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 : There is still time to order...Market closes at 8:00pm
Greetings All:
Just a reminder that Market closes at 8:00pm tonight.
Offerings you may want to check out!
Bakery on Brooks is back and Marie has fabulous Gluten Free offerings! Paleo Bites, perfect for an after-work-out-pick-me-up or a part of breakfast or healthy afternoon snack for the kiddos! Cookies to tempt your taste buds; soft and yummy Sandwich Bread perfect for sandwiches for Gluten Free folks! Try any of her delicious Rolls or Cornbread with your favorite soup. We are blessed to have such a wonderful Baker who makes the best Gluten Free items I have ever had!
For those of you who are not Gluten Free, My Daily Bread offers a great variety of Organic Baked Goods! Jams/Jellies/Preserves, (my favorites are the Hot Pepper Peach and Blackberry) all made from Organic ingredients! Check out the two new items Dabrielle has added! Beer Buzzed Cheese Dip, (perfect for snacking with veggies or crackers) and Buffalo Blue Cheese Dip which would go great with some Chicken Wings from Heritage Farm! Beware — Dabrielle says “It’s not for the faint of heart!” She has also added sliced Pumpernickel to her fabulous variety of yeast breads! Dabrielle bakes with passion and loves providing us with fresh Organic offerings and we are blessed to have her at Market!
Greg of Heritage Farm has Whole Duck, Leg of Lamb and Lamb Chops on Special this week. Bacon is back! This Hickory Smoked Bacon is over-the-top in flavor! Try some! Oh the Deli Sliced Ham is delicious. I have had it on sandwiches and added to a Fritatta — FABULOUS! Heritage Farm is a Family run Farm. Greg’s wife, Lainya and their children all participate in the work and running of Farm, so their ‘by-line’ from our family to yours encompasses that truth. I will be highlighting the Farm in next week’s Newsletter and we will have Greg as Farmer of the Day soon! I am grateful Heritage Farm is part of the Heirloom Living Market Family!
Carrell Farms is back with Water Buffalo offerings! Try some Soup Bones for wonderful Bone Broth!
Check your Grocery List and get your orders in before 8:00pm this evening for delivery on Thursday!
Peacefield Farm
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 and Organic Quinoa will be available on the Farmer Sales Table. There is a limited amount of Kefir, so if you know you would like some, please send me an email.
Azure Standard
Azure Standard Order Deadline: Tuesday, January 6th 6:00pm
Azure Standard Pickup Date: Tuesday, January 13th at 2:30pm
Pickup Location: 963 Buford Drive, Lawrenceville, GA
Drop #: 796431
Drop Name: Heirloom Living Market Lawrenceville
Drop Coordinator: Maryanne Vaeth
Contact Information: Email Drop Coordinator
Phone: 404-432-4337
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
Joyful Noise Acres Farm: Ordering ends at 8:0pm.
Please get your orders in before the market closes at 8:00 tonight.
If you are attending the Sourdough class on Saturday, you can wait until then to pick up if you want.
Blessings,
Mary Beth
Atlanta Locally Grown: Available for Saturday January 10
I hope this finds you all doing well. Happy New Year! Here we go, kicking off 2015 with a great selection for the market. While my garden is gone to the pigs for the winter Taylorganic has lots of great produce available this week. The cabbage, collards, kale and more will enhance any meal. Order up, you will eat 28 times over the next week. Hopefully we can be apart of those meals. Carroll farms has some fantastic water buffalo available this week. Our farm has eggs, mushrooms and plenty o pork.
Let’s welcome 2 new producers this week; Mana In Our Foods, with prepared meals and Red Cactus Tamales with tamales or a varietal of flavors.
Please order up, we appreciate all your support and don’t forget to share us with a friend.
The market is open until 8pm on Wednesday and pick up is on Saturday at your selected delivery location; Piedmont Park, Sandy Springs Farmers market or Brookhaven Farmers market, we will be in touch with you about the time.
Thank you,
Brady
Old99Farm Market: Old 99 Farm, week of Jan 4 2015
First thank you to the thoughtful Old 99 loyalists who gave us a gift of something home cooked or brewed, or a card and well-wishes over the Holiday Season. You reeally made our day!
I learned recently that Jan 1st is a very important day for chickens in California. Yes their new egg law is being implemented. Proposition 2,(2008)requires that all shell eggs for sale in the state come from hens afforded enough space to turn around and stretch their wings and fly, well, maybe walk and hop.
How much space do the scientists think a hen needs to comply with the new law? A spacious 116 square inches, as it turns out. That’s a nice upgrade from the very stingy 67 square inches (less than a piece of writing paper) afforded to hens unfortunate enough to be born into the battery cage neighborhood.
