I posted my personal goals for the May 2006 Eat Local Challenge a few weeks ago. Now that I’ve had a little more time to mull these over, I’ve tweaked and refined them.

Goal: To eat food produced within 100 miles as much as possible, then extend the range to food raised, produced, or caught in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Virginia.

Exemptions: salt, pepper, spices, tamari, flour*, pasta*, rice, olive oil, lemon juice, apple cider and balsamic vinegars, tahini, sugar, other baking necessities, Parmesano-Reggiano, coffee, tea.

Challenge: I’m used to eating out for lunch in the neighborhood, and I don’t think that anyone serves local food. My addiction to Pepsi One, which I’ll try to kick in May. My new craving for olives. I’ll miss salmon and bacon. Local regulations will not allow pork producers to cure meat without nitrates.

Help needed in finding: Grains of all kinds, pasta. If I can find local sources for flour, pasta, and Carolina grown rice, I’ll take them off the exemption list in an update.

Tips offered: The Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market sells locally grown chicken, beef, pork, dried beans, mushrooms, milk, butter, goat cheese, and eggs, in addition to seasonal fruits and vegetables. Chicken will be available from Back Woods Family Farm again in May. The corn for the grits and cornmeal from the Old Mill at Guilford is grown in Yanceyville. Donna sells their products at the Curb Market. The Piedmont Triad Farmers Market also sells sustainably raised lamb, and ostrich. Deep Roots Market carries some local products, including some fruits and vegetables, beef and dairy products.

NOTES:

I’ll buy my fair-trade organic coffee from Tate Street Coffee House, which is a short walk away, and sorry, but I have to have sugar in my coffee.

I’ll keep a pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator to try to kick my diet soda habit. I can’t go without caffeine - my migraines are enough of a problem in the spring. The problem here will be my husband drinking it all. He loves sweet tea. I’ll flavor it with mint from my garden.

I’ll buy my bread from Simple Kneads, a wonderful organic bakery in downtown Greensboro, or from nearby Spring Garden Bakery, or pita from Dough Re Mi at the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market. Or bake it.

I am mulling over making my own pasta for the first time. After all, I have to justify buying this noodle-cutter at the Liberty Antiques Festival yesterday! Note that I bought a “new” baking pan that begs for lasagne as well. I think I found a source for semolina flour from Virginia. I’ll post more if I decide to do it - it looks like the fates have decreed this. Now let’s see if I have the time and energy.

I plan to eat a lot of salad, which is not really one of my favorite foods. The way I have decided to make this fun and challenging is that I will make my own salad dressings and marinades. I’ve been addicted to Annie’s dressings for years, but there’s no reason I couldn’t make my own from scratch. I’ve added a lot of the base ingredients for salad dressings and marinades to the exemption list, to which I plan to add herbs from my garden and other ingredients that I find at the farmers’ market.

I am honored and excited to have joined the Eat Local Challenge, a blog that will bring together information from a diverse group of U.S. consumers dedicated to supporting those who produce food that doesn’t travel thousands of miles before it ends up on your plate. My first post for this new site is entitled Full Circle, Almost. So far, twenty-six other Locavores have signed on to become authors for the Eat Local Challenge blog, and it looks like hundreds have pledged to eat local for the month of May! Others have chosen to take the challenge in another month.

The posts about my personal eat local challenge will be archived here, so that anyone who is interested can see them all in one spot. The overall challenge is to eat food produced within 100 miles of your home, but each person sets his or her own personal goals and exemptions. I’ll keep you updated with the information I find about sustainably and humanely raised food produced within 100 miles of Greensboro.

It will be great fun and very enlightening to see how others find foods within their 100-mile foodsheds during a time of year when many places are just beginning to get fresh foods to the markets. Some traditionally lush harvests in California will be delayed due to unusually heavy rains. Here in the South, we’ve had drought. The Northeast is just now thawing out!

We are lucky to be able to find so many local foods in our markets here in the Piedmont Triad. Now we need to support our farmers and encourage the next generation of young farmers to continue the tradition by making good choices with our food dollars.

Planted:
O’odham Pink Beans - six hills in the center, five hills on the south.
Early yellow crookneck squash - two hills
Black Beauty zucchini - one hill
cucumber - unknown variety, amid the peas on the south end.

Just for kicks, threw most of the leftover oakleaf lettuce seeds everywhere. Along with the giant marigold seeds that never germinated.

Replaced two Amish Paste tomatoes, which seem to be having the toughest time, and one Yellow pear tomato.

Carrots are coming up!

