Springfield Locavore

Wait! Come Back!

Don't go away yet! I will post again! I promise! Today, even!

Welcome (Again!), SJ-R Food Section Readers!

About a year ago, Kathryn Rem, editor of the State Journal-Register's food section, wrote an article about this blog and our plans to become locavores. She called the other day to find out how the year had gone so that she could write a follow-up article. I think the new article will run in tomorrow's edition of the paper, so I'm posting this as a "Welcome to my blog!"

As I wrote last year, if you haven't read my blog before, welcome! If you enter your email address in that box on the right and click the "Subscribe" button, you'll receive an automatic email notification every time I post something. (No, I won't spam you. I'm busy enough without coming up with more things to do with my time!) Of course, if you use a feed reader (such as Google Reader), you can subscribe there as well.

This blog began as out outgrowth of another blog of mine, Talking to Myself Again. Over there, I just blog about things happening in the life of our family. Over time, more and more of the entries I posted there were about the latest goodies we bought at the farmer's market or received from our CSA membership. (CSA = community-supported agriculture.) It occurred to me that some of my friends might not be nearly as interested in this stuff as I was. :-) So I created this blog, copying from there the relevant entries.

The earliest one, from December 2007, was a Christmas recap that included this paragraph:

I also quickly devoured one of the books, "Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally", by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. This is one of those books that I have the urge to buy a dozen of and give them to all my friends. I plan on talking about it more later. At length. Be prepared.

What an understatement that turned out to be!

As I did last year, I plan on blogging here about what we've been eating, local food sources that we've found, what we're still searching for, etc. However, it certainly won't be just a food diary! (How boring would that be to read!) To give you an idea of what to expect, here are some entries you might want to read. (These tend to be longer entries. Most of the stuff I post is much shorter. Honest!)

• 1/10/2008 - The 100-Mile Diet
• 1/27/2008 - "King Corn" and Community-Supported Agriculture
• 4/14/2008 - Eggcellent Adventure
• 6/17/2008 - Eggs with Character (Plus Free Chicken Poop)
• 6/28/2008 - Photos from First Evening Farmer's Market
• 9/11/2008 - Return to the Illinois Products Farmers' Market
• 10/10/2008 - Michael Pollan writes to the next Farmer in Chief
• 1/7/2009 - Review: The $64 Tomato, by William Alexander
• 5/15/2009 - Post #100 - Square Foot Garden Beds are Ready!
• 5/27/2009 - Day 4 - Yes, We Have No Strawberries
• 7/6/2009 - My Locavore Weight Loss Plan
• 7/12/2009 - Today's Meals
• 7/24/2009 - Fresh Produce - Use It or Lose It
• 8/4/2009 - Faux Local
• 8/6/2009 - What's Cooking? Not Us!
• 8/8/2009 - Freezing Sweetcorn
• 8/26/2009 - Homemade Pizza!
• 3/18/2010 - So...

Update: The article in the State Journal-Register is Springfield blogger tries again to eat just locally grown foods.

So...

So you might be wondering why I haven't posted anything here since September 7, when I wrote a stimulating piece about the wonderful nutritional benefits of Froot Loops. (Or, more likely, this post has just shown up in your email or feed reader and you're trying to remember what this blog is about.)

It's not that I didn't have anything to write about. (Not any less than normal!) I frequently thought of things to write about, but then I always thought, "yes, but first you need to explain why you haven't posted anything since September 7." And since that wasn't an explanation I particularly wanted to write... I didn't.

But now I will.

We officially started our locavore attempt on May 20. Things went quite well for the first few months. Through the end of July, I estimate that I was eating about 80% local food. In August and September, we got busy for some reason, or perhaps just disorganized, and I would guess that I had slipped to about 50% local food. I was also a bit disheartened when I computed how much food we needed to store to stay local through the winter (answer: lots). And I fell behind on posting here.

Then, in October, disaster struck -- Our septic system died.

Our first clue that there was a problem was when our toilets wouldn't flush. Not even the brand new, ultra-low-flow "rated best flush" one. I went outside, removed the lid from the septic tank, and found that it was filled nearly to ground-level.

If you cast your mind back to October of last year, you might remember it being a bit damp. Actually, very damp. Drenched. We had over 11 inches of rain that month.

We live within the Springfield city limits, but when our house was built in 1973, this was still the boonies and there was no sewer service. There was an opportunity several years ago to get the neighborhood tied into the city sewer, but for whatever reason it never happened.

Anyway, to make a long story short, our new septic system couldn't be installed until mid-December, due to all of the rain. That meant going for a full 2 months without a working septic system.

If your septic system doesn't work, then you must drastically reduce your water usage. For us, that meant doing laundry at the laundromat; taking showers only every few days (and even then keeping the water turned off until it was time to rinse); and flushing toilets according to the rule "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."