To comply many egg producers are just reducing the number of birds per cage which in the short run, means fewer eggs laid. Out of state producers have to comply too, if they want to sell in California.
The industry spin is generally the same; California voters approved the measure ultimately causing a decrease in the size of the flocks supplying the egg market *with a corresponding increase in the cost of eggs. *
There’s an economy of scale example to illustrate in real-life why small pastured producers have eggs that cost more. But are eggs at today’s prices expensive?
If a price of eggs costs $6 per dozen, that’s really 50 cents per egg. That means two sunny-side up eggs for breakfast is $1. You can’t buy a latte, a 20 ounce root beer, a pack of cigarettes, or a gallon of gas for a $1. The US pastured poultry average for a dozen of eggs is $5.20 per dozen with premiums paid for organic and soy-free production.
While the hens supplying California’s cheap egg markets have more space to live, it doesn’t result in a better quality egg. And it doesn’t eliminate cages. This is part that nobody is really talking about. Here in Canada, there is no law forbidding confinement cages for layers. That’s why you can buy eggs for $2/doz. But do they taste good? Are they nutritious? do you care about animal rights to not subsidize that industrial mode of egg production?
I figure pasture produces better quality and provides a suitable welfare environment for the chickens. There are many studies to back up the nutritional differences in pasture-raised eggs. Also, there is no caged production and the living space for pastured hens can be measured in square feet with additional space for foraging. My 90 birds have 400 sq ft inside and 8000 square feet of outside space and were eating grass on Xmas day! (Mild winter helps:)
That is the context for my “Let’s all eat eggs” campaign here for the next while. I have happy hens producing more eggs that you’all are buying. So puleez, get your neighours and co-workers interested in pastured eggs. I’m offering a free dozen with every 3 you buy. That works out to $4.50 a dozen. Buy three, get four. Sounds like an omelet to me!
The greenhouse offerings are still plentiful, with salad greens, kale, collards, spinach, green onions, and carrots. More root crops in the cold cellar. Lots of meats in the cooler, including stewing hens.
Healthy eating
Ian and Camelia
Athens Locally Grown: ALG Open for January 8
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
Welcome to 2015, and another year of Athens Locally Grown. This will be our fourteenth(!!) year in operation, and we are looking forward to many more. Many of our growers are have slowed down for the winter, delivering every other week or otherwise reducing their availability. Many others, however, are still going strong thanks to greenhouses and other season-extending methods. Now that the holiday season is behind us, we’ll be going every single week from now until our next week off — Thanksgiving.
Each year, I devote the first few mailings of the year to the behind the scenes operation of ALG. This week, I’m going to talk about the many legal issues surrounding our market. Even though many people call us “the co-op”, ALG is legally a market owned and operated me, so I can have a place to sell items I occasionally offer from my own garden. There’s no board of directors, no shield corporation, no pot of grant money. It’s just me, and while that keeps things very simple, it also exposes my family to a ton of potential liability. It’s never been an issue (except when the whole raw milk thing erupted a few years ago) but there are several things I do specifically to minimize that risk:
- The growers list their own items and set their own prices. When you buy from them, it is from them, not from me, and not from Athens Locally Grown.
- Athens Locally Grown never takes ownership or possession of the food. The growers drop it off, and you pick it up.
- Everything at the market has a customer’s name attached to it when it arrives. ALG does not repackage any items, or buy in bulk for redistribution.
- When you pay, you’re paying into a shared cash box for all of the growers. This lets you write a single check or swipe your card once for convenience, but you are really paying all of the growers directly and individually. Your money goes in, and the software I wrote to keep everything going spits out checks for each of the growers you buy from.
- The growers give a small percentage of their sales, generally 10%, back to the market to cover the many expenses of keeping the market going. I’ll cover the details of finances another week.
- ALG never buys from a grower and resells the items to you. Never.
- When a grower sells items that need licenses from either the state or the federal government, ALG verifies that the proper licenses have been obtained.
The ownership issue is key. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t offer delivery, and why we usually can’t hold items for you if you aren’t able to pick up your orders. Delivery might be a good business for someone (if they could figure out all the legal requirements), but it’s not at all what I personally want to be into. I think it would be a valuable service for you, and I’m hoping someone will be able to partner with me for this. Many food co-ops and even some farmers markets aren’t as careful with keeping ownership straight as I try to be, and that has gotten other groups similar to us into serious legal trouble (deserved or not) over the years. There are so many grey areas in all this, and the written regulations still don’t even consider that something like Athens Locally Grown might exist. We’re so firmly in the grey areas with most everything we do that it’s just too risky for me to bring us into the areas that are clearly black.
