Saturday, August 22, 2009

A story to go with every zuke and tomato

Who put the loca on locavore? Dinner tonight was tomato sauce from homegrown tomatoes, steamed green beans and BBQ zucchini from the Shay garden and pasta from a package. Vegetarian too, which pleased my daughter Annie. Beer from Fort Collins (for me) rounded out the meal.

By the way, Jodi Rogstad's cover story, "Goal: Make a 100 percent local meal," in last Sunday's Wyoming Tribune-Eagle was great. She scrounged up almost all the makings of a meal from local farmers and ranchers. No easy task in this windswept high-altitude place with a short growing season. She found veggies at Lucas Loetscher's huge garden off Railroad Avenue between Cheyenne and Burns. Lucas is 23 and sells his veggies each Saturday at the Cheyenne Farmer's Market. His great-grandfather homesteaded the land in 1918.

That was one of the great things about the article. A story to go with every foodstuff.

Clair Schwan is a self-sufficient Libertarian who lives north of Cheyenne. He calls himself a "thrivalist" instead of a "survivalist." Schwan gives Jodi a bag of summer squash and allows her to harvest some eggs from his chickens. Later, Jodi goes to Catherine Wissner's Wild Winds Sheep Company near Carpenter. Wissner, a horticulturalist for the UW Cooperative Extensive Service, raises lamb and turkeys and grows her veggies in a high tunnels which "makes life here on Mars possible." "Life on Mars" -- I like that.

Jodi wrapped up her article with recipes and a list of food for locavores. Some of the growers were down in Wellington and Fort Collins, Colo., within the 50-mile radius preferred by locavores.

2 comments:

RobertP said...

Mike,

congratulations on your garden, you have come quite a way since the first small tomato plants. sounds delicious, but please do not ever again use the words "BBQ" and "zucchini" together. You can have grilled zucchini, but not BBQ.

I am overgrown with tomatoes and quite a few sweet peppers. In talking with other back yard gardeners, this has been a very good year for tomatoes.

Bob

Michael Shay said...

Dang, Bob, I was racking my brain for the correct word and all I could come up with was BBQ, which isn't even a word. On Friday, Annie and I cut up and grilled one of the bigger zucchini which had hidden itself amongst the leaves. I've been trying to catch them fingerling size for salads, but this was the one that got away.

Harvested a couple full-sized tomatoes this evening and ate them in a salad. Yum.