Tag: local food

If only all farmers market customers were this enthusiastic. And erudite.

After two years in the making, Atlanta’s new center for self-sufficiency, The Homestead Atlanta, launches this weekend with two classes: Designing Beautiful Edible Landscapes and Cultivating Mushrooms Indoors and Out. Soon to follow are classes in hand-spinning yarn, blacksmithing and food fermentation. If you have a single do-it-yourself bone in your body, you’re likely to find something of interest here.

It’s just the first week of March, but by my clock it’s already spring. That’s because Green Market at Piedmont Park has launched for the season—and other farmers markets will soon follow. Dozens and dozens of them, in fact, in the metro area.

Cesar Chavez’s birthday is coming up March 31, and perhaps you haven’t thought of a proper way to mark the occasion. Do not panic. Just open a new Word file, fire up the Wikipedia, and start writing.

Remember last November, when you thought it would be cool to buy a pasture-raised turkey for Thanksgiving, but all the farmers you called laughed at you because they had sold out months before? So humiliating.

Big changes could be coming soon to the Decatur Farmers Market.

There’s probably not a weekend gardener in the world who hasn’t, at one time or another, gazed at a bare corner of the yard or patio and daydreamed of filling it with a fruiting plant. But what would grow there—apples? Blueberries? Grapes? And don’t fruit trees require special care, or something? The dream goes unfulfilled.

On Jan. 9, Whole Foods Market will donate 5 percent of the proceeds from its Atlanta stores to Wholesome Wave Georgia, an organization that helps low-income shoppers access high-quality, locally grown food.

Honey, like wine, is a hyper­local food. Each batch is different, deriving color and flavor from the blossoms found by bees. Beekeepers place hives in, say, a kudzu patch or strawberry field.

Perhaps there is a special person on your gift list who loves food — good food, local food, organic food. But this person can’t afford to eat out every night in the city's finest restaurants. So he or she has been trying to buy better-quality food on a budget and figure out how to cook it at home.