So, these are the sorts of things that guide my thinking as Athens Locally Grown has grown over the years. Everything we do has legal ramifications, and the state of Georgia has a reputation for being no nonsense when it comes to enforcement — with the little guy, anyway. That has became extra obvious in recent years, and the FDA is also putting pressure on groups like us too. I’m not a lawyer, but every time we enter those grey areas, I make sure we follow the intent of the laws, don’t flaunt anything, and have a good defense and a paper trail should we need it. And when that doesn’t work, the good folks at the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund are behind us. They have consumer memberships, too, and I do encourage everyone who is able to become a member of the FtCLDF.
The FtCLDF was my legal counsel in the federal lawsuit against the FDA I (and one of our members) was a plaintiff on. The lawsuit was in response to the seizure and destruction of 110 gallons of South Carolina milk purchased by ALG members in October 2009. During the pre-trial phase, the FDA moved to dismiss the suit, and went so far as to claim that the milk dumping, filmed and placed on YouTube, with an FDA agent clearly identified, never happened. The judge refused to dismiss, and gave the FDA six months to give a yes or no answer to whether what we did is really considered illegal. Exactly six months later, they responded that it was illegal, but also claimed that even though an FDA agent was at my house giving direction, they had no hand in the dumping. They also went on record stating that individuals were legally free to cross state lines and buy raw milk to take home with them (something that the FDA agent at my house said, on camera, was completely illegal under all circumstances). After that, the judge dismissed the suit without fully ruling whether ALG was also free to facilitate our members collectively ordering and picking up milk across state lines. In any case, the state of Georgia still says what we were doing was illegal, so raw milk is still very hard to come by.
And there in a nutshell is the legalities behind ALG. In the following weeks, I’ll get more into the nuts and bolts of finances and other aspects of how we work.
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!
StPete.LocallyGrown.Net: Market NOW Open - Jan. 5th, 2015
SPECIAL THANKS to Customer Kim Munshower who shared—on our Market Community Food Blog—her recent adventure making Sapote Banana Pudding with black sapote fruit from our Market a few weeks ago. Way to go, Kim!
To Contact Us
St. Pete Locally Grown
on the web
on facebook
on google
via email
see volunteers on pinterest
see local urban growers on pinterest
Ready To Order?
sign in & shop now
FIRST TIME CUSTOMERS You are invited to watch our Market Tutorial before you begin. If you do not receive an email confirmation immediately after you order, then you did not click the SUBMIT ORDER button and we did not receive an order from you. Call your Market Manager for help.
Market Calendars Now Available!
Here’s your chance to capture the past year in pictures as Growers, Volunteers, and Customers come together to make this wonderful adventure called “St. Pete Locally Grown” a memorable keepsake for just $12. Act now so that someday you can say “you knew us when”.
Message from Your Market Manager
HAPPY NEW YEAR
AMEN! Our online Market is open every other week starting this week until the end-of-year 2015 holidays. This calendar shows all the “green” weeks that our Market will be open in 2015. Suggest that you save the link as a favorite!
PLEASE HELP US SELL OUT
As many of you know, our Market is growing and some of our suppliers require a minimum purchase which makes me have to ask you, our valued customers, to consider doing the majority of your food shopping through our Market! Availability varies from Market to Market so please don’t wait for an item to reappear as we cannot guarantee it will appear each time.
GROWER GREENERY
Kudos to many of St. Petersburg’s finest urban Growers like Pioneer Settlement Garden, Brenon’s Homegrown, Ida’s Garden, and Nathan’s Natural Veggies for their dedication to growing chemical-free vegetables within St. Petersburg’s city limits! We are entering our FIFTH year of this Market and all of these folks—and our other valued producers—have been right there with us, cheering us on. WE THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR LOYALTY TO OUR CUSTOMERS. Please visit all of our Markets’ Grower’s pages and get to know your farmers!
EXOTIC FRUITS AND PLANTS
Have you yet noticed our new Grower Mrs. Chippy’s Plant World and the awesome variety of exotic fruit & vegetable plants she offers exclusively to our Market Customers? Debra Black is an active member of the Tampa Bay Rare Fruit Council and well versed in this area. Check out her Grower page for more evidence of Debra’s passion!
MORE FRESH STRAWBERRIES & THIS WEEK’S FRUIT
Direct from Plant City’s Strawberry Passion Farms in addition to sour oranges (calamondins), ruby pink grapefruit, papayas, galas, Medjool dates, Carambolas (aka star fruit), and bosc pears.
