Eating Local

Happy Kitchen Garden Day! Here, we celebrate a week later, on the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend; we invite everyone to come over and look at the garden and eat farm fresh food and we have a big tomato tasting (this year I'm growing 50 varieties, although we found TSWV on a few, and pulled up 6 plants to try to get it under control).

Our annual tomatofest kicks off September, which is a month filled with labor: tomatoes, the honey harvest, poultry butchering, potatoes and squash, winter garden fit in somehow, fruit, and we lose our farm hand (Jay's daughter) to school. September is also eat local month:
- http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/
- http://www.locavores.com/
And our local eat-local group pushes an eat local week:
- http://www.rogueflavor.org/
(September 9 to 16) with lots of activities to encourage eating local. It's a good time of year to do it, there's so much food out there, all fresh and delicious. Since we grow so much, rather than a 100-mile diet, I'm thinking of a 100-yard diet; only eat food that we produced right here on the farm. Given the realities of trying to get the harvest in, while keeping our day jobs, and not causing upset and consternation amongst the stock and pets, and good taste, we'll make some exceptions, like coffee, animal food, salt, etc. The most challenging part are the starches... We like rice, and I've grow only a few pounds of wheat... what we have lots of is potatoes, and I don't know how well I'll do on mostly potatoes for a week.

So this year we (Jay and I) are going to take the week-long challenge and eat all our own food, with a few exceptions, and I'm going to try to blog about it, what we eat and just how local the food items are and what energy went into producing them.