Local Food Mn

A 90 second video from our day planting onions with folks from the Birchwood Cafe and Common Roots Cafe at Riverbend Farm. It’s a short, worthwhile watch that gives you a sense of the equipment out there (not all of it still in use) and what Greg Reynolds is all about. Riverbend supplies organic produce to many restaurants in the Twin Cities.

After all of this blogging about the local, organic Minnesota food we’ve been getting from the Harmony Valley Farm CSA, I’m excited to finally get the chance to visit the place. Harmony Valley has named Sunday, June 21 Strawberry Day, offering farm tours, strawberry picking, and other fun activities for the whole family from noon to 6 pm. Here are the details of the event, straight from the Harmony Valley site:

There’s little question that Farmers’ Markets are an easy and affordable way to support your local food producers while getting out and enjoying the festive open-air environment. So I jumped at the chance to report from the fabulous St. Paul Farmers’ Market for the Simple Good and Tasty blog! My favorite part about shopping the St. Paul Farmers Market is knowing that the vast majority of the food sold there was produced within 50 miles of the place.

When the most recent batch of local produce came from our Harmony Valley CSA last week, my kids wanted their pictures taken with each new vegetable. My daughter's colorful dress seemed like the perfect backdrop for this beautiful purple kohlrabi, which we ate over the weekend. To my less-than-expertly-trained palate, kohlrabi - which I'd never eaten before - tastes very much like cabbage.

Has it already been a week? Can you tell from the bigger that the bounty is getting bigger? It's much harder to make our way through an entire box of local, sustainable, organic fresh produce - no matter how wonderful - when we spend part of the week out of town (as we did last week). Lucky for us there's always a line up of family, friends, and neighbors willing to take an extra bag of spinach, green garlic, or bok choy off our hands in a pinch. Why is it so hard to let these treasures go?

I'm excited to try out Simple Provisions, a Stillwater-based food delivery company serving the Twin Cities. According to their website: Simple Provisions is a home delivery service featuring organic milk in returnable glass bottles and other local, sustainable and organic farm products.

Okay, okay - it's organic food labeling that we need help with - not the food itself. The food itself? I'll let the excellent book Real Food by Nina Planck describe it:

Organic means food was produced without synthetic fertilizer, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, genetically engineered ingredients, and irradiation.

Thanks to Good Life Catering, I no longer fear vast quantities of rhubarb. Now that I can make a rhubarb margarita, I say "bring it on!" Thank goodness, because more rhubarb is on the way. Here's a list of what I'll be getting from my Harmony Valley CSA today, along with descriptions and advice straight from the Harmony Valley newsletter:

Seems like every few days I'm approached by someone with a local food focused business idea. Distribution is broken! We need a year round farmers market! CSAs are not the answer! Here's what I say: Yes. I've seen King Corn, FRESH, The Future of Food, and others.