The Weblog
This weblog contains LocallyGrown.net news and the weblog entries from all the markets currently using the system.
To visit the authoring market’s website, click on the market name located in the entry’s title.
Athens Locally Grown: ALG Open for February 26
Athens Locally Grown
How to contact us:
Our Website: athens.locallygrown.net
On Twitter: @athlocallygrown
On Facebook: www.facebook.com/athenslocallygrown
On Thursdays: Here’s a map.
Market News
This last week was a great one for local food in Athens. Everything that we have build together over the last 20 years was on full display for people around the country in town for the annual Georgia Organics conference. Friday saw tour busses fan out from the Classic Center to visit farms, community gardens, markets, food businesses, research plots, and more. Intensive workshops were held at sites about town teaching others how our treasures were created and how they could go back home and build on our experience. Hugh Acheson, originally just the founding chef of Athens’ 5 & 10 but now a nationally known celebrity chef, gave an impassioned keynote address Friday night about his vision for re-inventing Home Ec in our schools and his new non-profit to get that vision in practice (led up by former ALG volunteer Almeta Tulloss). Saturday saw dozens of instructional sessions taught by nationally known experts (many of the Athenians). And the topper was the renowned Farmers Feast, always one of the best meals I have all year.
All through the weekend I heard from people who were new to Athens marveling at all our community has done to build a local food system, and also from those who have been here many times marveling at how much more we’ve done since the last time they visited. It’s easy to get lost in the routine of daily life, such as ordering carrots from a favorite local farmer and picking them up a few days later, and forgetting that what we have available here, while far from perfect, is still the envy of so many other communities. We should be proud of what we have available here, even while working to make it better (by pushing for a backyard chicken ordinance, and trying to grow local grains, and starting and supporting local food businesses, and introducing your neighbors to the joy of really fresh lettuce).
Two awards were given out during the farmers feast. University of Georgia Sustainable Agriculture Coordinator Julia Gaskin was awarded the 2015 Land Steward Award for her work as a soil scientist and champion of sustainable agriculture in the halls of academia and in fields across Georgia. “Julia has been the college’s strongest supporter of sustainable agriculture,” said Dr. Scott Angle, Dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “Because of her efforts, the college has made great strides in recognizing that agriculture comes in all shapes and sizes. We are a much different college compared to 20 years ago thanks to the efforts of Julia Gaskin.” It’s a common trope across the country that the state ag department, and especially the outreach teams from the ag colleges, are working against organic foods and for the corporations behind much of industrial agriculture. You hear that sometimes in Georgia, too, but thanks to Julia the extension agents across our state are well versed in organic growing practices and fully supporting of new growers staring farms and conventional farmers wanting to convert to organic. She is truly a local hero for sustainable agriculture, and her award is so well deserved.
The Barbara Petit Pollinator Award, given to someone, not necessarily a farmer, who has made a difference in promoting sustainable agriculture and local foods, was given to me for Athens Locally Grown and all of the locallygrown.net markets across the country. It is a huge honor, one that inspires me to work harder on making the system accessible to all. Athens Locally Grown wouldn’t exist without all of the growers big and small who work through all kinds of taxing conditions to make food available to us, all the volunteers that help get food from the farmer to you during our market days, and to all of you who buy the food our growers are offering. Even ordering one dozen eggs makes a difference, and is one dozen less that has to be laid by chickens in cages somewhere and shipped here. Thank you all for helping make my crazy idea come to life in such a spectacularly successful fashion! Over five hundred other communities have begun markets based on ours here, and its a testament to all of you.
Thank you so much for your support of Athens Locally Grown, all of our growers, local food, and our rights to eat it. You all are part of what makes Athens such a great area in which to live. We’ll see you on Thursday at Ben’s Bikes at the corner of Pope and Broad Streets from 4:30 to 8pm!
