The date is looming

June 1st.
The start date.

I'm looking at the garden a little nervously.
Our greens will be ready to have a few salads with by then. It's been pretty cold the last few weeks, so that everything seems kind of stunted in growth. Nothing has died, but with the soil temp being cooler, everything just kind of went from manic to slowly growing.

Thankfully there's the farmer's market. We can buy food from the people who have greenhouses, or at least a better knack at growing things that I do. And we have the 1/4 cow I'll be picking up Wednesday, and the lamb we still have in the freezer.

Our friends from Virginia (who are buying land and about to build their own housewith nearly all green materials AND planning on homesteading in a very real way) stayed the night last week. It was so great to see them. At any rate, we were discussing The Start Date for our eating local for the year and they asked if we've made any exceptions. My friend was kind enough to remind me that if Pa could get coffee way out on the plains in Little House on the Prairie, then I should be able to have some too. I like that way of thinking. Upon hearing that, my friend Kate said gift giving at Christmas will be easy for us this year: she'll give us an orange to split amongst ourselves, just like the Ingalls.
Here's our list of exceptions. Granted we've still got 8 days, something more might be brought to the table for discussion:

Coffee (will be Fair Trade, I am a midwife with small children. I need coffee for those days where I've been up for 36 hours with no sleep but still have to be a Mama when I come home again.)
Tea (see above)
Olive oil (although I have been using butter more for some things. This year of eating local will have me on Lipitor in no time!)
Occasional Chocolate (it is VERY good for me, in this I believe. It makes me a nicer wife and mother, honestly. Also Fair Trade.)
Beer and Wine made from local brewers, despite their ingredients not being 100% local. Our brewery is too good to not visit anymore. I'm all about supporting local businesses...
I'm also making the exception for me to get restaurant food ONLY if it's one of those situations where I'm at a birth, or coming home from one and I know my hypoglycemic butt needs to eat before handling heavy machinery (like a 3-ton Volvo). Oh, and obviously if I'm at someone's house attending a birthing mama, I will eat that food.

Hmmmm. So it will mostly be ME who is eating outside the locavore box! What a hypocrite!

As for the garden, everything is just about planted. I have one more small spot to plant in (3X4 feet).
The parsnip seeds I planted were very slow to germinate (it really does take 3 weeks, just as the packet says, although it was more like 4weeks due to cooler tems). When they do start to grow, they look like grass, which makes it nearly impossible to weed around the row (which I didn't mark the ends of-not so smart). Yesterday though, I found the parsnips! They are growing! I was so happy to finally be able to weed the now 4-inch tall grass that was growing all around them.
I planted my sweet potato slips yesterday. I've grown sweet potatoes before and they did okay. Sweet potatoes do really well in the south because they love the warmer temps and longer summers. These planting instructions that came with the slips actually said to cover the ground in black plastic to warm the soil and to keep the soil warm. How clever. I hope that works. Slips look like dead or mostly dead, blanched, dried leaved messes when you receive them. You have to re-vitalize them by getting water to their roots and then planting them ASAP. I had to wait 2 days before planting so the temps could climb a little.

The strip of garden next to the garage that was possibly hit by RoundUp is thankfully doing well. I'm very PMS-y this week, so excuse that last emotional post about the RoundUp. That day I swear I was ready to either cry or jump the neighbor's fence and start kicking over their garbage cans in all of my gardening, feed-my-family-healthy-things angst.

As for books, I've just finished Root Cellaring (I still can't believe I'm reading books with titles like this). It was really, really helpful. If you're interested in trying to grow food to get you through winter, this is the one to read first.
I'm making G read Food Not Lawns because it's a library book and I don't have time to read it before it needs to go back. It's more of a concept book, or lifestyle book than a gardening book. Very cool for it's relentless suggestions for making the most our your community in every single way. Exactly what Ypsi is all about, right?
G tells me bits and pieces of it, and I skim through it every morning over coffee. There's one bit I particularly like and might adapt myself with my renegade side-kick children:
in the book the author talks about how she and a friend walked all over her town with a packet of zucchini seeds (because that's one thing that grows without much help at all). Every time they'd see an open, vacant space or a nice spot in a park or field, they'd plant one or two zucchini seeds. And then throughout the summer, they were able to bike around town and see these huge zuke plants flowering and growing in the strangest places.

What a great idea.