Most importantly from a locavore viewpoint, it meant that we had to avoid washing dishes or using water for cooking. The practical effect of that restriction was that we ate out nearly every day for 2 months! Doing so did very bad things to my attempts to lose weight, of course, but it also effectively killed our attempts to eat local food! It also meant that I didn't have much to blog about here. (I suppose that I could have posted "Ate out again" every day for 2 months.)

By the time we had a working septic system, winter was upon us. No more fresh veggies for us!

However, spring is almost here! I recently received an email from Garrick Veenstra about this year's CSA, and yesterday we began preparing our garden beds for this year's planting. In fact, the strawberry plants that we planted last year are already greening up, which is very exciting!

I'll try to write a "lessons learned" post here soon, discussing what we did well last year and what caused us problems. Stay tuned!

(You can see photos of the septic system installation on my other blog, Talking to Myself Again.)

We Have Internet Again! How Exciting!

We finally have working Internet access again! Comcast came out and replaced the line to the house. Bingo! It all works again! I just wish I had called them to start with, rather than wasting time trying to diagnose and correct the problem myself! Oh well, live and learn! I'll be posting something more substantial later, but I wanted to get this posted now. Stay tuned!

I'm Not Dead Yet

I'm not dead, but our Internet connection is. A few weeks ago, we began having intermittent outages. Then frequent outages. Now it's down pretty much all of the time, with occasional brief periods of uptime. After calling Comcast to fix it, then canceling the service call because I thought I had figured out the problem, I've finally reached the conclusion that it really is Comcast's fault area of responsibility. Hopefully they'll be able to fix the problem this weekend.

(Don't worry, I'll be writing a much longer dull post explaining the saga in mind-numbing detail.)

No, Being a Locavore Hasn't Killed Me

Sorry for the long silence! The Memorial Day weekend was a bit busy, so I've fallen behind in posting. I'll try to get all caught up this evening. Stay tuned!

Welcome, SJ-R Food Section Readers!

Kathryn Rem, editor of the State Journal-Register's food section, wrote an article about this blog, Family plans to keep diet close to home, which just went online, so presumably it will be in the print edition on Wednesday.

If you haven't read my blog before, welcome! If you enter your email address in that box on the right and click the "Subscribe" button, you'll receive an automatic email notification every time I post something. (No, I won't spam you. I don't even see your email address. It's VERY automatic!)

Now that the harvest season has begun, I plan on blogging here nearly every day about what we've been eating, sources that we've found, what we're still searching for, etc. (For example, I found local butter today, and I might have just found a source of local wheat today! Yes, local flour is a possibility!)

Of course, we have plenty of non-local food still in the house, so we'll be using that up for awhile as the harvest starts getting up to full speed. Fresh salads are nice, but we'll need some starches, too!

Check back regularly and see how well we succeed -- or how entertainingly we fail -- at sticking to our 100-mile diet!

Article About This Blog in SJR Food Section Soon

My 15 minutes of fame begins in 2 weeks.

Kathryn Rem, editor of the State Journal-Register's food section, left a phone message with Dawn yesterday saying that she wanted to do an article about my blog. Cool! Lindsay Record of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance told me last fall that she had told Kathryn Rem about my blog and urged her to do a story about it. Nothing came of it at the time, but I guess the idea was filed under "to do someday" and someday has arrived!

I talked to her this evening for about 30 minutes, discussing how I became interested in becoming a locavore, how I got started last year, the interruption that came about when we moved into the new house right at the height of the harvest season, the mostly non-local winter that followed, and our plan to go as close to 100% local as practical this year.

She said that the article would probably appear in the May 20 issue. I presumed that she had called because she had heard that I would be speaking to the Springfield chapter of Food Not Lawns on May 23, but in fact she hadn't known, so it's just a bit of fortuitous timing!

My Resolutions for 2009

Resolution #1: Post more often to my damn blog!

*sigh* Actually, I started several blog posts over the last month. I just haven't actually finished any of them! Some of us aren't hung up on the whole "completion" thing, ya know?

Okay, the holidays are done with, so I should be back with some real posts soon. I've got a few book reviews, some info about garbage bag leaf composting, and some updates on buying local in Springfield grocery stores, not to mention lots of complaining about how thoroughly not prepared for a garden our property will be this spring!

We Interrupt These CSA Updates to Apologize

I really didn't intend for this blog to consist of nothing but weekly lists of what was in our CSA share. (Since we only have 4 shares left, that wouldn't work well anyway!) Immediately after we moved to our new house, everyone in the family decided to get sick.

Our son in particular has been sick on and off for more than 3 weeks! First it was a sinus infection, then that became bronchitis, which has now become walking pneumonia! When Lando is sick, he becomes even more energetic than his already hyper self.

At the same time, Dawn came down with a series of colds that turned into a sinus infection. Unlike Lando, when Dawn is sick, she becomes a vegetable. (No, not that kind of a vegetable!)

Anyway, hopefully everyone is finally on the road to recovery, which will free up some time for me to update this blog more regularly.

There have been many things that I've wanted to talk about in recent weeks, but just haven't had the time. I'll try to get something posted every day for awhile, so that maybe I can get to at least some of the backlog!