Fruition: Local Foods Blog

July 13, 2023Sara Trimm

How to share your extra garden produce

Nothing beats the taste of those first few harvests from the garden. The flavor and freshness, combined with the pride of knowing you grew it yourself, just can’t be beat. Once the newness wears off, the freezer fills, and the excitement of processing our garden goodies turns into a real chore though, we might find ourselves with an excess of wonderful food and no energy to deal with it.

Melons and lemon cucumbers harvested from CCE for donation

When you find yourself with an overabundance, you can share it with the people in our community who love delicious, fresh food but have no means of growing their own. Here are some suggestions for connecting with them

The local organization GardenShare has created a comprehensive interactive map where you can easily search for food pantries and community meals in your area. Locations and details are listed online here.

screenshot of local food guide map from GardenShare — Sample of GardenShare’s interactive map results

United Helpers many subsidized housing units throughout the county, and their house managers would be glad to talk to you about donating to the residents. Recovery and Safe Houses also welcome donations and reaching out to their respective directors would help you understand what they need most, or what they could consume.

There are many food donation options in every community here in the North Country. In my experience, these organizations and the people they serve are always grateful for fresh, nutritious food, even if you only have enough for one family. Free will dinners sometimes provide “take home food” when they have extras, and your produce could be part of that offering. If we all share just a portion of our harvests, the impact will be staggering. Read more How to share your extra garden produce

June 29, 2023Laurel Balog

Versatile Cooking in Summer

My favorite time of the year is here – summer. I love the warm days, fireflies, bonfires, farmwork, and of course, the fresh local food the season brings to us in abundance. Now is the easiest time of year to support our producers and eat refreshing fruits and vegetables. All the area outlets, from CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farms, farmers’ markets, farm stands, and natural food stores, are filling their shares, stands, and shelves with produce. We are once again able to enjoy big bunches of leafy greens, salad mix, carrots, garlic scapes, radishes, turnips, snap peas, onions, berries, and more as the season progresses.

An outdoor fire in a fire pit, with the moon rising over a background of pasture and forest. — My husband and I enjoy watching the moonrise with bonfires on summer nights.

Summer also brings full schedules. With the nice weather I find myself needing or wanting to do all sorts of different things – work in the orchard, fix fencing, mow the lawn, preserve fruits and vegetables, plant flowers, go canoeing, take my dogs for a hike, visit with family and friends – the list goes on! Prioritizing fresh food can slip lower on my activities to do, even when it’s most available. That means easy-to-make but versatile recipes are key to my summer eating. A favorite recipe we enjoy at home is Dragon Noodles. When you google “Dragon Noodle recipes”, there are many different variations that pop up and often have an Asian flavor influence. Our version stems from a friend’s recipe my husband learned while working on a vegetable farm in New Jersey. It consists of rice noodles, a stir fry of vegetables, a protein source, and a peanut sauce.

In the presence of plants

The county’s Master Gardener Volunteers and several others with an interest in foraging wild plants recently met at a local trail to learn from Tusha Yakovleva. Tusha brings a lifetime of learning about local plants to her educational events, from her childhood in Russia and Scotland to her time spent exploring ethnobotany with native youth in the Adirondacks.

She started by guiding the group to use all of our senses when learning about a new plant. Though we used a plant known to most of us for this exercise, rather than skipping right to how it looks and what it’s called, we started with feeling the presence of the plant, noticing the sounds in the plant’s environment, the hairiness of the stem, the smell of the crushed leaves. We even considered what name we might give the plant based on our observations. Lastly, we landed on the common name, goldenrod, and its use as an immunity boosting tea. This guided exercise primed us for what Tusha called “slow and present observation” throughout our 2+ hour walk on St. Lawrence University’s Kipp trail.

A stand of black locusts in full bloom attracts pollinators. The flowers are edible.

Of the many plants we encountered, some I most enjoyed learning about (and tasting) included black locust flowers – which taste like alfalfa sprouts – and wood nettle, our native nettle with tasty leaves that can be dried for tea, eaten raw or cooked, or even dried and rehydrated.

I also tried the broccoli-like unopened flower buds of common milkweed – the only nontoxic species of milkweed. In addition to the flower buds, the young shoots are edible before the leaves unfurl in spring, and the aromatic flowers can be used to flavor drinks and baked goods. Read more In the presence of plants