After not being able to find a local store with local rice, I came home and got to work turning the lemon cucumbers I brought home yesterday from Mack Fleming (A Country Garden - 5 miles) into sour pickles. Here is what the cucumbers look like -

They are about the size of a lemon, hence the name. They do not, however, taste like lemons. They just taste like cucumbers.

For the fermentation, I based everything on the recipe for sour pickles in the Sandor Ellis Katz book, Wild Fermentation. The book is amazing, as it serves up history, methodology and recipes for fermenting and brewing just about anything.

For this fermentation I’m using a three gallon ceramic crock that I bought from Lehman’s Non-Electric, “products for simple self-sufficient living”. The basic recipe is 3 to 4 pounds of cucumbers, 3 to 4 heads of flowering dill (or any other form of dill you can find), 2 to 3 heads of garlic, and a pinch of black peppercorns. For the brine, a little less than a tablespoon of salt is used for each cup of water. The quantity of brine depends on each individual situation. I had to use about 12 cups of water for this batch.

The bottom layer of the crock is composed of the garlic, dill, and other seasonings. I used a lot of basil as well, both sweet basil and lemon basil from the garden. On top of that goes the cucumbers. After that the brine gets poured in and a plate is placed on top of everything. I used a wooden Sauerkraut board that I also bought from Lehman’s. On top of the plate or board a weight is used to keep everything submerged in the brine to ferment. I used a couple jars of water as weights.

Katz says that I should check on the pickles everyday and scoop off any mold that occurs where the air meets the brine. This is typical, he says, and will not bother the pickles. In a few days I should be able to eat one of the pickles and in a number of weeks the pickles will be fully sour.

The final step in the pickling process is to put a towel or piece of fabric over the crock to keep dust and flies out.

Should be interesting as this is my first attempt at home fermentation. Well, that’s not true, there was the lemon “musk” hard cider that some former housemates made, a terrible but addicting alcoholic brew that I kind of wish I had a bottle of right now…

Of the staples I needed to find or make, I determined that rice was at the top of the list. I thought hundred mile rice would be hard to come by. It turns out that there is a revived plantation across the border in South Carolina growing Carolina Gold heirloom rice. Carolina Plantation is a bit out of range at 125 miles, but the extra miles for a staple are worth it.

The plantation offers free shipping services to Wilmington. They also have a listing of places that sell their rice. Looking up my zip-code in their database, I was given a couple of options here in town. One turned out the be an antique store that was closed today and the other option seems to be a store that is now closed forever. Even in the age of the Internets, directory pages get outdated fairly quickly.

So, no local rice for now as I use some of the stocked rice in the cupboard. I’ll order some of the Carolina Gold tonight and hope for a quick turnaround in shipping.

My friends Noel and Danielle live and work at Black River Organic Farm in Ivanhoe, NC (Sampson County), about 45 miles northwest of my house. The farm is owned and run by Stefan Hartmann, a farmer I have known for many years through various projects, now primarily as a supplier for the food co-op where I work as the Produce Manager.

Black River sets up at the Saturday morning farmer’s market in downtown Wilmington every week from April through December. Their table has been slammed since the start of the market season, and they have typically needed extra hands for the duration of the market. That said, Noel called me last night, and I ended up volunteering (with pay) for the market morning. I looked forward to it…

Three or so years ago Kristin and I filled in one Saturday for Noel and Danielle, back when they were working at Grassy Ridge Farm. Back then the farmer’s market was much different than it is now. It was just getting started, and the number of vendors was fairly small and confined to three-quarters of a city block. Foot traffic and sales were low. City residents were just starting to warm up to the idea of a street market with fresh produce and such. Kristin and I stood around most of that morning, and we packed up the majority of what we brought.

All that has changed. Noel and Danielle run, arguably, the most popular table on the strip. Now that the market has expanded to two city blocks, that is a considerable compliment to the farm, Stefan and everyone involved in making everything run as it does.

I knew going in that it would be busy at the table, but I wasn’t prepared for the lack of breaks between waves of customers. I arrived at 7:30 in the morning, locally roasted organic coffee in hand (cheating already). Noel asked me to get everything out of the truck and start setting up. For every basket of goodies on the tables, there needed to be a box of “backstock” on the ground underneath. Corn, tomatoes, peppers, summer squashes, cucumbers, garlic, green and yellow beans, eggplant, cherry tomatoes, basil, rainbow chard, melons, purple scallions… Everything needed to be out in preparation for the crowds.

