Possie

For whatever reason, my backyard attracts local cats and wildlife. Tonight, I drove up the driveway and saw my latest guest. An opossum, caught in the headlights, skittered across the lawn into the doghouse. He was kind of cute, sitting in the back of the doghouse looking out.

Another wildlife encounters this year included a hawk picking off a chickadee near the bird feeder. Poor birdy didn't even see it coming. No skunk sprays yet!

Last Day of the CSA

Yesterday was my last pick-up for my share of the Wishing Stone Farm CSA. Tiffany and I had a lot of purchasing to do, we walked away with bags bursting with our riches. And yes, I did get taters n squash! To be more specific, purple potatoes and an acorn squash. They also had tomatoes out but tomatoes at the end of October don't seem to be as good as the ones in August. Now is the time to get creative with preparing everything so they don't go bad before I have a chance to enjoy them. :)

Food Inc.

Check out the new movie Food, Inc. which is playing in small independent theaters. The movie lifts the veil on the industrial food industry (mainly the meat packers).

Redneck Musings

This has nothing to do with local agriculture but I thought I'd share some musings after a trip to "As far from the city as you can get without leaving RI".

You know you're a redneck when your mailbox is attached to the tree with duct tape.

You know you're a redneck when the baitshop, tax prep office and biker bar are all in the same lot. One stop shopping!

Fall in Vermont

A recent trip to Montpelier, VT inspired me to update my blog.

For a state capitol, it was surprisingly cozy and had the feel of a New England town. While we were in town, there was a fabulous farmers' market (see carrot pic). Not only were there many produce vendors, but there were also hot food vendors selling Pakistani, Asian, and African food. Instant lunch! I had a fire grilled pizza made with eggplant, tomatoes, goat cheese, and onion. Yum! I imagine it was all collected right there at the market. The vendors had this pizza oven on a trailer and they just wheeled it from one location to another.

Last time I visited Vermont in the winter, I ran into a lot of out of towners. This time, there were many more locals milling about. If I move to Vermont, I'll have to get a Subaru Outback, stop shaving, grown long, nappy hair, get a Labrador Retriever, and wear hemp clothing in assorted neutral colors. All kidding aside, there was a little bookstore on Main Street that had a great environmental section right up front, not stuck in the back.

I covered Stowe in the last trip but it is about 20 minutes north of Montpelier if you want to sneak in to Ben and Jerry's or checkout their quaint downtown area.

Rent a Green Thumb

A recent article in the NYTimes about an alternative method to get local produce on the table...

July 22, 2008

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

By KIM SEVERSON

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a “100-mile menu” of food from the caterer’s farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.

“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. “This has become fashion.”

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.

Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.

As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills, backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden — no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails — is a twist. “They want to have a garden, they don’t want to garden,” said the cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.

Her neighbor Chase Ault, a business consultant, recently had a vegetable garden installed with a customized set of plants and a regular service agreement. “I am working 24-7 these days, but I wanted to have something growing in front of me,” Ms. Ault said.

Like organic food, which corporate manufacturers embraced in the 1990s, before it, local food is quickly moving into the mainstream. Last year, the New Oxford American Dictionary picked locavore as its word of the year. A National Restaurant Association survey this year of more than 1,200 chefs, many of whom work for chain restaurants or large food companies, found locally grown produce to be the second-hottest American food trend, just behind bite-size desserts.

For a growing number of diners, a food’s provenance is more important than its brand name, said Michelle Barry, who studies American eating patterns for the Hartman Group, a research firm in Bellevue, Wash. As a result, grocery stores are looking to repackage products like milk and cheese to play up any local angle.

That will be a boon to people who find that shortcuts are necessary if they wish to eat locally. “If you live on East 80th 14 floors up and all you have is a potted plant, it’s tough,” said Lynne Rossetto Kasper, the host of the radio show “The Splendid Table,” who recruited 15 listeners for a study on the subject. Researchers will record their struggles to make 80 percent of their meals from organic or local sources. Spices are the only exemption.

Lazy locavores would never go to such extremes. Rather, they might simply sign up with the FruitGuys. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Philadelphia, will deliver boxes of local, sustainably raised or organic fruit right to the cubicle.

In the mood for a meal that reeks of community but does not necessitate a communal activity? Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, Calif., which describes itself as a community supported kitchen, offers its customers the opportunity to make friends while making food from local, sustainable farms, but the worker-owned company also offers online shopping for people who do not have the time to pick up orders or participate in educational activities.

Customers 20 miles away in the affluent community of Mill Valley, for example, can pay $15 to have jars filled with Andalusian stew, made with pasture-raised pork, delivered to their door. The jars, of course, are returnable.

“It’s a very savvy crowd that understands how all the pieces of sustainable farming and nutrition fit together,” said Larry Wisch, one of five worker-owners at Three Stone Hearth. “But they don’t want the headaches of getting here.”

Or you could just have your private chef handle all your local food needs. At their Hamptons summer house, John and Lorna Brett Howard want to eat almost exclusively local, which means that in place of one trip to the grocery store, their chef, Michael Welch, makes several trips to farm stands and the fishmonger.

“What I’m seeing with my clients is not the trendiness or the politics,” Mr. Welch said. “They are looking only at taste.”

Mrs. Howard said she ate local vegetables growing up in northern Michigan and Chicago. But her husband, a private equity fund manager, ate a lot of expensive imported food with little thought about where it came from. But all that has changed.

“It’s like the first time you start drinking good red wine and you realize what you were drinking was so bad you can’t go back to it,” Mrs. Howard said. “It’s that same way with vegetables.”

The author Barbara Kingsolver, whose book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” was a best seller last year, did not have the lazy locavore in mind when she wrote about the implications of making her family spend a year eating local. But she celebrates the trend.

“As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural places,” she said, “I can’t tell you how joyful it makes me to hear that it’s trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow.”

Sound of Music

One of the best parts about living in Rhode Island is that there's always some place new to explore. Yesterday I checked out part of the Blackstone River Bikeway in Lincoln/Cumberland. This paved path winds through marsh, and along the Blackstone River. Unlike the crowded East Bay Bike Path, this one was much more relaxed and there weren't as many serious speed demons. A nice place for a casual, scenic ride.

Since I had my mountain bike, I ventured onto one of the dirt trails which ran along a tributary for about a mile. At one point I was amazed by the noise of birds, it was almost deafening. No "Silent Spring" here. Sadly, I was just casually riding through this avian symphony, when some old guy walking towards me yelled at me saying I should use the $30 million bike path, and leave the walkers a trail. OK, seriously, I wasn't going fast and there was plenty of room for us to pass side by side. Later I thought of my comeback line: "I can share, can't you?". That put a dark cloud over my head until another guy passing on a bike later said hi. That's what I'm talking about- some manners! hahahaha.

If you're into fishing or kayaking, this looks like a good place to do both. I scouted out a few put-in spots and I saw a handful of people with rods. At the very least bring your bike and keep your eyes open for turtles, fish, frogs, and birds.