It’s only the 3rd of May, and I just picked up my first box of 2024 vegetables. Again this year, I’m outsourcing the gardening. A young couple who live about two miles away, who moved here from Chicago, are making a living from their little farm. This year they’ll have three seasons of community sourced agriculture boxes each week — spring, summer, and fall.
They are superb gardeners. Over the winter they added a second greenhouse (for starting their vegetables from seeds). They do organic, no-till gardening on remarkably little land. None of the space they have is wasted, with some room left over for blooming things that feed the birds and bees. They sell most of their produce at a high-end farmer’s market in Greensboro, which is open on Saturday mornings. I believe I’m their only local customer who picks up at the farm, which is a bit sad. Most rural people just don’t care about fresh vegetables anymore. Very few people garden, and based on what I see local people buying in the grocery store, their diets are terrible. As much as rural people complain about grocery prices, you’d think they’d get a clue.
I have a standing appointment for pickups on Fridays at 11. They pick my things early in the morning, wash it, and put it in their chiller. When I pick it up it’s fresh from their garden.
Again this year I’ll grow tomatoes and herbs (especially basil) in my own garden plot. But I’ll get everything else from Brittany and Richard.
That’s great a young couple are making a living from small scale farming. Should give us hope for the future. There’s been a bit of a revival of farm shops around here too. They declined in the 1990s with the rise of big supermarkets but there’s been a welcomed counter-trend in recent years.
Hi Chenda: As you know, it’s a really good feeling to be able to support such an enterprise so close to home. I had never seen “cone cabbage,” by the way. Next week they’re saving me a cone cabbage with the larger outer leaves intact. I would like to steam or boil the leaves and use them as wraps for something stuffed.
That sounds nice! I also spy an interesting book review in the background;)
Hi Chenda: My reading stack is pretty tall at the moment. I also am trying out a new fiction writer, C.J. Sansom, who recently died. His first book is “Dissolution,” which is set in Tudor England with a plot relating to the dissolution of the monasteries. How could I resist!