Springfield Locavore

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!

Place Purchased, Possessions Packed, Pumpkin Pulverized!

We survived the move! Mid-July, all of August, and the first week of September are pretty much a blur.

The short version: We started house hunting in mid-July, quickly found one that we wanted, made an offer, closed on August 15, learned firsthand that 2 weeks isn't nearly as much time as you would think it would be for moving, finally got the last of the stuff out on September 1, and have been slowly digging our way out of the pile of boxes that currently dominate our new house.

The long version: Um... The long version is long. And you don't really care anyway, so let's skip it. I might eventually post something later over on my LiveJournal blog, where my scores of friends can read it over and over to their hearts' content. Or not.

Locavore Impact: Ouch! Okay, I must say that all of my locavore stuff took a backseat for the last few weeks. For one thing, it's difficult to eat local when you can scarcely find the stove to cook on or the table to eat on! In addition, we were so pressed for time trying to get everything moved that I even forgot to pick up my CSA share on the last weekend of August! (And 2 weekends before that, we told a friend of ours that she could pick up our share and keep it, because we knew that we wouldn't be able to make use of it.) The result was that we ate more pizzas and drank more sodas over the last few weeks than we have in a very long time!

Pumpkin Pulverized: Moving out of the old house meant that our volunteer pumpkin plant, Audrey II, had to go to the Great Pumpkin Patch in the Sky. She had 3 pumpkins, so I cut those off, pulled up the plant, pulverized it with the lawn mower, and then put the vine in a yard waste bag. At that end, I would estimate that the main vine was about 35 feet long. Well, we got 3 nice pumpkins out of it. They're still mostly green, but I'm hoping that they'll turn orange soon. They've already begun the process, and I'm rotating them every day or two to (hopefully) prevent them from rotting, given all of the rain that we've had recently. Plus, if things go as planned, we might save some seeds from these 3 pumpkins and see whether we can have an Audrey II Jr. next spring!

Looking to the Future: Our new place is a full acre of land with lots of sunshine. As an added bonus, our backyard borders a horse pasture, so we can walk up to the fence and pet horses! How cool is that! After we get more settled into the house, I'll be turning my attention to our future gardening plans. I'm thinking raised beds, surrounded by a high fence to keep the deer out!

I'll write more later. It will take me awhile to get caught up, but I wanted to at least get this much posted so that you'd know I hadn't completely disappeared!

I'm Not Dead Yet!

Just a quick post to say that my locavore diet hasn't killed me or put me in the hospital. I mentioned last time that the landlord told us he will be selling the house we're renting, so we've been house hunting. Actually, not just hunting; we've pretty much caught one!

We'll be closing on August 11, so we've been busy meeting with the real estate agent, banker, house inspector, etc, as well as doing some preliminary preparations for moving. After we close, we'll have until the end of August to move. That means we'll be able to move at a fairly leisurely pace over the course of nearly 3 weeks. We'll move a few boxes each day during the week, then rent a small moving van on the weekends to move furniture.

Our new place is on a 1 acre lot with plenty of sunshine, which means I'll be able to have a large garden! Food that you've grown yourself is as local as you can get!

Good Morning, Springfield!

Surprisingly enough, the new domain name seems to already be working! I guess DNS changes happen much faster than they did a few years ago.

Well, it's late now, so I'll be going to bed. Next time I'll post about the Hill Street Farm CSA week 5 share. I'll also be writing a post about eggs, followed by a post about chickens. Or maybe I should do the one about chickens first. No, I'll do the one about eggs first. Hmm....