And they started coming. Noel asked to exploit my strengths of stocking product and to try and deflect the check-out process to himself or Danielle. So I stocked. It was a constant motion of placing produce on the tables and breaking down boxes. At some point, the folks in the crowd had enough of me simply putting things on the table and not taking their money. So I started taking money and stocking at the same time.

Cases of corn and tomatoes disappeared into the bags of shoppers. Questions of how to cook things, and “what is this variety called?” and “can I have another bag” bounced off the poles of the E-Z-Up tent in rapid repeat. Even though I deal with customer questions about produce on a daily basis, the frequency has never been anywhere near what it was at the market.

Customer - “What is the variety of this corn?”

Me – “Uh, bicolor, white and yellow…”

Customer – “No, what variety?”

Me – “Noel! What is the variety of this corn?”

 

Repeat with other fruit and veggie varieties… It reminded me of the Beavis and Butthead episode where Beavis is asked if the shakes they make at Burger World are made with real milk or reconstituted shake mix. Beavis replies that they have vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. The original question goes unanswered. *Sorry for the reference to a 1990’s cartoon, but living without TV for a decade tends to minimize current pop culture references.*

At the store, I am hardly ever asked about a variety name. Usually it is some weird hybrid name like SRT7-1 that nobody wants to hear about. Not that hybrids are bad, but folks at the market want to know that they are getting Provider beans and Luscious corn and Caliope eggplant and Trust tomatoes. And I don’t blame them. Market farmers tend to have a few varieties that customers recognize the name of, and the names bring a certain trust into the mix that would get left behind if all you grew were Round-Up ready whatcha-call-its.

It really wasn’t a problem that I didn’t know the variety names of the produce. Having not purchased the seeds, planted them or harvested them, my ignorance could be forgiven for the first round of questions. In all honesty, after a few times I knew what was what and could confidently answer questions as if I had packed all the veggie boxes into the truck my own self.

Anyway, the hours of the market were gone before I knew it, and I had just enough time to stop and get some goat cheese from Nature’s Way Farm and Seafood (29 miles) and some raw honey from Olsen Gardens (48 miles), before I had to be at work at the co-op.

As far as what food I was able to get for the day, I picked up 4 pounds of potatoes, a cubanelle pepper and cherry tomatoes from Black River (45 miles), the other farmer’s market food mentioned above, plus a leftover CSA box from work (45 miles), several pounds of lemon cucumbers (5 miles), some out-of-date chicken thighs (scavenged) and some basil and dill from the co-op garden (5 miles). My bicycle basket was full, but the ride home was easy. A full day to be sure, and the only non-local thing was the coffee.

One hundred miles doesn’t seem like that much, especially when living on the coast. Half of the radius is ocean. I don’t really care for seafood, so that cuts out a lot of my food options. Anyway, my food radius looks like this:

A foodshed is -

“…borrowed from the concept of a watershed, was coined as early as 1929 to describe the flow of food from the area where it is grown into the place where it is consumed. Recently, the term has been revived as a way of looking at and thinking about local, sustainable food systems.”

 

- source Wisconsin Foodshed Research Project

Further -

A foodshed is a local bioregion that grows food for a specific population.

 

The foodshed concept, most often attributed to Arthur Getz’s in his 1991 Urban Foodsheds article in Permaculture Activist, uses the analogy of a watershed to describe ‘the area that is defined by a structure of supply’. Getz used the image of a foodshed to answer the question of “Where is our food coming from and how it is getting to us?” and to picture how the local and regional food supply system works. Inherent in this concept, he emphasized, was ‘the suggestion of a need to protect the source, as well as the need to know and understand its’ specific geographic and ecological dimensions, condition and stability in order for it to be safeguarded and enhanced.’

Source - The Foodshed Project

For the purpose of this project, my foodshed will be the 100 miles outlined on the map above. My foodshed includes several established organic farms, several places to get eggs, honey and meat as well as the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS). And I haven’t started looking closer at what is really in my foodshed…