by Birdsong S.
Just a quick post to introduce myself, and help spread the word a bit. I am Birdsong, I live in northern California, in a benign portion of the Sierra foothills, north of Nevada City, where we are able to garden, but still have to work around late snows and frosts. I see the Eat Local Challenge as a way to encourage more people to think about how they can support their local economies through their purchases, and not as some sort of competition to be the "purest" (or is it "be a purist?")
I have been trained in permaculture design (incorporating permaculture into my Masters thesis in 2000), but have been employed as a teacher and most currently as an administrative support person for our local medical and dental clinic in Downieville.
If you visit my personal blog, you will discover that I write about a variety of rural issues, including eating locally, as well as my five burros and my passion for knitting. We currently get most of our veggies from a local CSA, Mountain Bounty Farms, that partners with another CSA in the Capay Valley (Live Oak Farm) to the west of us. We also buy ranch-grown beef from my cousin in Newcastle, where she is continuing our family's farm tradition dating back to 1920; there were commercial orchards on the same land for many years and we are able to harvest fruit each fall from the few remaining trees.
I hit the "Eat Local Goes Mainstream" category button for this post to let everyone know that the latest issue of Yoga Journal contains a short article about eating local, authored by one of the editors who resides in Berkeley and gets veggies from a different CSA in the Capay Valley. We probably receive our produce in the same type of farm boxes, which are made in Yolo County and tout "over 40 organic farms in Yolo County" providing sustainably raised, high-quality products.
Happy Eating!
Birdsong lives in the Serra Nevada foothills of California, where she blogs about her passions for food, knitting and burros at A View of Sierra County.