NEW GROWER WITH LAMB ON NEXT MARKET
Check out new Grower Alexandra Lake Farm in Dade City joining us on the Market Jan. 19th! Lamb cuts…
WELCOME TO OUR NEWEST CUSTOMERS
Once you have submitted your order, if in doubt about what you owe, you can always confirm what you have been charged for by checking your account history and viewing your most current invoice. Instructions on how to do that are on our Q&A page under the question entitled Since you don’t provide an invoice with delivery, how do I know what I owe? Also, since your vegetables are picked fresh within 24 hours of delivery, they should be lasting for WEEKS in your refrigerator. When you accept delivery, please take a few minutes to inspect your order to protect your vegetables from unnecessary spoilage. Lastly, it is imperative that you understand our policy on Unclaimed Orders found on our Q&A page. When you make a purchase you are agreeing to abide by this policy.
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED
Our Market has high standards for what it sells. Despite that—as seasons transition—the challenges of evolving weather and pesky insects can take its toll on the crops. Market Growers are being very selective about what they are willing to present to you. No, it won’t always be picture perfect (which is part of its charm) and sometimes an insect is going to evade capture! But we won’t send you anything that we wouldn’t eat ourselves. If for any reason we have goofed and you are dissatisfied, please report it to me right away so we can rectify the situation. That’s how we get better and we all benefit from that. Your satisfaction is key to our success as a resource for St. Petersburgs’ lovers of chemical-free, organically & locally grown vegetables.
Upcoming Events
All these and more are posted on our Calendar of Events
WORKSHOPS & EVENTS
- “Successful Urban Farming in St. Petersburg” on Jan. 10th, 1-3PM Cost $35/$25. RSVP NOW
- “REAL DIRT: Make Your Own” on Jan. 17th, 1-3PM Cost $35/$25. RSVP NOW
- “Monthly Potluck Social”, Jan 24th, Nathan’s Garden Tour Begins at 5:30PM for active Market customers, growers, and volunteers. BY Whoozin.com e-vite ONLY. Our Speaker is Kathleen Wheeler who is going to share her extensive experience with fermenting foods for the past few years and how that has impacted her health & well-being. Should be a good one!
Volunteer Opportunities
We are currently organizing our volunteer needs by Grower and by Market. So when you are interested in learning how to garden and/or how to run an urban market—including a model for great delivery service for the Market—consider volunteering for the organizations below. Check back for more Growers to be listed and don’t miss the link below to a (Goat) Nanny Program.
Nathan’s Natural Veggies
Pioneer Settlement Garden
St. Pete Locally Grown Market
The Dancing Goat
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!
Conyers Locally Grown: Available for Friday January 9, 2015
I hope this finds you all doing well. Happy New Year! Here we go, kicking off 2015 with a great selection for the market. While my garden is gone to the pigs for the winter Taylorganic has lots of great produce available this week. The cabbage, collards, kale and more will enhance any meal. Order up, you will eat 28 times over the enact week. Hopefully we can be apart of those meals. Carroll farms has some fantastic water buffalo available this week. Our farm has eggs, mushrooms and plenty o pork.
Please order up, we appreciate all your support and don’t forget to share us with a friend.
Thank you,
Brady
Northeast Georgia Locally Grown: Locally Grown - Availability for January 7th, 2015
Hey Local Food Lovers,
Welcome back to Locally Grown after what feels like a very long break! My fridge is nearly empty of local food which is downright painful. Time to stock it back up!
We are bringing in the new year in style with the first of what will be numerous exciting changes and improvements to Locally Grown in 2015. I’m sure all of you have noticed the change in the appearance of the website. While everything functions exactly the same (please let us know if you found something that isn’t working properly), the site should look and feel just a little bit nicer. We also want to point out a very cool new logo designed by Andrew Linker. Very well done! Many of our Gainesville customers have already met Andrew, but you’ll be seeing a lot more of him in 2015 as he’ll be taking my place (Justin) as the full time manager at Gainesville. I’ll definitely be stopping by from time to time, but will be concentrating more energies in some of the logistics of growing the market this year.
I’d like to mention a couple of other things as we bring in the New Year. Locally Grown is supported by a huge fleet of volunteers and way underpaid managers. Since we’ve expanded to 3 locations now I thought I’d slow down long enough to mention all of our crew that makes the market possible.
Here’s how the LOCALLY GROWN CREW breaks down:
Justin and Chuck are co-managers of the whole market
Amy is the Tiger market manager
Teri is the Clarkesville market manager
Andrew is the NEW Gainesville market manager
Bruce King starts as our Shuttle Driver between Gainesville and Clarkesville this week!
