eat more locally grown food

The vegetable patch has spread and now includes plenty of things on my patio too.

Also in the hamlet next to our village there’s a few farms. One sells directly to the village shop and I bought some very local watercress at the weekend. I know it’s travelled less than 1 mile. That’s pretty local.

I guess I can’t get any more local than my own garden. That is if I’m successful.

I do love going there but the food is so damn expensive.

I don’t mind too much paying £8.50 for 3 gorgeous jars of high fruit, low sugar jam (jelly to my US friends) as they are made in fairly small quantities.

The fruit, vegetables and dairy products are expensive tho. I know for our market in particular that it is the farmers or their families that must set up stall (not employed market workers) so you can ask questions but this is always a luxury shop for me. I would love to shop there more often but simply can’t justify the outgo.

This week my mother has received a bag of windfall apples from her best friend’s garden and a bag or runner beans, 3 beetroots and a marrow from her next-door neighbour.

Some has been frozen and some is being eaten tomorrow for lunch.

There’s also grapes and tomatoes ripening in my parents’ greenhouse and some more fruit and veg in their vegetable garden.

Loads of really fresh goodies. :)

I picked a large bucket of apples from my parents’ garden today. We’ve had really strong winds and loads of apples were blown from the trees. There are loads more still up in the trees. Yum.

The apples are bruised or worse but all the apples I picked up look to be 50% salvagable. Then my mother will stew them and make crumbles and freeze the rest so we can have crumbles all winter long.

Again couldn’t get much more local than that – the sugar and crumble ingredients will be from the supermarket unfortunately. Still it’s better than 100% coming from the supermarket (and possibly abroad).

When I visit my parents (which I’m doing quite a lot at the moment) some of the food on the plates at most meals was picked under an hour before or came out of the freezer from earlier in the season.

That’s about as local as it could be – and they also only grow organic food using fertiliser from their compost heap.

I try to buy British fruit/veg when I can but this still has food miles caused by transport to/from packing plants.

Our farmers market moved and I now don’t go past it. I must organise regular visits. Their veg is much nicer (if more expensive). There is also virtually no packaging on these products – thereby reducing my environmental footprint more.

OK – I will go on Sunday.

Wish it was earlier in the weekend as we eat most of our weekly fresh food Fri/Sat/Sun.