkesville market manager
Andrew is the NEW Gainesville market manager
Bruce King starts as our Shuttle Driver between Gainesville and Clarkesville this week!
Brooks is an occasional shuttle Driver between Tiger and Clarkesville
Lynn is an every other week Clarkesvillle volunteer
Crissy is an every other week Clarkesville volunteer
Annaclair is a substitute Clarkesville volunteer
Ron and Hildreth are our every other week Gainesville volunteers
Anne is an every other week Gainesville volunteer
Sue and Carrie are our substitute Gainesville volunteers

That’s a whole lot of people, and I apologize as I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few. We also have lots of farmers that help coordinate order deliveries between farms to try and cut down the driving time for everyone.

If you get a chance, please thank these individuals for giving so much of their time and energy to make this market possible. Each year that the market has grown we’ve had to expand our base of volunteers to help make sure we could continue, and each year, the right people have been there at the right times and we are very thankful for them. We have a great crew!

Maybe one day soon I’ll describe the history of the market again, and how we are organized by a farmer led non-profit called Georgia Mountains Farmers Network. But tonight I have a few other announcements to make.

Here are some of the things to look out and prepare for in 2015
New Farms are joining and will continue to join Locally Grown this year. We want to welcome The Veggie Patch at Bouchard Farms this week. The farm is certified organic, located in Commerce, GA, and has an incredible mix of greenhouse grown goodies (to keep us stocked up all winter) and a whopping 15 acres of field grown veggies that’ll come on strong for the spring and summer. We’ve posted a photo of Michelle Berzack the Farm Coordinator at The Veggie Patch showing off their greenhouses on a tour we took right before Christmas.

A Gainseville Farmer Drop Off Site will be coordinated sometime in the next 3 months, likely somewhere at the History Center pickup location. We’re in the process of looking at all the logistics now to make it as smooth as possible. What this will mean to you the customer is that we’ll be able to expand the number of farms and food vendors that can sell to the market, by adding a location that is closer for them to deliver to. This should greatly increase the diversity of products offered through the market. We could use your help. If you know of farms or food producers (that also meet our market standards) that would like to sell and are located within a 30 min drive or so from Gainesville, please let us know or let them know or both. Our focus is on food producers so we’re not encouraging other locally crafted goods at this time.

We’re working on our first ever Marketing Strategy with a great group of folks at FORUM COMMUNICATIONS in Gainesville. We’re very excited about this process and reaching new people in 2015. We believe with some creative approaches to engage more people with Locally Grown food, people could eat better, and farms will have a solid and growing customer base every month of the year. We also have found that quite a few of you are more than willing to talk us up. We thank you for that. With a few new cool tools and resources we think we could make it even easier to make Locally Grown look irresistible to people. That’s our aim, to become irresistible! And we look forward to engaging all of you in that process.

Before we wrap up tonights message, I just want to let each of you know that we consider everyone who buys food from the market, or reads these e-mails on a regular basis, or just keeps up with what we are doing to be a very important part of our Locally Grown team. Up until this point the success of our entire little market has been because of word of mouth from folks just like you who like good food, and like learning about sustainable farms, and then supporting those farms. We love the deep conversations we have with customers on market days about everything from how to cook jerusalem artichokes, to the benefits of probiotics, to how to plant, harvest and cure sweet potatoes successfully. It’s fun, it’s educational, it’s about building community around the things we love and above all else it’s about eating well. So THANK YOU for making 2014 our best year yet, and thanks in advance for your help in making 2015 …..well let’s just say it’s gonna be BIG!

So EAT WELL this week and here’s to the beginning of a GREAT NEW YEAR!

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew
in Clarkesville, Tiger and Gainesville

will be working on some other Locally Grown

Northeast Georgia Locallygrown Availability list for Jan. 2

Good evening Locavores,
Welcome back your Locallygrown market to begin a new year of fine dining with local healthy food. You will find some nice changes to the markets appearance with more to come.
We are very pleased also to introduce a new grower to the market, The Veggie Patch at Bouchard Farm. The Veggie Patch brings a bounty of fresh vegetables as well as prepared foods to the market.
Enjoy your new choices for 2015 and also your old favorites from 2014.