Brooks is an occasional shuttle Driver between Tiger and Clarkesville
Lynn is an every other week Clarkesvillle volunteer
Crissy is an every other week Clarkesville volunteer
Annaclair is a substitute Clarkesville volunteer
Ron and Hildreth are our every other week Gainesville volunteers
Anne is an every other week Gainesville volunteer
Sue and Carrie are our substitute Gainesville volunteers
That’s a whole lot of people, and I apologize as I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few. We also have lots of farmers that help coordinate order deliveries between farms to try and cut down the driving time for everyone.
If you get a chance, please thank these individuals for giving so much of their time and energy to make this market possible. Each year that the market has grown we’ve had to expand our base of volunteers to help make sure we could continue, and each year, the right people have been there at the right times and we are very thankful for them. We have a great crew!
Maybe one day soon I’ll describe the history of the market again, and how we are organized by a farmer led non-profit called Georgia Mountains Farmers Network. But tonight I have a few other announcements to make.
Here are some of the things to look out and prepare for in 2015
New Farms are joining and will continue to join Locally Grown this year. We want to welcome The Veggie Patch at Bouchard Farms this week. The farm is certified organic, located in Commerce, GA, and has an incredible mix of greenhouse grown goodies (to keep us stocked up all winter) and a whopping 15 acres of field grown veggies that’ll come on strong for the spring and summer. We’ve posted a photo of Michelle Berzack the Farm Coordinator at The Veggie Patch showing off their greenhouses on a tour we took right before Christmas.
A Gainseville Farmer Drop Off Site will be coordinated sometime in the next 3 months, likely somewhere at the History Center pickup location. We’re in the process of looking at all the logistics now to make it as smooth as possible. What this will mean to you the customer is that we’ll be able to expand the number of farms and food vendors that can sell to the market, by adding a location that is closer for them to deliver to. This should greatly increase the diversity of products offered through the market. We could use your help. If you know of farms or food producers (that also meet our market standards) that would like to sell and are located within a 30 min drive or so from Gainesville, please let us know or let them know or both. Our focus is on food producers so we’re not encouraging other locally crafted goods at this time.
We’re working on our first ever Marketing Strategy with a great group of folks at FORUM COMMUNICATIONS in Gainesville. We’re very excited about this process and reaching new people in 2015. We believe with some creative approaches to engage more people with Locally Grown food, people could eat better, and farms will have a solid and growing customer base every month of the year. We also have found that quite a few of you are more than willing to talk us up. We thank you for that. With a few new cool tools and resources we think we could make it even easier to make Locally Grown look irresistible to people. That’s our aim, to become irresistible! And we look forward to engaging all of you in that process.
Before we wrap up tonights message, I just want to let each of you know that we consider everyone who buys food from the market, or reads these e-mails on a regular basis, or just keeps up with what we are doing to be a very important part of our Locally Grown team. Up until this point the success of our entire little market has been because of word of mouth from folks just like you who like good food, and like learning about sustainable farms, and then supporting those farms. We love the deep conversations we have with customers on market days about everything from how to cook jerusalem artichokes, to the benefits of probiotics, to how to plant, harvest and cure sweet potatoes successfully. It’s fun, it’s educational, it’s about building community around the things we love and above all else it’s about eating well. So THANK YOU for making 2014 our best year yet, and thanks in advance for your help in making 2015 …..well let’s just say it’s gonna be BIG!
So EAT WELL this week and here’s to the beginning of a GREAT NEW YEAR!
Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew
in Clarkesville, Tiger and Gainesville
Dawson Local Harvest: Fresh Produce for your January!
DAWSON lOCAL HARVEST for January 9th
Fresh Produce and More for Your January!
HI EVERYBODY!
It may be Winter now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get fresh, all-natural Produce. LEILANI’S has a nice, big greenhouse that’s perfect for winter vegetables like Lettuce, Kale, Spinach, and other crisp favorites. Take a look to see what’s new ar The Market for this week.
THE MARKET IS NOW OPEN!
REMEMBER! You can order until Tuesday night at 8pm. Pick up your order at Leilani’s Gardens Friday afternoons from 4 to 7pm.
You’ll find the DAWSON LOCAL HARVEST at http://dawsonville.locallygrown.net
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! We guarantee your satisfaction with all products in the DAWSON LOCAL HARVEST.
Have a happy and healthy week!
Alan Vining
Market Manager
Citrus County Locally Grown: Happy New Year
