Locally Grown

Look what arrived today!!


We ordered all these seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, a wonderful company and I encourage you to check out their website! That's their catalog and my new gardening journal in the background. I am hoping to keep better track of how much we plant and what our yields are this year by keeping a journal. We are so very excited about our garden this year, we are trying not only new vegetables, but multiple varieties of each vegetable. Carrots, for example. Last summer the local Lions Club started a farmers market for our little town, and it really took off! Every Thursday, Shane and I would load Joey in the Burley and ride our bikes down to the market. Most of the growers were local Hmong families that rent plots of land from the area farmers. One family grew these beautiful purple carrots, I had never seen purple carrots before! The core was a creamy yellow color, and the outside ranged from a deep purple to almost a light lavender color. They were so sweet and tasty, and when she was all sold out of them Joey and I were very bummed. He thought it was so neat to have orange, purple, and yellow carrots to snack on.

We haven't grown carrots ourselves before, mostly because we have such a hard packed clay soil and we don't know if they will do well or not. But we decided to give it a go, and hope for the best. They can keep so well in the fridge if you keep them moist, and we eat a lot of carrots throughout the year. So we are going to plant not only the normal orange carrots, and purple carrots, but yellow carrots and red carrots too! Each color of carrot has different health benefits, and we will have the most colorful veggie tray for our football Sundays this fall!

Besides carrots, we also have in this pile of seeds; parsnips (which I encourage you to try, very tasty in beef stew or roasted with other root veggies, they cook very quickly), Yellow of Parma onion, De Grace snow pea, beets, Dragon Tongue beans (very cool purple striped beans!), Cherokee Long Ear corn (for popcorn), and three spicy peppers; Black Hungarian, Chocolate Habenero, and Lemon Yellow Habenero.

We chose seeds that we know we can't purchase as plants from local growers. But for me, it was more about purchasing seeds (and therefore, food) that is not genetically modified. All seeds from Baker Creek are heirlooms, which means the plants have been open pollinated, the seeds saved, and no genetic modifications (although there isn't a definitive definition for heirloom seed). We try to eat locally grown food whenever our income will allow it, by purchasing local produce and growing much of our own in the summer. We then preserve as much as we can by canning fruits, pickling, and making jellies. Or by freezing (squash, corn, rhubarb, beans, fish, etc). I think in the long run this saves us a bunch of money in the winter, and it keeps our bodies healthier. Although there is much more we could be doing to save the environment/ourselves, we do what we can with what we have.

We try to buy local meats as well. Last summer Shane's dad raised some chickens for us (and him) on his farm in northern MN. We know that there are no growth hormones in these chickens, and that most of them were allowed to find their own food once they grew large enough. They are not as super tender as the chickens you may buy in the store, but they are one heck of a lot larger! We try to buy our pork and beef from local farmers with minimal drugs/hormones too. It means having a very large freezer that is very full at slaughter time, but it is well worth it in my opinion!

I worry about our culture of Bigger+Faster=Better. I think that our food supply system is in serious need of repair, and we are slowly ruining our environment and our own health by purchasing and consuming mass produced food. I don't want to jump on a soapbox here right now (although I've kinda started, maybe I will continue in a future post!) but I encourage you to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and check out the movie Food Inc. Find out about this issue yourself.

ANYWAYS!! (goodness I tend to rant..)

We are super excited about having a more diverse garden this year, and I can't wait to see how our root vegetables turn out. Wish us luck!