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The first week of the eating local challenge has gone quite smoothly. It helps, of course, that I had lots of store-cupboard ingredients to hand – oatmeal, flour, sugar, pasta, canned tomatoes, yoghurt, parmesan cheese. What will I do when the oatmeal runs out, or the ingredients to make soda bread, which has been my breakfast these last few mornings? If I buy bread baked locally, will that count, no matter where they sourced their flour? For a long time now, I’ve been the kind of shopper who scrutinizes the ingredients list on a packaged item, usually to check that it doesn’t contain any hidden, non-vegetarian surprises. It adds another layer of complexity to be worrying now about how far individual ingredients have traveled. In fact, I can source regionally grown and milled bread and pasta flours (from Anson Mills), so I could make my own bread… If only my bread machine hadn’t died.

The biggest change so far – and this is the kind of shift that Barbara Kingsolver talks about in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – is that dinner doesn’t begin with an idea for what I’d like, a shopping list, and a trip to the supermarket. Instead, I’m starting with what I have to hand – the fruits and vegetables in season here, or that came with my Ungraded Produce box – and figuring things out from there.

Two of the best meals this past week, made with in-season, locally grown produce, were pasta with asparagus sauce, and a lemony pan-fried kale dish. A confession: citrus trees don’t grow in North Carolina (to the best of my knowledge), but lemons, like coffee, are something I don’t think I can live without.

For pasta with asparagus, cook the asparagus in boiling water (the tips will take only a minute or two), puree the stems with lemon zest, and then combine with the pasta, asparagus tips, and plenty of grated parmesan.

For the sautéd kale dish: sauté chopped garlic and dried oregano in olive oil, throw in handfuls of chopped kale (stems removed), salt and pepper, a little water, and a lot of lemon juice.

Delinquent blogger returns… The plan is to update the blog this year at least every season. Because stuff is happening! The garden is expanding slowly, both inside the deer-fenced area and out of it: two new beds will be ready to plant this year, and I’m expanding the flower/herb bed too. And outside the fence, I’m starting to prepare some ground for fruit trees!

What’s in the Ground?

Today I put in some onions,  the same stock that came from TurkeySong homestead about a year ago. They are in a bed near garlic, which is doing okay, and some experimental fingerling potatoes that are probably not okay. We’ll see. The plants still going strong, despite the long, bitter winter we’re experiencing, include: the mints (nothing can deter cat mint, it seems); the strawberries I planted in late autumn, and I think the lemon balm is coming through again. Something has been eating the little fig tree, though (something bigger than crickets), so I’ve given it one of the vegetable cages. Really hope it pulls through.

Otherwise everything looks very brown and drab. With the vegetation so low, this is the time of year when old bits of trash seem to surface. Old plastic bottles catch the eye, and glass bottles too in archaic shapes and shades. And bits of rusted metal. After I’d messed about in the garden for a bit, and despite the fact that I’m quite tired at the moment and wasn’t planning to do anything too strenuous, I glanced over the rest of the homestead site and realized it needed some help. There were (and still are, despite today’s efforts) so many fallen branches. I cleared as many of them as I could, imagining the many camp fires all that wood will fuel in months to come. Once I’d started clearing the natural debris, all the man-made stuff started to stick out as well. The old wooden buildings that are slowly (too slowly) decaying. But also plastic and glass bottles that are still turning up, despite the bags and bags of trash I hauled away in the first year of owning the land. Today I hauled away another big bag of trash, mostly plastic items, from the homestead area but also from beside the trail.

The photo below was taken after I’d cleared away most of the fallen branches from around the Old Man. For the moment I’m piling them up in a heap you can see in the middle ground of the picture. If they were a bit more substantial, I’d use them to make fences. But I suppose if they were a bit more substantial, I wouldn’t be able to drag them anywhere.

And here’s one final shot that seems to promise spring is on the way. After the derecho last summer had blown down lots of trees on the property and huge numbers of branches, I had to clear myself a path from the trail to the homestead site. I pushed a load of fallen debris to the side of the trail, but when I visited the land about a month ago, I realized that I had piled it all up over the spot where daffodils come up every spring. So I shifted all that and enjoyed the results today. The daffodils are up! This time last year they were already in bloom, which just shows how long and cold a winter we are having.