Other Area Farmers Markets
The Athens Farmers Market has closed for the winter. You can watch for news during the offseason on their website. The other area markets are also all closed for the season, I believe. If you know of any winter markets operating, please let me know. And they might all be closed, but we’ll be here all year round!
All of these other markets are separate from ALG (including the Athens Farmers Market) but many growers sell at multiple markets. Please support your local farmers and food producers, where ever you’re able to do so!
We thank you for your interest and support of our efforts to bring you the healthiest, the freshest and the most delicious locally-produced foods possible!
Green Fork Farmers Market: Weekly Product List
Dear Green Fork Farmers Market Customers,
Make sure you check out Bee Well Gardens—they have beautiful potted paperwhites again this week! They will only last for a limited time.
Also available this week:
Vegetables—Lettuce mix and spinach.
*Meat*—pastured chicken, lamb, pork, organ meats, soup bones, and parts for stock.
Eggs—pastured chicken eggs.
Specialty foods—fermented sauerkraut and jalapenos, salsa made from local and organic ingredients, sugar cookies, and olives directly from the grower in California. Figgieville will also have a new shipment of olive oil coming in soon.
Place your order from now until Tuesday at noon, and we’ll reserve your products for pickup on Wednesday from 4-7 pm. Or you can stop by to see what we have for sale on our tables.
Thank you, and see you on Wednesday!
Green Fork Farmers Market
Wednesdays 4-7 pm
Indoors, Year Round
At Nightbird Books
Northeast Georgia Locally Grown: Locally Grown - Availability for February 25th, 2015
Hey Local Food Lovers,
This last week was pretty exciting! First, there were lots of questions from both farmers and customers about whether we would carry on with Locally Grown in the freezing cold ice and snow. The answer was Yes! As long at the roads aren’t horribly dangerous we keep the Local Food moving from the farm to your fridge to your bellies nearly every week all year long. We do REALLY appreciate it when everyone works with us the way you did this past Wednesday by picking up in just a one hour time frame so we weren’t freezing to death. We had 100% support on that and we really THANK YOU. Everything went well and hopefully you enjoyed getting good fresh local food in the dead of winter.
There were some other exciting developments this last week. The first I’ll offer as a teaser. Andrew and I went to visit a farm that’ll be joining Locally Grown in just a few weeks that will have some excellent BEEF, PORK and EGGS produced on a farm that just relocated to north Hall County. It was a frigid day on our visit, but we were very impressed with what we saw and can’t wait to welcome a new MEAT producer to the market. Since they’ll be joining us soon enough I’ll save lots of other details including their name for their grand entrance coming quite soon!
Georgia Organics had their huge annual conference this past weekend in Athens (about 1,000 in attendance) and Chuck and Andrew and I had the privileged opportunity to go down and give a presentation on the role of FARMERS NETWORKS in building Local Food Systems as one of the conference sessions. Many of you may not yet be aware of the Georgia Mountains Farmers Network (GMFN) that we started back in January 2012 and how important that has been in creating regional collaboration amongst sustainable farmers. To give you an example of how important, the GMFN is the reason that Locally Grown expanded to Gainesville this past year. Our little group would vote every year on our top priority projects to collaborate on, and every year COLLABORATIVE MARKETING to get more products to more customers was voted as a top priority. The more we discussed how to do it, we realized that 1) We wanted to reach URBAN customers to increase our sales potential and; 2) We wanted to continue to sell RETAIL (as opposed to Wholesale). We discussed many ways to accomplish that goal, and eventually discovered that expansion of the Locally Grown market to Gainesville was our best possible opportunity.
It’s taken a lot of effort, but our collaborations have paid off in just the 3 years that GMFN has been around. We have a board of directors, our FARM TOUR (mark your calendar now for June 27-28) is a huge event promoting local food farms regionally with over 500 people attending last year. And in less than a month our little group (it’ll be about 50 people) will have our annual meeting at Harvest Habersham, enjoying a really good meal of food grown from their own farms to discuss what we want to accomplish in 2015 and onward.
