Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Athens Locally Grown

One of the best things about living in Delaware was I had local sources for everything. We had a meat source, a milk source, an egg source and a few produce sources. All local and naturally grown.

Moving here I was worried about finding local sources for everything. I got on Local Harvest and found out about a group called Athens Locally Grown. It is basically a co-op. A group of people found farmers that would provide products every week. On Sunday, they post what is available that week and members can place an order. The organizers then go around to all the farms and pick up the orders, then the members go pick up their orders at a centralized place at an arranged time.

They have produce of all types, eggs, meat and raw milk. The meat to choose from included beef, chicken, pork, lamb and goat. The raw milk included cow and goat milk. They also have many cheeses.

We placed an order last week and went to pick it up. Here are the tables full of all the orders.

Here was the line we waited in to pick up our order. The line was consistently this long the whole time we were there, which was over an hour. Pick up is during a 4 hour time window. I don't know if it is this busy the whole 4 hours.


Here is what we got. The most exciting things were the goat's meat, which we've never tried and the goat's milk. We plan to get a dairy goat or 2 in the spring. We've been advised to make sure we like goat milk before we get goats. So we decided to try it. Logan really liked it, I found it had a bit of an earthy flavor, but I could adjust to it.
I'm excited to have found this. It will be a convenient way for me to get local, naturally grown food. I also hope to find some local farmers of my own.


7 comments:

Gail said...

No added unknowns! This is a great resource you found.

Unknown said...

That's a great find! We have a co-op here that I found and a friend of mine uses it all the time. I haven't ventured out yet but I think it is time!
Christy

Christy said...

Gail - That is a great advantage of it. We did a CSA last year and got a quite a few things we didn't want, we also made some new discoveries too. I'm going to try to order 1 new thing each time just so we keep trying new things.

SwingCat123 said...

I'd like to recommend a great podcast called Geek.Farm.Life by Andrew and Misty. They raise dairy goats for their own milk and meat consumption as well as do many other farm things. In addition to lots of other interesting topics, they discuss the whys, hows and why-nots of thier choices to raise goats (and sheep, chickens, ducks, turkeys...)and I'm sure you would find it helpful as you plan for getting started with goats. Thier site is geekfarmlife.com and you can get the podcast there or in itunes.

Laughing Orca Ranch said...

Oh! This is so great Christy! I love that you can order exactly what you want without any unwelcome surprises.

We intend to get our mini-mancha bred soon and expect to have goat's milk in the Spring. Maybe we'll both be milking goats come Spring! :)

~Lisa
New Mexico

Christy said...

Swingcat - I'll check it out it sounds very interesting.

Lisa - I hope to get a goat in milk this spring so we don't have to deal with breeding her. Logan wants a wether to train so if we could get a mom and her baby that would be perfect. We can share milking adventures this spring.

Carla said...

How cool is that! You just dove right in to the new town and found the good stuff.