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.
Heirloom Living Market Lawrenceville : Check this out...there is still time to order!
Greetings All:
Just a reminder that Market closes at 8:00pm tonight.
Offerings you may want to check out!
Greg of Heritage Farm has Smoked Ham and Lamb Chops on Special this week. Bacon is Sold out; however, I did happen to purchase some extra when it was available! This Hickory Smoked Bacon is over-the-top in flavor! Check with your Market Coordinator at pickup if you are interested.
Burnell Farms is back! Check out their great veggies on Market! Last week Tammy brought Broccoli, Brussell Sprouts, Huge heads of Savoy Cabbage, Carrots, Kale and Romaine Lettuce for the Farmers’ Sale Table! Things sold out very quickly! This week you can order on-line!
Carrell Farms has delicious Water Buffalo offerings! Try some Soup Bones for wonderful Bone Broth! Add in the Ox Tail for an especially delicious treat!
Jay Parsons of Dances With Bees is offering a Bee Keeping Class. Jay is a Master Bee Keeper with a wealth of knowledge! His Apiaries are Certified Naturally Grown. Want to start your own hive? Now is your chance to learn all about bees, their importance in our lives, how to keep and care for them and harvest your own Honey! Great opportunity!
Check your Grocery List and get your orders in before 8:00pm this evening for delivery on Thursday!
Burnell Farms
The Veggie Patch
Milk
Cedar Rock Dairy (Cow)
Little Tots Estate (Goat)
Eggs
Rocky Acres
Golden Farms
Little Tots Estate (Organic, Soy Free, pastured chickens) on Farmers’ Sale Table only
Bakery
Bakery on Brooks
My Daily Bread
Grass Fed Meats
Carrell Farms
Heritage Farm
Microgreens
Cedar Seeder
Honey
Dances With Bees
Natural Products
Carrell Farms
Dances With Bees
So-Koi
Handmade Items
Carrell Farms
Dances With Bees
Peacefield Farm
So-Koi
Flours/Grains/Salt
My Daily Bread
So-Koi
Just a heads-up…this week at Market Kefir, Elderberry Syrup and Organic Quinoa will be available on the Farmers’ Sale Table. There is a limited amount of Kefir, so if you know you would like some, please send me an email.
Marie of Bakery on Brooks has created a Gluten-Free Pancake Mix especially for our Market! It is available on the Market this week. The waffles I made yesterday were fabulous! I made a full recipe and now have some stashed in the freezer for part of a great breakfast!
Azure Standard
Azure Standard Order Date: Tuesday, 1-27
Azure Standard Pickup Date: Monday, 2-1 at 11:15am
Pickup Location: 963 Buford Drive, Lawrenceville, GA
Drop #: 796431 Route: Q5
Drop Name: Heirloom Living Market Lawrenceville
Drop Coordinator: Maryanne Vaeth
Contact Information: Email Drop Coordinator
Phone: 404-432-4337
Please Note: Starting with this delivery, our regular delivery day will be the Monday after the ordering deadline at 11:15 am.
This Group on Facebook will keep you up to date on the “happenings” with this service!
Azure Standard Lawrenceville Drop Information: My Azure Standard Drop Lawrenceville
Thanks for your support! See you Thursday!
~Maryanne
Berea Gardens: Market is Open
Good Sunny Day to You!
Our offerings are a little slim this time of year, but we are open to accept your orders. Please remember to get them to us before 9 AM on Tuesday.
Blessings,
Bob
Naples,FL: Market News, Please read
I don’t know why the email didn’t go out this week my apologies. We are sold out. From this time on when your order is not picked up I will credit it to your account and you will have to reorder next week. I had several large orders that had not been picked up and they want them this week which cut down on the product available for everyone else.This has caused a problem to the customers who are on time and regularly pick up their orders. I know things come up but in all fairness to everyone you will have to get a credit and reorder product at another time. Also when you send me emails through the co-op if you don’t sign your name I can’t respond the website doesn’t automatically give your info. We are in the process of buying better cows and getting rid of the cows from our last source which are not producing enough milk or gaining the condition that they need to work for us. These new cows will have to be weaned off of their rations slowly so to keep producing milk and not dry up.