Rather than try and re-give the whole talk here, feel free to take a look at the SLIDESHOW
If you’ve got an hour to kill and would enjoy plugging your headphones into an MP3 describing how our local farming community has grown over the last 3 years here’s the AUDIO from the talk.
That’ll do it for this week. Our item count is a little low this week. Obviously the coldest week of the year stifles the growth of fresh veggies, but order big of what we do have and get ready. We are just days away from the beginnings of spring crops. I can feel the excitement in the air.
EAT WELL,
Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew
Atlanta Locally Grown: Available for Saturday February 28
I hope this finds you all doing well. The market is open and ready for orders. March is just around the corner. It potato planting time. My sons an I will drop some 400-500 lbs in the ground in the next week or so. With any lick we will have a bountiful harvest in late spring. It’s also time for most other spring planting items, beets, carrots, collards, kale, radishes and more. I expect transplant by mid march with tomatoes and peppers to follow. It’s exciting to be a farmer this time of year. We have so much potential. I just hope we can keep up.
The market had lots of great things listed for this week. Plenty o pork along with a plethora of garden goodies. Order up and please share us with a friend.
We will see you Saturday at your selected delivery location; Brookhaven Farmers Market, Piedmont Green Market or Sandy Springs Farmers market.
Thank you for all your support,
Brady
Conyers Locally Grown: Available for Friday February 27
I hope this finds you all doing well. The market is open and ready for orders. March is just around the corner. It potato planting time. My sons an I will drop some 400-500 lbs in the ground in the next week or so. With any lick we will have a bountiful harvest in late spring. It’s also time for most other spring planting items, beets, carrots, collards, kale, radishes and more. I expect transplant by mid march with tomatoes and peppers to follow. It’s exciting to be a farmer this time of year. We have so much potential. I just hope we can keep up.
The market had lots of great things listed for this week. Plenty o pork along with a plethora of garden goodies. Order up and please share us with a friend.
We will see you Friday between 5-7 at copy central (1264 Parker road).
Thank you for all your support,
Brady
Fresh Harvest, LLC: Fresh Harvest for Feb 22nd - One More Week Off!
To Contact Us
Fresh Harvest, LLC
Link to Fresh Harvest
Email us!
Tallahassee May
tally@wildblue.net
JohnDrury
john.drury@att.net
Recipes
Market News
Hello!
Well, that last week was a doozy, wasn’t it? We hope you all were able to slow down some and stay safe and warm.
Thankfully, the weather does seem to be shifting a bit. However, it is still cold enough to warrant one more week off of delivery. It will be good for us all to catch up this coming week on the stuff we couldn’t get to last week!
We plan on starting up again next week, so please look for an email on the night of March 1st.
As always, thanks so much for your support, and we look forward to seeing you Wednesday, March 4th!
John and Tallahassee
Coming Events
We thank you for your interest and support of our efforts to bring you the healthiest, the freshest and the most delicious locally-produced foods possible!
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Dawson Local Harvest: The Market is Back!
The DAWSON LOCAL HARVEST for February 27th
The Market is Back!
HI EVERYBODY
After a week of annoying and inconvenient weather it looks like things might return to a little more normal, and that’s good news for all you Locavores out there! MY DAILY BREAD was without power for several days but they are back and rarin’ to go. It also looks like we may be offering a new vendor shortly, with more coming this Spring, so stay tuned for some exciting announcements!
In the meantime we hope you’ll take a look at The Market for this week.
THE MARKET IS NOW OPEN!
REMEMBER! You can order until Tuesday night at 8pm. Pick up your order at Leilani’s Gardens Friday afternoons from 4 to 7pm.
You’ll find the DAWSON LOCAL HARVEST at http://dawsonville.locallygrown.net
We thank you for your interest and support of our efforts to bring you the healthiest, the freshest and the most delicious locally-produced foods possible! We guarantee your satisfaction with all products in the DAWSON LOCAL HARVEST.
