Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Craigslist is Da Bomb for local!

The farmer's markets are a great deal, but around here they only operate a couple of days a week during the summer and fall months. But, thanks to Craigslist, we've found that there are many more resources for local foods here that we never knew existed.

For instance, pick your own places. We now know of several within a 15-20 minute drive from our house that we can use to augment our own garden produce. Last summer we picked tons of cauliflower, cabbage, beans, corn, carrots, parsnips and cucumbers. This year we are doing a cooperative garden with some folks we know that live close by and have an acre, but we will still probably visit the pick your own places at least once during the year for bulk items to freeze and can that we are not going to grow ourselves.

Another resource we've recently tapped is the local family farmer - family run butcher shop. By calling a particular family-run butcher shop, we can order a pig or a steer from a local farming family, have it humanely slaughtered, cut up and frozen for a price that is actually LESS than factory farmed meat from the grocery store. And the quality was really good! And, we rented a meat locker there so we didn't have to try to store it all at home. It's been one of the best decisions we've made in the past couple of years on our way to becoming as local as we can. This year we will likely get a lamb and/or a goat to augment the quarter steer and half pig we are still working on. (We split the steer and pig with two other families)

So, I'm happy to say that with this and our other efforts to eat more simply and locally, we're about 75% local at the moment. If we had easier access to local dairy products we could bump it up a bit, but the dairy we use when we can is about 45 miles away in another city. Maybe some day someone will open one here. At least we can get local eggs.

So if you need to find more local foodstuffs, try craigslist.com and see what you can turn up!

2 comments:

Linn's Cooking Channel said...

Isn't it nice with farmers markets? I totally love it! Please check out my online cooking show.

Anonymous said...

Why did you stop blogging? This is a great idea.