They are quality cows and will be good producers after the adjustment.However Jerseys are hard to come by and we have had to go out of state to purchase. Mike and his son will be traveling the end of this week to get them.They will have to travel non-stop to get them here between milkings.
We are anticipating a 3-5 weeks adjustment period. We are checking into the feed at the moment and it will be non-GMO and will be given at the minimal amount to keep cows in condition. By the end of March and beginning of April(if weather conditions hold) we will be getting our spring grass and everything will be back to 100% grass fed and the great milk that everyone is use to.
Not all the cows are fresh at this time but this will help in their transition period.They are due to calve soon and lets hope they have heifers for future milkers.
Thank you for your understanding through this process it is not by choice but is our only option.
Teresa and Mike Alday
CSA Farmers Market: Growing Season Update January 2015
Dale Kinney from White Pine Farm is starting to plant. He turned an old freezer into a germination cabinet and is upgrading the attached green house so he can heat it. Last years cold weather contributed poorer than usual transplants. Each year he tries to improve and each year poses new first time challenges.
On sunny days the hoop houses get very warm and the chickweed still grows like crazy.
Even it what is suppose to be downtime for farmers is not downtime but bundle up time, long johns, carhardt coveralls, extra socks and what ever it takes to stay warm. The cows can stand in the field with the snow piling on their backs so long as there is water, food and a place to get out of the wind they seem content. Last extreme cold winter was one reason beef prices rose. When it gets cold animals put all their energy to staying warm and not towards growing. In some areas of the country it was so cold herds died. We were lucky our small handful of animals did well, they did not grow quite as much as normal, but they still did well.
This winter so far has been a pleasant blessing, the early cold snap in November took out a lot of hoop house plants but so far after that the winter is somewhat more typical of an average year. Let us hope for a good spring so we can harvest fresh lettuce, kale carrots and more in March. I was forced to buy lettuce from the grocery store instead of eating our own from the hoop house and my first question was Where is the FLAVOR—-there was none, so I too am anxiously awaiting fresh greens.
Until Next Time
Marian Listwak
Northeast Georgia Locally Grown: Locally Grown - Availability for January 21st, 2015
Hey Local Food Lovers,
I hope everyone gets to enjoy either a little time off for the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, or is participating in the MLK Day of Service! I’ll be doing the latter tomorrow at a Garden Workday in Clarkesville at our GreenWay Garden. Anybody looking to enjoy the warm afternoon in the sunshine is welcome to join us from 1-4 pm if you’re close to Clarkesville and would like to see an organic garden and what winter chores look like. It’ll be a combination of mulching fruit trees, digging up raspberries (in fact you might be able to take a few cuttings home with you) and some shed clean up!
I really like the MLK Day of Service slogan, “make MLK a day on, not a day off.” Though we didn’t organize a unique MLK event just for Locally Grown this year, we are in the process of developing several activities that supportive community members could be a huge help to us and our farmers in 2015. Here’s a short list and if you have special skills or interest in any of the above please let us know.
- We’re considering how to BUILD a SHED somewhere near our Gainesville location that would allow us to store our coolers, shelving, boxes and signs in between markets. A shed would also allow us to start receiving items from farms and producers located closer to Gainesville which we hope to do by spring.
- Grace Calvary Church in Clarkesville has been the best possible host for our market there we ever could have imagined. To show our appreciation, sometime in 2015 we would like to help take care of the CARPORT where we have our pickups. A WORKDAY would consist of cleaning the roof of some little trees starting to grow on it, and painting some or all of the outside.
- June 27th is our 2015 FARM TOUR and this year we are planning to do help some of the farms that participate in the tour by organizing a handful of CROP MOBS to help them clean up their farms, and get a handle on the weeds, etc. before the BIG TOUR. If you are interested in being involved in helping farmers during their busiest point in the season get in touch with Andrew the 2015 TOUR COORDINATOR at foodandfaces@yahoo.com
- Locally Grown is hoping to attend several events in the Gainesville / Hall County community this year just to get our name and mission out there. One of them is coming up soon, the BUY LOCAL SAFE and GREEN EXPO on FEBRUARY 5th. If you’d be interested in helping us hand out fliers and business cards at this event please let us know. There will be other opportunities this year for customers to lend to our little market some new faces and testimonials. You guys have always talked us up better than we ever could ourselves.