Have a happy and healthy week!
Alan Vining
Market Manager
Suwanee Whole Life Co-op: Reminder: Place your co-op order
Just a friendly reminder since orders look a little lighter than normal. I know a couple of you were sad last week at pick up when you forgot to order so I thought I’d send out a quick reminder :-)
If you want Organic, Raw Mixed Nuts please don’t’ forget to order. We only have 8 out of the 25 pounds needed to get bulk pricing. If we do not reach the minimum I will cancel the nuts.
I will leave the market open until 6pm to give more time to place your order. At 6pm, I will send orders to the farmers/vendors and the market will be closed.
If you already placed an order- Thank you and I’ll see you on Tuesday!
Thanks for your support!
Nora
The Wednesday Market: Weblog Entry
Good afternoon, everyone.
The Wednesday Market is open for orders. Please place your order by 10 p.m. Monday, and orders are ready for pick up Wednesday between 3 and 6 p.m. Check the website for this week’s product listings. Here is the link: http://wednesdaymarket.locallygrown.net/market
What could be better on a dreary rainy day than creating something hot and tasty in the kitchen? That is my goal today! At the least, I have two birthday cakes to prepare – one for my husband and another for a friend who works at our favorite restaurant. Joe and Karina share the same birthday, Feb. 23.
Tomorrow night the boys and I are going to make one of Joe’s favorite meals: pork tenderloin with herbed roasted potatoes, fresh baked bread, and mixed green salad with homemade dressing. For a side vegetable, we will choose steamed broccoli or fresh spinach sautéed with garlic. And for dessert, we’ll have devil’s food cake with fudge frosting served with vanilla ice cream.
Joe loves flavorful food, and this menu is a showcase for the flavors that he loves: rosemary, garlic, red pepper flakes, oregano, and freshly ground black pepper.
Do you use herbs in cooking? Having grown up with a parent who shunned anything but plain meat and potatoes, I have enjoyed learning how to use herbs and spices to create all kinds of different dishes, savory and sweet. Here are just a few of the many herbs that are commonly used in cooking: basil, mint, rosemary, oregano, thyme, cilantro, parsley, chives, dill, sage, and tarragon. All of these herbs are available in dried form, but I encourage you to experiment with using fresh herbs whenever they are in season. And, fortunately for us within The Wednesday Market community, we can purchase these wonderful herbs from several of our farmers!
Here is a simple recipe for a tasty dipping sauce for hot, fresh baked bread. You can use dried or fresh herbs, and you can tweak the recipe to use more of the herbs you really like and less of the ones you do not prefer.
Easy Herbed Dipping Sauce for Fresh Baked Bread
Oregano
Basil
Rosemary
Kosher Salt
Freshly Ground Black Pepper
Red Pepper Flakes
Fresh Minced Garlic
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Start with ¼ teaspoon EACH of oregano, basil, rosemary, and kosher salt, and mix together in a small dish. Add freshly ground pepper to taste, along with a pinch of red pepper flakes. Add about 2 cloves of freshly minced garlic. Top with about ¼ cup of extra virgin olive oil and stir gently to combine. Taste, and adjust seasonings to suit. This makes enough for about 4 servings (depending, of course, on how much bread you have and how much you like dipping it!). I always make a lot more because my boys really love this sauce.
To learn more about the use of herbs in cooking, please follow this link to an article from Cooking Light magazine, “11 Herbs Every Cook Should Use,” http://www.cookinglight.com/cooking-101/essential-ingredients/all-about-herbs-slideshow
Thank you for supporting locally grown agriculture and for choosing to buy locally. We’ll see you Wednesday!
Beverly
Gwinnett Locally Grown: Sunday Market Reminder!
The Market is open Thursday at 9 – Monday at noon After that, ordering is disabled until Thursday morning. Pick up your order Tuesday from 4:00-7:00 p.m. only at Rancho Alegre Farm at 2225 Givens Road, Dacula, GA 30019. New to The Market? Learn about how it works here.
