The Grow Local Learning Curve

When you make the transition to growing most of your own produce, a lot of things change, although they don’t necessarily change all at once.

Before I was heavily involved in vegetable gardening, making dinner involved 1) thinking about what I wanted to eat, 2) perhaps stopping at the store on the way home if the desired ingredients weren’t in the house, and then 3) preparing the perfect meal. Okay, sometimes it wasn’t perfect. And sometimes I didn’t have time/energy/money to go to the store, but I would still choose what I wanted to eat from the ingredients in the fridge/pantry.

But when you spend a large amount of your time and energy trying to coax food from the soil, eating what is ripe and ready is much more important than what you want for dinner. And that is a big change.

There were days last summer when I came home with bags and bags of fresh tomatoes in hand, walked right past the ripe beans and squash and basil, and pleaded to go out for pizza.

Over the winter, our garage was full of purple potatoes and butternut squash, and the garden had fresh carrots and kale. I still wanted Thai takeout.

And today, there are enough salad greens outside my front door to feed everyone I know, and some of their friends, a huge, fresher-than-you-can-imagine, bowl of beautiful salad. But I ate Fig Newtons for lunch.

What’s a girl to do? Well, there are a couple of things I’m working on.

Forgiveness We do what we can, when we can. Being a zealot (or a freak, depending on your perspective) doesn’t usually win you many friends or adherents to your cause. I don’t think that eating local means never having takeout or Fig Newtons. It does mean thinking about where your food comes from, noticing when it comes from far or unknown places, and doing your best to source from places you know. Sometimes that won’t happen, and I think it’s much more important to celebrate the times that it does than feel guilty over the times that it doesn’t.

Making it easier I think that in the time that’s passed since it was normal to grow most of your own produce, we’ve lost more than genetic diversity and food preservation techniques – we’ve lost the skills needed to make it easy. (Also, the definition of easy has changed). But I think as more and more of us attempt food production for ourselves, we’ll re-figure out some tricks to fit the whole thing into our lives.

Gradual change and adjustment It really is a lifestyle change to attempt to source most of your food from your own backyard or the backyard of those you know (like the farmer’s market). This time of year, although there is an abundance of food, there isn’t the diversity at the farmer’s market that there is at Safeway. This is perhaps the biggest change. I used to eat leafy greens a couple times a week. Now I eat them every day. Okay…most days.