Well that’s about it for tonight. This week I really enjoyed cooking up some collard greens, having some Cheddar Dill Bread from Habersham Bakers, and adding fresh cilantro to my meatballs instead of parsley.
Have a Great MLK DAY and
EAT WELL,
Justin, Chuck, Andrew, and Teri
Princeton Farm Fresh: The Market is Open
The market is open and it is so hard to go to work in an office when it is so pretty outside. I would love to be putting my fingers in dirt this week. Alas, off to work I go today!
See everyone on Friday,
Angela
Plattsburgh Online Ordering: Jan 24 first winter market
Welcome back. I don’t have pricing yet, but we expect to have carrots, beets, and sweet potatoes from Juniper Hill Farm. If you will not be at market but want some, ask in the comments. We also have garlic bulbs from Reber Rock Farm, available in this online system.
Plus the usual great yogurt, cheese, meats, and other veggies.
Have a great week.
Atlanta Locally Grown: Available fir Saturday January 24
I hope this finds you all doing well. The market is open and ready for orders. We have some great produce available this week along with a nice selection of farm fresh pork products. We are also taking reservations for our next round of processing. They will be ready for delivery mid February.
Thank you for all your support. We will see you on Saturday at your selected delivery location, piedmont park, Brookhaven or Sandy springs. We will be in touch with you about delivery times at each stop.
Thank you again and please share us with a friend,
Brady
Conyers Locally Grown: Available for Friday January 23
I hope this finds you all doing well. The market is open and ready for orders. We have some great produce available this week along with a nice selection of farm fresh pork products. We are also taking reservations for our next round of processing. They will be ready for delivery mid February.
Thank you for all your support. We will see you one Friday between 5-7 to pick up your orders at Copy Central, 1264 Parker road.
Thank you again and please share us with a friend,
Brady
Athens Locally Grown: ALG Open for January 22
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
I’ve just arrived home from nearly a week in Mobile, Alabama, where I served on the staff of the annual conference for the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. It’s one of my favorite events, where over 900 farmers from across the south and beyond gather to share stories of failure and success, learn from those, and inspire each other to return home and grow even more real food for their communities. The days there are extremely long, and I’m ready to drop into sleep as I type this, but it is always well worth it.
I haven’t gone over all the listings for the week yet, but there are about 850 items to choose from, including several new items. The winter has been cold and wet so far, and there is plenty more freezing nights yet to come, but our growers are doing a great job of keeping the food coming to our tables.
If you’d like to learn more about the business, there are several educational opportunities coming up for you.
First, there’s Sound and Sensible Organic Certification Workshop on February 5, 2015 from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., hosted by the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT). This workshop is intended to enlist new farmers and ranchers and help them learn how to become National Organic Program (NOP)-certified. It will provide information and expertise to farmers interested in NOP and answer questions regarding organic farm practices and NOP certification. This day-long event is free, and lunch will be provided. Location: Athens-Clarke County Cooperative Extension, 2152 West Broad Street, Athens, GA 30606 http://www.ugaextension.com/clarke To register: Please visit https://www.ncat.org/events Questions: For questions and more information, please contact Rockiell Woods at 479-575-1385 or email rockw@ncat.org.
Georgia Organics is again bringing their annual conference, attended by people from all over the county, to Athens next month. You can find details of what’s to come at their website, http://conference.georgiaorganics.org/. It’s one of my favorite conferences anywhere, and there’s something there for everyone involved in the local food system, from growers to cooks to eaters.
Finally, in the past two weeks I’ve talked about the legal organization and considerations behind our market and then the financial operation that keeps everything running. I’ll wrap up my yearly primer on Athens Locally Grown this week with a few words about our growers and other market vendors.
First and foremost, let me preface everything by saying the decision to let a new grower into the market is always made by me alone. I know many farmers markets often get some press regarding one vendor or another feeling left out of the market and complaining that the committee running that market was a little too closed. Well, my efforts to run ALG in a cooperative manner aside, the responsibility here comes back to me. There’s no committee, and no formal application process. I’ve had some potential vendors that I’ve rejected get upset with me and complain that ALG is a “closed” market, and they’re right. It is a closed market, and it’s not open to just anyone to sell through. That doesn’t mean we have arbitrary standards, of course, and actually I think I’ve set the bar pretty high. A good number of our growers also go above and beyond to only bring “the best of the best”, and that pushes the de facto standards even higher. Here’s a summary of what it takes to be able to sell through Athens Locally Grown:
- All growers must use sustainable practices and never use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. I’ll come back to this later.