An elderly man approached me to ask if I knew one of the master gardeners. He asked me about my row and I told me that I had raised my tomatoes from seed, and perhaps planted them a bit too early. He asked me if I had used anything on them, and I told him that I used a balanced organic fertilizer mix, composted manure, and epsom salts. He allowed that all that was good, but advised me to use “just a little Miracle-Gro.”

I was very polite and thanked him for his advice. Mercifully, he was called away at that moment!

Still to do - buy or make tomato cages. Buy okra seed. Most of the mulching and planting has been done!

You know what? The Eat Local Challenge is not going to be hard at all. A lot more food preparation at home, but the ingredients, for the most part, will not be hard to find. We live in an excellent area for a variety of local foods.

This morning at the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market I bought:

Eggs
Pork chops
Locally milled, but not grown, flour
Butter
Red potatoes
White mushrooms
Strawberries
Pecans
Pita bread
Greenhouse tomatoes
Soap

Last week I bought:
Cheddar cheese
Beef
Goat cheese
Bread
Granola

I didn’t buy green veggies because I have plenty in my garden and freezer at the moment.

Here’s a tip for buying locally if you want to buy organic, or close to it. When you approach a farmer, ask him or her where their farm is. Chit chat if they’re not busy or if they’re willing. Then ask the person if she/he uses a lot of chemicals. The reaction will tell you if the food is organic or near-organic. Non-certified organic farmers are eager to let you know about how they raise their food, but they can’t put up a sign saying that they are organic. Certified organic farmers pay a lot of money and put in a lot of time doing paperwork to be certified organic. You can bet that if a farmer is certified organic, he or she WILL have a sign up.

For example, last week I asked the strawberry guys about their chemical use, and was told that they use fungicides because they have to. This week, I approached another strawberry vendor and asked him the same question. “Well, no, because I really never have needed to.” We had a nice conversation and I promised to visit him again next week.

This is why I love the farmer’s market.

I misidentified this as a California poppy earlier. I don’t think that I’ve ever had a flower this exotic in my garden! The bugs sure seem to like it a lot.

This week has been mostly dedicated to ripping out wisteria, grapevine, ivy, and wild yam vines from the fence bordering the back forty. I noticed that there’s a nice crop of poison oak growing behind the fence. Hope that doesn’t spread. I also spend a lot of time pulling out sow thistle, wild lettuce, violets, and asters - since we got so much rain the ground was nicely soggy for this kind of task. The rain also means that I won’t have long before the tiger mosquitoes make long-term tasks in the back forty miserable. Right now it’s allergies that are making me miserable. And lack of sleep.

According to Farmgirl, today and tomorrow are prime fertile planting days according to the moon. I was going to try to plant the Carolina Sieva lima beans and the O’odham Pink Beans this afternoon, but I just didn’t have the energy. Hopefully tomorrow. I think I have decided to put the O’odham beans out at the community row. It has better drainage and more sun. But it will have to wait until after I go to the farmer’s market and do some major shopping (remember, the Eat Local Challenge begins Monday!), set up the Slow Food table at the Deep Roots Market Taste Fair, and then get back from the Liberty Antique Festival, an awesome event, where I intend to get outrageously sunburned and buy a humble hoe. Believe it or not, I do not have one, and I can see that I’ll need one at the community garden.

There is a good conversation going on over at I’m Mad and I Eat about eating locally and elitism. This is so bizarre, that eating locally and organicly has come to be associated with elitism. It goes to show you that something is severely wrong with our food system when the unhealthy crap that uses the most fuel to produce and distribute it is subsidized so that it is cheapest, and the farmers who produce healthy good food are run out of business. And the working poor have to work so many hours to make ends meet that they don’t have the energy or time to cook. It isn’t the food activists that should be blamed, it is the folks in Washington who are blind to the problem.

Behind them, the cardoon is shooting up. This is its second year.

I know that I’m posting a lot on the weekend, but I can’t find the time during the week, and when I come home at night I don’t especially feel like getting on the computer. So here are a few things that need to be dumped out of the old brainpan.

The most exciting thing going on for me right now is my joining the team for the national Eat Local Challenge blog. It has not been launched yet, or I would post the link, but there should be about 35 of us from all over the country writing about the pleasures, challenges, and importance of eating locally, and it’s coming very, very soon.

Looks like the Slow Food PT Local Food Guide won’t get printed this year. I have a rather steep learning curve ahead on preparing a publication for the printer, and the budget for it keeps wiggling around so that I don’t have any idea of how many pages it can be, how much color, etc. The good news is that I should be able to put it on the Slow Food Piedmont Triad web site, which I plan to redesign this summer with the help of Dirty Greek. Web stuff, I can do. Well, most web stuff.

