Living (more) Locally

I read an article about a year ago that has really stuck with me and made me think. It was about a woman who ONLY ate local food for an entire year. Literally, they did not eat anything that wasn't grown or raised within 100 miles of their home (so I guess that means no McDonalds, no Chili's, no Taco Bell???). She found farmers who raised chickens, cows, pigs, etc to get her meat, eggs, and dairy products. She found wheat farmers to get wheat to grind into flour for bread and pasta. Instead of sugar, she used honey to sweeten things. She grew or bought only produce that was in season and available from her area...so no oranges, bananas, pineapples... (those are some of our favorites...Gracie eats a banana most every day).

While I will never go to that extreme, I would like to eat MORE locally grown things. We live in a great area for a variety of things. There are lots of farms, orchards, dairies, farmers' markets, and pick-your-own farms near us. My goal, for this summer especially, is to buy whatever produce I can from a local source instead of the grocery store. It's healthier, fresher, and much more delicious. The main thing that makes me not do this all the time is the convenience factor. With 3 little ones in tow, it's hard enough to run by the grocery store and walmart, let alone add a couple more stops along the way. But I'd like to put those excuses aside and really not buy produce in the store, that I could buy fresh. So, ask me at the end of the summer, and hopefully I'll tell you that I didn't buy any berries, peppers, tomatoes, peaches, or any of that at the store...we'll see. I have several friends who buy all their milk from a local dairy. I'd love to start buying at least some of our milk that way (although the dairy is about 20 minutes away from our house, so it's hard for me to justify a 40 minute round trip to buy "local" milk, when I could drive down the street to buy milk at the store).

I'm also planting a garden again this year. I planted one last year, but it got wiped out by a major hailstorm (worse than any I'd ever seen in TX) right before I could harvest anything. I had about 8 tomato plants, 3 pepper plants, and a couple zucchini plants. You can see in the picture of the garden after the storm, I had maybe 2 plants left standing (but with only the main stem left) that tried to grow again, but by that point, it was a little too late in the season for anything to grow and ripen.

So, hopefully this year will be better for my garden, and we can get a lot of produce that way as well. I'm also planting more variety (peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, sugar snap peas, lettuce, baby spinach, and I'm debating about planting a watermelon plant as well).

The girls love to go berry picking, so here in a couple weeks when the strawberries start to ripen, we're going to have an outing at the farm and find some juicy ones. Let our summer of fresh, local produce begin!!