OLS Week 6: One Local Winter?

Sure, we’ve been eating local.  Any chump could in August around here!  Practically without trying.  There are cucumbers everywhere, the blueberries are ripening, and you can hardly shop anywhere - grocery store, bookstore, coffeeshop, that someone doesn’t try to give you squash for crying out loud!

But buried beneath the delirium of bounty, I have a nagging feeling, one that I can only liken to that of the proverbial farmer who is never happy with today.  She is convinced that the surplus of the moment will be hailed on tomorrow, or that the rain today won’t stop and will end up flooding the fields.

My nagging feeling is that I can eat locally-grown foods now, I can get locally-grown foods now, I need to figure out how to save all of these foods now…now while they’re ripe…now while I can…now before the snow flies…argh!  I actually woke up a few nights ago dreaming about all the tomatoes and berries that were out there that would go to waste if I didn’t pick them and somehow preserve them.

I’ve even begun to dream of how I’ll store potatoes, apples and squash on our porch, and how I can convince the farmer up the street to give me a great deal on all the corn that’s going to be left over when everyone goes home for labor day.  Is this a normal reaction to my newfound awareness of my food?  Geeesh.

So, in an effort to curb the nagging dread, and to help me along on my goal to eat locally as much as possible even in February, I took the bull by the horns and canned up some tomatoes this Saturday.  A bushel of tomatoes, in fact.  The dreams have stopped, for now.

I also picked some blueberries at a blueberry orchard in Tamworth.  This is a cultivated orchard, and the first time picking on such bushes for me (I’m used to the wild, smaller bush blueberries that grow at my in-laws).  The fruit was weighing the branches down, it was really quite amazing.  I picked as much as I could in 30 minutes in 95 degree weather, and had enough to can up some blueberry jam!  I did this at the same time as the tomatoes - it was a marathon session.  I even had enough berries left to freeze a couple of quarts.

If that wasn’t enough, 12 cups of chicken stock and four quarts of green beans from my in-laws garden joined the berries in the freezer.  I will sleep soundly, until pumpkins and apples and squash….well…I guess that’s for another day, yes?