MARKET NEWS
*_Thank you, thank you for all of you that braved the cold to come pick up your orders in this crazy cold weather! Tuesday didn’t happen so I’m so grateful to our wonderful customers who made it happen yesterday! Hats off to you all!! You are awesome!!
_Grower Highlight of the Week!
Bo & Lisa’s Lil Patch
Certified Naturally Grown
*_*Lisa Says…
Bo & Lisa are not new to farming , but are new to having our very own farm.
We have 14.28 acres in beautiful Aragon Ga., 70 miles from Lilburn, Ga. We share a passion and love for farming naturally with wholesome products that are good for your health and budget._
*_*Bo is a beekeeper! We have Italian bees and produce RAW honey . We only strain it once and never heat our honey, so that you receive the FULL nutritional benefits. Our bees are happy to pollinate our blueberry field._
*_*Yes! We are blueberry farmers too! Our blueberries shrubs are 4 years old and
are producing more each year. We do not use any chemicals, only a natural fossil substance (Diatomaceous Earth) that is edible and healthy for all to eat._
*_*We appreciate your willingness to support local farming and our desire to be good stewards of the land we have been given. We would like you to know that a portion of our sales go to a Christian Health Retreat and Healing Center (homeforhealth.net) in Kentucky for healing spiritually as well as physically through Jesus Christ . This facility is run by medical missionaries and is close to our hearts as Lisa is a cancer survivor! We donate funds to help with scholarships for those who have no means of getting help for their illness. We donate as well to other cancer centers such as the AFLAC Cancer Center for children in Atlanta. You can read about how Jesus healed Lisa at : http://www.cancer-research-awareness.com/god-healed-lisa.html
Thank you for letting us grow healthy nutrient dense food for your family and for helping to support these other causes. Be well friends and many blessings to you and your family.
In His service, Bo and Lisa*_*
I’m working to get natural dog and pet treats on the Market! Stay tuned for that!
I’m looking to post a survey real soon to see everyone’s interest in different items. We have opportunities to get some really cool items but there are minimum limits for some to get them offered on the Market. So be looking for that as I share the wonderful items available to us and see your interest!
Is anyone interested in Azure Standard? They are a group buy that is delivered once a month. We have the opportunity to participate….so go on
https://www.azurestandard.com. Please email me if you would like to participate!
_As Always….
_Please share with friends and family about us so that we can give more people the opportunity to buy and eat healthy! Local farmers need our support to keep providing us with all the fresh foods! If we don’t give them enough business, it’s hard for them to continue to deliver to us. Please let’s not let that happen! Tell your friends about us so we can keep the Growers supported as this is how they make their living. *_
Thank you to all of you who support Gwinnett Locally Grown!
Browse through to see all the great Growers we have and maybe you will find something new!
We have Wilderness Family Naturals Coconut Sugar, Flour and Organic Popcorn in the Market for sale! When you come to pick up your order, check them out! They are also now online!
If there is something you’d like to see in the Market, please let me know! I would love your imput!
Remember…
The Market is extending their hours! The Market will now be open from 4:00 to 7:00pm!
Having said that, if you place an order with us, PLEASE remember to pick it up on Tuesday. As I am so grateful for your orders, I also have a family at home waiting on me too! We cannot hold orders, especially cold items due to limited refrigeration space, so please be courteous and come for your order.
CLICK HERE NOW to Shop Gwinnett Locally Grown!
Thanks for all your support!
Shop often and eat well!
Cheryl Gelatt
Market Manager
grow@ranchoalegrefarm.com
Fresh Wishes,
Pilar Quintero
Market Host
Rancho Alegre Farm
Please email grow@ranchoalegrefarm.com for questions pertaining to Market or Raw Milk. It is very difficult to return phone calls. Remember to interact with us on Facebook and follow us on Meetup to get notification on all our wonderful events and news.