Since the beginning of 2011, Husband and I are making an effort to eat local foods more. We've found that there is quite a large selection available to us.
There are plenty of farms offering delicious fruits and vegetables. My plan is to start preserving and freezing produce when it's in season this summer to supply us during the winter months. We will be starting off easy, canning veggies, making sauces, freezing berries, making jams and fruit preserves and lets not forget Salsa and Tomato soup. To add to this, we will be attempting a garden in our back yard.
This will be our third attempt to a garden and hopefully we will get better results this time. The first year, we didn't put much in our soil except for some peat moss. Our soil is almost like clay, practically nothing was harvested. The second year, we started to enrich our soil. Then we decided only to plant roma tomatoes, about 50 plants worth. Well that was a mistake! The plants produced hundreds of tomatoes each, however because of insane amounts of rain, they rotted before they could be picked. We were able to eat about 10% of what had grown. So this time, we have composted material and enriched soil so we are going to plant a variety of food. Thank goodness we have local farmers as a back up.
Here are other things we are doing to reduce our food miles:
-We buy Speerville grain and flour
-We replaced most of our sugar intake with maple syrup and local honey
-We purchase only free range eggs and grass fed meat from a local farmer
-We eat only local cheese and dairy
-We don't eat prepackaged food much to begin with, but we are cutting that out too.
We didn't stop buying things just because they aren't completely local, we still get chocolate and such but we are substituting our usual brands and products for things that are made or grown closer to home. For us it's not about the 100 Mile Challenge, or even a Maritime Challenge, it's about changing our food habits for good.
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