Monday, March 16, 2015

Sourcing Local Foods

Websites:
·      Local Harvest 

Black Hills Area CSA’s (community supported agriculture):
·      Bear Butte Gardens (Sturgis) 
·      Cycle Farm (Spearfish) 
·      Joy Farm (Rapid City) 
·      Matriarch Gardens (Nisland) 

Local Farmer’s Markets:
·      Black Hills Farmer’s Market (Rapid City)
·      Deadwood Street Market
·      Spearfish Farmer’s Market in the Park

Restaurants Sourcing Local Foods:
·     Black Hills Burger and Bun (Custer)
    Dough Trader Pizza (Spearfish)
    Jambonz (Sturgis)
·      Killian’s (Spearfish)
·      Tally’s Silver Spoon (Rapid City)

Local Food Outlets:
·      Back to Nature (Sturgis)
·      Black Hills Milk (Spearfish)
·      Breadroot Co-op (Rapid City)
·      Good Earth Natural Foods (Spearfish)
·      South Dakota Online Food Co-op (pick-up points in Spearfish and RC)

Ways to Increase Local Food Options:
·      Ask restaurants which items on the menu are locally sourced
·      Ask grocery stores if any items are locally sourced
·      Call individual producers and inquire about what they grow and if they can help you source other items
·      Post a question on Facebook (“Does anyone know of a good source for local pork?”)
·      Encourage your school’s food services manager to source locally (there are Farm to School grants available for schools)

Saturday, March 21st – Small Farm Summit Social 6 p.m. at Sturgis Center for the Arts
Saturday, April 25th – Farm Tour (Cycle Farm and Bear Butte Gardens)


Michelle Grosek, Owner Bear Butte Gardens
Email:  Michelle@BearButteGardens.com 
www.BearButteGardens.com 

Monday, February 23, 2015

Raising Food







(previously printed in Black Hills Simple Life Online Magazine)
The more we know about food, the more we want to have better control over the entire life cycle of what we eat.  That is a big undertaking, but increasingly more important for Rick and me.  It started with gardens.  I wanted to grow all of our veggies.  A couple years later with gardens in place and vegetables growing we realized we needed manure for composting our gardens, so we might as well get some chickens and collect their manure while simultaneously getting eggs.  We did not want to order sexed chicks, so we decided to order straight runs, which means we would potentially get 50% males with each order.  For us, that meant butchering cockerels for meat as we did not wish to have more than one or two roosters.  Then with all of the bad press about large corporation-raised meat birds testing positive for various viruses and bacteria, we were further convinced to go ahead and raise our own broilers.  Even though chickens can produce a lot of manure, it is not enough for two greenhouses and six outdoor gardens.  We started talking about other livestock.  Ever since I was a kid I had wanted to have a few sheep again.  We decided to take on some bum (bottle-raised) lambs last spring with the intention of manure production, grazing, and ultimately a freezer full of organically fed lamb in the fall.  What else might we easily raise about the gardens that could be beneficial to our gardening process as well as serve an ultimate purpose of providing food for the family?  Turkeys!  For years I had been either sourcing a local Thanksgiving turkey or ordering as wholesome of bird as I could find from a local health food store.  Why not try raising a couple turkeys?



The thing about growing healthy, happy animals for your own family’s food is that when other people find out what you are doing, they want healthy food for their family, too.  Maybe they are not wild about knowing all of the details, but they certainly would rather know that the chicken, lamb, or turkey they are cooking for their own dinner table was happily going about its business on a sunny hillside a few miles out of town a short time ago rather than think about so many animals that are raised for our dinner tables in very confined, smelly spaces and being fed low-grade feed. 

We get a lot of questions about our attachment to our animals and the fact that the chickens, turkeys, and lambs are raised for food, not necessarily companionship.  No one shames us for it, but a lot of customers state that they could not do it.  Sometimes I am surprised that we can do it.  We thoroughly enjoy baby animals and just love everything about them….their frolicking energy, fuzziness, cuteness, and dependence for food and shelter.  From Day One we know that specific animals will eventually be food for us or for our customers, but that does not keep us from caring for those animals and tending to them just as we do our pets.  Fortunately, farm animals have a way of becoming independent, large, smelly, demanding, and well, not so cute.  As that transition happens from tiny, sweet baby animals to full-grown animals we still take great care of our livestock, but we give more thought to how we will conscientiously honor the animal’s life and make sure its last days are sunny, well-fed, and just plain enjoyable.  We both enjoy having meat with our meals and we feel we need to materially participate in raising and butchering some of that meat to fully appreciate it.  Raising animals for food is fun, entertaining, melancholy, soul-searching, rewarding, and difficult all at the same time. 

So, as the scope of our Bear Butte Gardens vision grows, we gradually add in the components that we need for the gardens and for our own family and also see where our customers’ needs take us.