Baseball, Families and Farms

Friday night we went to the Buffalo Bisons game. We decided to go to support an organization that serves the refugee and immigrant population in the area. We didn't plan well. We thought there would be food included with our tickets and that it would be interesting food from some exotic location. Instead the will-call booth had an exceedly hard time finding our tickets, there were several other parties using the same space as our party and there was only ballpark food. The people from the organization had been told, no food. At the same time, the other groups seemed to have food they had brought in. So we ended up eating ballpark food -- Italian Sausage, chicken fingers, peanuts, cracker jack red licorice, beer, soda and bottled water. After just a couple of weeks of eating local food, we found this to leave much to be desired. And none of it was local, I am sure.

What we have realized is that if we are to stay within our 25% goal for food grown and/or produced further away, we will have to keep better track of our spending. So we have a new goal for next month.

We spent Saturday looking for local food. We started at the farmers, market in North Tonawanda. There are the local farmers who sell their produce. And there is a coffes vendor selling coffee beans, puveyors of flowers and plants, cheese and sausage, hats and sunglasses, you could get a lot at the market. We were looking for garlic, blueberries, dill and anything else that caught our fancy. We ended up with beets, carrots, onions, green apples, garlic, leeks and dill. The green apples are for making pectin. They have quite a bit. We plan to boil them and put them through a mill and store what is left until we are ready to make jelly later in the season. We have been getting tons of summer squash as part of our CSA, so Jon is going to try making some pickles from it.

Since the blueberries cost more than we wanted at the market we went to pick some. We followed the map from the website for Greg's U-Pick (http://www.geocities.com/gregsupick/index.html) and found a field of blueberries waiting to go home with us. The place had all kinds of people there picking and having fun. There were families with young kids and families with teens, all looking for those berries that had achieved that magical blue-black color on the bush. There were plenty of berries that were not yet ripe. If one was inattentive, one could begin to pick the berries that were dark burgundy, thinking they were the ripe ones, only to be reminded when seeing the actual blue beauty.

I realized what a great idea u-pick farms really are. The farmer gets free labor to pick the produce and then the laborers pay for the privledge! Of course, there is a lot of stuff picked too early, and the inevitable eating before the weighing. Even so, it is a great idea. We hope to go back leter this week, there were plenty of berries still to become ripe.

This is our second trip out for picking fruit and one interesting thing about the places is the ways they choose to keep birds away. At the cherry orchard the farmer had sounds of gun shots every 3-4 minutes. At the blueberry place there was a recording or a bird just screaming. It would play and play. It seemed to work.

After the blueberries we collected our bag from the CSA -- lettuce, squash, beets and cucumbers this week, and headed up to Bond Lake, a park in Niagara County. We had heard about orchards there and wanted to check them out. After careful study of the map at the entrance, we walked along the path we thought would get us there. Soon we were surrounded by a huge orchard. We were near apple and plum trees. Row after row of trees planted years ago and left to grow wild for many years since then. We did not discover a lot of fruit on the trees, but know that come harvest time, there will be a bounty beyond measure. As we were leaving the park we looked at the map again and realized there was a small peach orchard in another area of the park. Off we went looking for it. To get there we had to walk a bit closer the the local gun club (yikes!) and through a forest. We really weren't sure if we would find it when suddenly around the bend was an orchard -- of trees that had died. It was heartbreaking to see. So much potential, but nothing realized. The black limbs of the trees still reaching to the sky for light and warmth, but the sap had long since stopped running through them.

Back to the car we went, knowing we could find more apples than we could eat later this year, satisfied with our abilities to find great tasting local foods with which to stock our shelves for the coming winter.