- All growers can only sell what they themselves have grown, made, or otherwise produced
- All growers must be from the greater Athens area. Right now, this means within about 75 miles
- All growers must be willing to be part of our ALG community, and not think of us as just a dumping off point.
- All animals raised for meat or eggs must be pastured or sustainably wild-caught
- Handicrafts must be made primarily from items produced or gathered on the farm
- Prepared foods must use organic ingredients if at all possible, and locally grown ingredients if at all possible
- All proper licenses, when required by law, must be obtained
That about covers everything, I think. When I’ve turned down requests to sell through ALG (and I turn down several monthly), the grower has clearly not met one or more of those standards. There are a few edge cases that I take on a case by case basis. Coffee is one. 1000 Faces was our first coffee vendor, and they offered direct trade coffees (they purchase directly from the coffee growers with no distributor or middle man) and did all the roasting and packaging themselves and to order. That set the standard, and other coffee vendors (such as GranCoffee Roasting Co.) have to match it. Mills Farm was a founding ALG member, but they buy in organic grains for their mill. We now have Sylvan Falls Mill in Rabun Gap as a vendor, and they primarily buy their grains from local (to them) organic growers. From now on, all future millers wanting to sell through ALG will have to meet that standard. And so on.
Let me get back to that first requirement: “sustainable practices”. There’s no set definition of that, and there’s really a sliding scale. For example, I sometimes use a gasoline-powered rototiller, and our no-till growers and the no-hydrocarbon growers would frown upon that. There is a generally accepted definition of what is “conventional” agriculture, and that includes the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and confined and grain-fed animals. Those are easy to exclude. At the other end, there is the USDA Organic Certification and Certified Naturally Grown certification. Few small diversified growers can meet the expense of USDA certification, but a good number of our growers are CNG certified. This program uses the USDA rules as a starting point, made a few things more strict, and uses a system of growers certifying other growers to keep things honest. My farm had been CNG certified for nine years (though I dropped my certification the last few years simply because my garden got really, really small), and many others area farms have followed since then. If a new grower does not have a certification, then I talk to them, get information about them, and visit their farm in person when necessary. A good number of our growers were ALG customers long before growing for market themselves, so I’ve gotten to know the people and the decision to let them in was easy.
In short: the growers have satisfied my standards, and I personally have approved them for inclusion in ALG. However, I want you to not just take my word for it. We have farm tours during the warm seasons so you can go on-site yourself and see the farms in action. We have a semi-regular “meet the grower” table at the Thursday pickups so you can talk with the growers yourself face-to-face. We encourage them to take photos for their online photo album, to describe their practices, and to take care with their product listings. We want to facilitate communication between you and them, so when you place an order, they see your name and email address in case they need to clarify a request or offer a substitution, and likewise for most of our growers you can see their contact info when you view their grower profile (while logged into the site) so you can get clarification from them when needed.
I often wrestle with some of those edge cases. Doug’s Wild Alaska Salmon was one such case. The salmon and halibut they sell was caught in Alaska, but Doug and his family live here (well, just over the line in South Carolina). They own their own small boats, and catch the fish themselves. Their practices are certified sustainable by a reputable organization up there, and their products are high quality. They’ve worked out the logistics of getting fish to you every week (by keeping a supply at my house in a freezer they own). I have in the past talked with sugar cane growers from South Georgia, dairies from across the state, fisherman from Savannah, olive growers from Savannah, citrus producers from Florida, and other people making items we just can’t get from growers located right here. Often, the logistics of getting their items from there to here on a regular and timely basis is what breaks down, but I hope that over time we’ll be able to expand the items at our market without compromising our community of growers located right here.
Hopefully that explains how our growers get into ALG, what standards they have to meet, and so on. It’s a very important topic, perhaps the most important one for our market, but much of it goes on behind the scenes. I know you’ve put your trust in me, and I take that very seriously, If you’d like to talk with me in person about this or any other aspects of ALG, I’d love to do so. Just pull me aside when you come by to pick up your order.
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!