Saturday Stuff

My original mission this morning was to swing by the Matthews Farmers Market on the way to give blood at the Red Cross blood drive at a local church. The best laid plans . . .

Here are a few pix of our thriving Matthews Community Farmers' Market located in the middle of historic, downtown Matthews. Probably 50+ vendors at the height of the summer. Everything sold at the market has to be grown/made by the vendor -- i.e., no trucking in wholesale produce from a distributor. Great policy. Local food, local faces.







Sammy Koenigsberg (l.) (New Town Farms) and Fred Mundie (r.) (Big Oak Natural Farm) are two of our best local organic growers. Sammy is an institution in the area. He was one of the first organic growers, was a founding member of the Matthews Market, and has a thriving CSA with a waiting list:



Sammy and his lovely wife, Melinda -- mom to their eight home-schooled children:



Not only is Sammy an organic farmer, he's an avid road and mountain biker. Yikes! -- he just got a new bike, so I had to go across the street to our LBS (local bike shop), Bicylces East, and talk to owner Scott Russ about bikes. Scott is a great guy who sold me my first bike a year ago, and who has forgotten more about bikes than I'll ever know:



On to give blood at a local Lutheran church. The Red Cross usually sets up at one of two Presbyterian churches in Matthews which are always packed with donors. There was nobody waiting today at the Lutheran church -- they need to pick it up a little. The Presbys are making them look bad. They did have a cool velvet-Elvis type painting on the wall of the fellowship hall portraying Isaiah 11:6-9:



This sign in the bathroom was not cool. All this time I thought our local drought was because of a lack of rain. It's really because the Lutherans are doing too much flushing:



Checked out Mr. Grier's garden on the way home. He's taken the wall-o'-water's down and staked the tomatoes with 7-8' rebar (they must be that long since they're six feet tall above ground). Here's another way to think about Mr. Grier's skills: On the same day that I took these pictures of Mr. Grier's two-foot-plus-tall, already-blooming tomatoes, I saw people buying tomato plants for planting in their home gardens at Renfrow's Hardware, the historic center-of-all-things-local in the middle of downtown Matthews. Those folks are two feet, and at least a month, behind Mr. Grier's tomatoes. I also saw Jim Stumpf, aka "The Tomator Man," selling his fresh spring tomatoes at the Matthew's market today. Tomatoes already in the middle of April? That's because he grows them in a greenhouse. He's the only person in our area that gets tomatoes sooner than Mr. Grier, but it takes a greenhouse to beat him. The average home gardener could be enjoying tomatoes a lot sooner by using Mr. Grier's frost-prevention strategies:







Home to juice with the LaLanne Power Juicer I described the other day.



The above amount of produce yields about 2.5 cups of juice -- really too much for one person at one time. Still trying to gauge the right amount to use in the LaLanne juicer to get the right amount of juice for one serving:



Then a couple handfulls of Sammy's "Space" and "Bordeaux" spinach in some warmed up eggplant/rice/corn/onion/tempeh/etc. soup.





Note the red stems of the Bordeaux and the green stems of the Space. Hard to describe the difference between this spinach and what I get at the local organic store that was picked a week ago in California. No comparison:



Then burying the juicing pulp along with veggie scraps from the last couple of days in the flower beds -- feeding time for the worms:





While I was outside my buddy (neighbor) Henry gave me a dogwood tree for the yard. A friend of his had let him dig up a bunch of dogwoods off her property so he was kind enough to give myself and another neighbor one for our yards:





Like I said -- the best laid plans . . .