Eat Local Challenge

People all over the country are taking the Eat Local Challenge. It is not a contest with judges or rules, just a chance to challenge yourself to eat locally. You choose your own format, whether you'll eat locally grown food for a meal, a day, a week, or whatever. You can make exceptions to the local rule, like coffee or tea or condiments or staples if you want. Try it! You get some great food, you learn what is grown in and around your community; you save energy on shipping and processing your food; and you support local farmers. We can do this right here in Montgomery. Write and tell me what you bought, what you cooked, and how great it was! I'm also interested in what you learned.

There are many places to find the ingredients for your local meals. Some stores in town carry local products. Some farms have farm stands or signs offering eggs or other produce. There is the farmer's market, or CSA's, or you could grow your own.

Montgomery Friends of Open Space has a farmers' market that opened June 12th (see first photo). It will be open every Saturday until 1:00 pm until October in front of the Village Shopper, which is on Route 206, just north of 518. I was there the first week. There were several stands, offering produce, meat, baked goods, flowers, and plants. Some of the vendors are friends or neighbors of mine, and I always see friends among the shoppers. We stand around and talk and it's a lot of fun. I highly recommend it. I am somewhat restricted in what I can buy, because my husband has a vegetable garden and we already have a lot of what is offered. Last week I bought a yellow summer squash, cucumbers and rhubarb. The squash was sauteed tonight with chopped onions, the cucumbers were made into sandwiches, and the rhubarb was cut up and boiled and it's cooling right now. I'll add sugar and eat it by the bowlful.

Some people get their produce from a CSA. That stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and supporting local farmers is definitely sustainable. In a CSA, families buy shares (or half shares) of the farmer's crops for the year. Depending on the weather, there may be more or less of something than the previous year, but everyone gets a share. Members pick up their share at the farm one day of the week, or at a designated pick-up site. Sometimes there is an option to pick your own of some especially abundant crop if you want extra. This unusual system allows the farmer to concentrate on growing food, not marketing or selling it, and guarantees the income the farmer needs regardless of the weather. Usually a share is a lot of food, so you might want to start with half a share, or take a friend's share while he or she is away on vacation.

Some especially hard-working and enthusiastic people grow their own food. This is about as local as you can get. My husband has had a vegetable garden here since we moved to Montgomery in 1986, and I am always impressed with all the food he gets from it (see second photo). It is a little late to start your own garden this year, but not too early to start planning for next year. You can do research at the library, look for publications from the Rutgers Agricultural Extension, and ask other local gardeners what they recommend. Probably they will have lots of great advice. They will probably be willing to show you their gardens (and even let you help weed!). You may want to take a soil test so that you don't use any fertilizer that your soil doesn't need. I also recommend starting a compost pile right now so you will be able to improve your soil in a year or two.

So far my husband's garden has produced radishes (did you know you can eat radish greens? Just cook them like kale), bok choy, mizuna, collards, kale, chard, rhubarb, sugar snap peas, garlic scapes (see my last post), purslane (a delicious weed that grows in the garden), spinach and half a dozen kinds of lettuce (see third photo). We are also picking and eating several kinds of berries right now (see fourth photo), but I'll tell you about that another day.