B b-B b-b-b Beets!

My friend Candace and I share a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share. One of our local farms, the World Hunger Relief farm produces vegetables for eight months out of the year and we commit to buying the food for those eight months. This deal has a number of benefits. It supports locally purchased food cutting down on transportation costs, middle man sales etc. It also allows the farmer or farm to have a set sustainable income (rather than an unpredictable amount of sales) which encourages them to produce more since they know exactly what their income is. My favorite benefit of this deal is that every Tuesday, my friend Candace and I get fresh, organic, produce picked that morning. We share the share (along with our other friend John) because there is generally a lot of produce that we can’t eat it all in a week. The shares are designed to provide produce for a small family, so our “small family”, Candace and her husband Scott, our friend John, and my husband Greg and I all partake of delicious vegetables throughout the week. I’ll tell more about the WHR farm over time, but for now, suffice it to say, this has been one of my favorite ways to use our budgeted income. It’s like Christmas every Tuesday when I anticipate, “What did the farm send me home with today?” Well this week I was not at all disappointed.

Actually…to be more accurate., they sent me home with beets on May 11. I had no idea what to do with them. I’ve never had a beets in my life and the only thing I could think of in reference to them, was a friend telling me she never liked them because she always ate them pickled, and “The Beets” from Doug. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=doug+nickelodeon&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

So today, fourteen days after the farm gave me my present, I roasted my beets with a number of other farm veggies, carrots, summer squash, a few radishes as well as red onions and green onions. I must also say that I grew the green onions and my urban community church garden provided the red onions. I roasted all of them with a little balsamic vinegar, olive oil and salt and pepper. It just might go down on record as my favorite vegetable side dish ever and my next garden planting will most certainly contain a harvest of beets!.

Six Months Later...

It has been nearly six months since I started this blog and penned the previous post. My life has taken a dramatic, though perhaps slow, turn in the direction I was hoping for. I regret not taking the time to write and reflect through many of the changes as they took place, but times of change often don’t allow time for writing, though I was certain to not leave out the reflecting part.

Just to list a few of the changes:

v I graduated with my masters and for the first time in 22 years I am not in school.

v I began my second container garden, which is four times the size of the first (and was in the Fall) but every bit as experimental as the first.

v In two weeks I will complete a job I have been in for two years which fully uses the degree I’ve received and I will continue in another job, which required simply 4 weeks of on the job training.

v I am helping to start a local Farmer’s Market in the downtown area of my great city.

v I’ve tried to make drastic changes about our “green living” for our own health as well as for the health of our environment.

The list is longer, but these are a few of the highlights I hope to unpack in future posts.

Here’s to journeying on…