Have you ever seen the first purple-tinged tips of asparagus poking up through the warming spring soil? If you grow your own you have. Gardening, especially vegetable gardening, brings us closer to the natural cycles of the earth that make life as we know it possible.
The sun made a brief appearance this morning before being hidden once again by a thick layer of clouds. The last two weeks of alternating cloudy and rainy days derailed both baseball games and the best laid gardening plans. Our vegetable plant grower watched his main planting of 60 flats of basil rot in the greenhouse. I weaned my own homegrown tomato plants from the warmth and dryness of the light stand, only to have them become infected with early blight outside in the damp gloom. They’ll recover to produce a diminished crop if the sun ever returns. Or maybe I’ll buy some uninfected plants. In either case my garden will provide a constant supply of tomatoes from July until frost.
Growing your own food, in your own yard, makes you the quintessential locavore. You can’t get food that’s any more local, any more sustainable, than the fruits and vegetables you harvest just outside of your back door. If you want the freshest, tastiest produce around, dig a garden and tune into the cycle of the seasons. Just don’t forget the hard work part. Quality doesn’t come cheap. If you want the best produce money can’t buy, you’ll have to work for it. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans planting your first garden this year, welcome to the club.
Few gardeners, though, are able to produce all or even most of their fresh food needs.
We are fortunate that there are a number of former gardeners in our area who have promoted themselves to full time farmers. These local farmers, all advocates of sustainable agriculture (whether certified organic or not), provide us with bountiful harvests from their land. Despite the challenging weather so far this spring, Harvest Market will soon be overflowing with locally grown vegetables. Asparagus, spring salad and cooking greens, scallions, peas and maybe strawberries (if we don’t have too much rain) are just around the corner. Early summer harvests of new potatoes, green beans, zucchini, the first tomatoes and much more will soon follow.
Harvest Market supports dozens of local growers and producers with hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual purchases. With the planting season only just beginning we have already more than doubled last year’s purchases of vegetable and bedding plants from Paul and Carol Hauser (Lincoln University, PA). We‘re expecting another good year of production from the Esh family (Christiana, PA) who provide us with fresh vegetables, raw milk cheeses and the Country Kitchen line of pickles. And Lancaster Farm Fresh, a grower’s cooperative of mostly Amish and Mennonite families, now has more than fifty farms that can supply us with fruits and vegetables well into the fall. Of course we are also fortunate to have year-round supplies of grass-fed meats from Rumbleway Farm (Conwingo, MD) and Country Meadows (Quarryville, PA). Rumbleway also supplies us with naturally pastured chickens though October and turkeys for Thanksgiving. And Jacob Zook supplies us with his absolutely delicious and nutrient dense raw milk cheeses from his herd of grass fed cows. All of these last three farms also supply us with dark-yolked eggs from chickens that live outside, rather than crammed thousands to a factory farm building.
When we buy direct from local farmers we are supporting the fairest of fair trade. These local growers set both their own working conditions and the fair prices they need to continue to keep their land as farms. When we buy directly and locally we keep money circulating in our communities. The land stays open, the farmers continue to farm and we all benefit. Well, except the multi-national techno-food conglomerates—but that’s another story.
Thank you for supporting local family farms. Please pick up the Harvest Market Guide to Local Products the next time you’re in the store.
Bob Kleszics
