Eat Local This Winter: Plan Ahead
Kate Dagnal's family calls them 100-mile-per-hour tomatoes. They're the ones you buy at the grocery store in the middle of winter.
"You can throw them against the wall at 100 miles per hour and they bounce right off," says the organic farmer, whose family grows specialty greens and gourmet vegetables at Goose Creek Gardens in Oakdale.
The culprit is long-distance travel, which forces farmers in faraway California, Chile and New Zealand to pick their fruits and veggies days or even weeks before they reach peak ripeness. Fortunately, with a little planning ahead, you can enjoy fruits and vegetables all winter long that are locally grown, seasonal, and most of all, tasty.
Move Indoors
Some farms, including Goose Creek Gardens, use greenhouses to extend the growing season. Salad greens, braising greens and herbs do well in greenhouses through December, until days are too short to provide enough hours of sunlight.
Dagnal also suggests tracking down local hydroponic tomatoes starting around March: "They may not be organic, but they are local, so they're picked ripe."
Stock Up
Jen Montgomery, farm manager at Blackberry Meadow Farm in Natrona Heights, suggests stocking up on locally-produced "storage crops," ones that will keep several months in a cool, dry basement.
"Potatoes, winter squash, onions, beets, turnips, sweet potatoes... I load up on all of those things now to get local," she says. "Winter squash will keep for almost a year."
As a general rule of thumb, root vegetables are great keepers, so stock up on local onions, garlic and yams at this weekend's final Farmers @ the Firehouse. Late-harvest apple varieties, like Red Rome and Jonathans, also make great candidates for long-term storage.
Preserve
"It pays to do some of your own canning and freezing," says Next Life Farm's Beth Marshall.
A little work now can soothe your cravings for summer fruit when cold temperatures set in. Marshall makes plenty of spaghetti sauce to satisfy tomato urges at her farm in Indiana county. Soups, fruits and vegetables can be frozen or canned for long-term storage, and berry preserves make a great mid-winter treat.
Even with these tricks, however, most farmers admit that Mother Nature has the upper hand whenever there's frost on the ground.
Marshall conceded defeat this way: "In winter, I buy citrus. It may not be local, but at least it's in season."
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