100 Miles.

I am reading Plenty, a book about a Vancouver couple who decide to eat only food that comes from within 100 miles of their house, for one year. I'm only up to May so far but it's really interested. I did a final project for a class on thoughtfulness in eating. I spent two days, one eating the cheapest food I could find on sale at Safeway, and the other making that same food from scratch with ingredients I bought from a farmer's market. I enjoyed the time spent shopping and preparing the meals that took longer. There's no way I could afford that type of lifestyle though. Now, reading this couple's experience, I'd be interested to try something like this for a more sustained period of time. It would be super challenging. There are three farmers markets that are in my normal radius of travel, one being in Lake City. We got our first box of produce today from New Roots Organics, although only a couple items were marked as being local. It's still pretty sparse. Two weeks ago, the farmers market had mostly potatoes, jams, eggs, meats, baked goods, flowers, etc... not a ton of fresh produce. But, spring is getting closer every day. This is the first year I've really noticed it as it happens but stuff is blooming like crazy over the past couple weeks. On Friday the yard was covered with super confident dandelions and the lilac bush outside our bedroom window finally bloomed a couple days ago. There's a tree that I can't identify that had a bunch of small white flowers yesterday. And the bush outside our gate finally came back from the whacking Molly gave it last summer. Apparently it blooms as well and should smell pretty good. The rose outside the mudroom window went crazy after Molly pruned it, now it's sprawling all over the side of the house, over the deck railing. And our sad little flower garden in the front even has a few flowers popping open, since that nice sunny day on Saturday. And, not to keep going on and on, but I will, the herbs in our old veggie patch remembered they're alive and shot up recently.

I saw the farm down the street from my mom's house has a pasture full of lambs now.

It's only a matter of time before the asparagus is here. Although, I cheated and had some California asparagus from Central Market last week.

So, we'll see where this goes. I think I'll finish their book first.