We showed The Real Dirt on Farmer John to a full house, in collaboration with Weatherspoon Art Museum. It’s a great documentary - quirky and funny and sad. I found the audience reaction to the film rather curious. Maybe it was the way the beginning of it showed John in some Elton John-ish get-ups riding his tractor, but so many people laughed loudly throughout the movie. I mean, I did too, but there were some scenes that called for just a smile, and a couple of scenes that I found outright disturbing, that people had a good belly-laugh over. I guess that’s a good thing, and I was happy that everyone enjoyed the movie. I related to the movie as a former country kid who was always the weird one, and who had an attraction to the theatrical.

Sandy and I made our reservations for our stay in Florence, before we go to Spannochia. We are going to go to the passport office this week, I swear it. I can’t think about the plane trip - every time I look for tickets online I start having an anxiety attack. But I’ll try to do that soon and get it over with so I won’t have to think about it.

By the way, if you’re planning to move out of town next year, and you hate your neighbors, plant any of the following near your borders before you go:
ornamental grape
wisteria
honeysuckle
ground ivy
English ivy
mulberry

I swear that I will try to make this my last mention of how much I hate these things until next year. I hate them, hate them, hate them. Hate. Them.

Blueberries this year?

The California poppies didn’t bloom last year. But lookie…

The foxgloves succumbed to some kind of rot last year. They were supposed to be an annual variety. They came back, and looks like I’m going to get some action…

The tomatoes are looking a bit better. I replaced three of them this time. The Amish Paste tomatoes seem to be having the toughest time. I popped some Mammoth Dill seedlings into the spots where a few of the cabbage seedlings didn’t make it.

The lettuce and endive seeds aren’t coming up. At least I don’t think that they are. I don’t know what the seedlings are supposed to look like and there are a lot of unfamiliar weeds coming up. I planted the lettuce seeds in a curved pattern so I hope to be able to identify them that way. The seeds were giveaways, and old, and I didn’t expect much anyway. If they don’t germinate, there will be more room for peppers and okra later. I swear that by the time I left there were new weeds where I weeded when I first got there.

Radishes are emerging, no surprise there. Carrots have not.

I put shredded Christmas tree mulch on half of one of the paths beside my row. I hope that the ladies on either side of me will help with this to keep the weeds down. I’ll go out there later and do some more when the shade is over my row.

I dug up a very large, very entrenched tansy, and it was a bear. I didn’t want to put it in the compost pile potentially to become someone else’s problem, so a kind lady named Linda gave me a garbage bag and helped me wrestle it in there and heave it into the car. Now I have to decide whether to plant it in the wild area behind the studio or throw it out. Or nurse my aching back the rest of the day.

I headed over to the Greensboro Curb Farmers’ Market this morning where the Herbal Thyme Guild was conducting their annual sale. It was fairly crowded considering the stormy weather. I bought a few herbs that I don’t have in the garden at present - comfrey, stevia, borage, bee balm, elfin thyme (so cute), and a red-veined leaf sorrel that is just beautiful. Hope it tastes good!

Last year the bee balm was beautiful, but something killed every bit of it. I guess it was some kind of disease. I hope it doesn’t happen again, because it is one of my absolute favorites. I’ll plant it on the other side.

I was going to plant the comfrey in the wild place behind the studio where it could take off, but now I’m having flashbacks to the last time I grew comfrey, and the big pot is beginning to seem like a better idea. Comfrey is indestructible, and it sends out runners. However, it is beautiful and it is wonderful for the compost pile because of its high mineral content. The large leaves can be used for mulch. (Update: Argh, I just realized that by putting it in a pot, the roots would not be able to mine the minerals, and the main reason I bought it would be lost. Such is life.)

I’ll have to research how to prepare the stevia, but it is used as a sugar substitute.

Pat is participating in the Slow Food USA RAFT project, growing some endangered Native American beans. They sent her more than she has room to plant, and she knows of my interest in heirloom vegetables, so she gave me a packet. This is a dicey proposition - they are “O’odham Pink Beans,” Phaseolus vulgaris, “a bush bean native to the desert borderlands of Sonora and Arizona,” and if we have the predicted drought, they may grow just fine in the back forty. If they have to put up with our normal high humidity PLUS clay soil, well, who knows. I have raised beds, so that will help. The seeds came from Native Seed Search in Tucson, AZ.

I didn’t come home with a single vegetable from the market this time - other than the plants I bought hamburger, extra-sharp cheddar cheese, honey vinegar, and granola.