We’ve figured out that as farmers, we can accumulate credit card points through our purchase of all the seeds, organic fertilizers, compost, and even all the stickers that label our bagged greens that we buy every year. And every once in a while, we can trade in those points for plane tickets for our family to take a trip in the winter. So this winter we were fortunate enough to visit extended family that live on the other side of the country. We had never visited them before! 3,000 miles is a long way to move our whole family.
Usually when we travel we take very short trips and we bring all of our own food with us. We pack a cooler wherever we go! As food-centric people, this is important to us. Over the years that we have been operating this farm, we have become extremely attached to the food that we produce. This attachment combined with our limited travel has meant that we have been fortunate enough to always have access to this food for most of the past decade. And thus we had forgotten most of what it was like to eat in the days-before-this-food.
But then this winter we flew on a plane. We did not pack a cooler full of all the food our family would need for two weeks. Instead, we went shopping. We shopped at grocery stores and purchased produce on the day we arrived on the West Coast. We researched the local farmers’ market schedule and we shopped there on Day 5 of our trip. With all due respect to the mainstream food system that supplies grocery stores and the limitations of local farms growing in a desert in January, we were largely disappointed with the vegetables that we purchased. We were thrilled with the locally and organically grown grapefruits, kumquats, and avocados! Those were incredible treats for us, and they were the only local, organic food we could find.
The rest of what we ate came from the big-ag sector and we were grateful to be able to purchase it and be fed. But it was a fabulous reminder of how lucky we are to be able to eat our “regular” food every day. There were no local organic greens or root vegetables that we could find, so we don’t know how those would have tasted. Our children were vocal with their complaints, so it wasn’t just us adults that experienced the difference!
We loved our time with our far-away family and we knew we were fortunate to travel to a distant corner of our country. And we very much looked forward to our food waiting for us at home.
This shift in food expectations and enjoyment happens when you eat a lot of this flavorful, nourishing food we grow. If you haven’t experienced this yet, we encourage you to visit us at the farmers’ markets and look into the details of our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program where community members join our farm to receive weekly shares of vegetables, May through November.
When you are ready to sign up, please Join our CSA so you can be sure to get a bountiful and delicious share of our weekly vegetables this season.
We’ll see you Saturday at Farmers Market @ St. Stephens in the West End of Richmond where we will have…
Kale / Microgreens / Cress / Chard / Pea Shoots / Salad / Spinach…and our Organic Hearth Baked Bread (Sunny Greens, Whole Rye, Raisin, & Seed loaves for this weekend) and Tomato Chutney.
{Our farmstand is open with most of the above items…see here for updated inventory}
Also keep an eye on what we have available via the online farmers’ markets: FallLineFarms.com and Local Roots Food Coop. We have PLANTS for your garden this week!
Enjoy!
– Janet & Dan, & the whole Broadfork crew
