The 100 Foot Diet

June 29, 2009

I’ve been amazed by the fact that ‘buying/eating local’ seems to almost be a trendy thing to do these days. I feel like I’m hearing about it EVERYWHERE, which definitely gets me excited!

I’ve been somewhat familiar with the “100 Mile Diet” idea for awhile now, but in all honesty, it wasn’t until this year that I finally really started paying attention. I caught a few episodes of “The 100 Mile Challenge” on the Food Network and it was really fascinating watching these normal families (out in BC) trying out this approach – and for the most part, benefiting a great deal in the process.

Interestingly enough, my wife has become very interested in ‘buying local’ this year as well (after taking a holistic nutrition course), which has certainly helped to add that extra bit of motivation to really take this stuff seriously. I’ve always been the eco-head in the family, but sadly I can also be really lazy and lax with some of my earth-friendly practices. Now that my wife is onboard with all of this, I foresee us moving a lot more quickly in a positive direction.

We’ve already been making an effort to learn a lot more about local farms and businesses that subscribe to these sorts of philosophies, and it’s been fun starting to break away from the run-of-the-mill grocery store fare when it comes to meal preparation. I should mention that I have plans to write about a lot of these local businesses etc here on the blog in an effort to spread the word a little more, and help to get things a little more active around here.

As the title of this post might imply, one of the major things I am also focusing on this year is growing a LOT of our own food. I’ve always been a gardener at heart, and have even grown some decent yields of various summer staples (tomatoes, zucchinis etc) – especially last summer, thanks to my restaurant food waste project – but I’ve never really taken the time to get serious about gardening, and to learn proper organic methods etc. This year I decided it was finally time to do so!

It’s kinda funny when I think about it now, but I’ve always day dreamed about my ‘ultimate’ small farm property, where I would finally be able to put down roots (no pun intended) and get serious about my sustainable gardening efforts. I always just assumed that as long as I was living in the ‘burbs’, there wasn’t really any point in going too crazy with all of this. Thankfully, I finally woke up this year and realized that A) we might end up being here awhile, so I might as well take advantage of that and B) I have enough ‘land’ and sunlight to create a pretty serious little suburban eco-farm.

Of course, my outdoor worm herd is playing a very important role in all of this! I’ve written previously about my vermicomposting trenches. Well, I’m happy to report that these systems are back in action this year, and I have even expanded my trench network. I am also experimenting with some other wormy methods, such as living mulch and worm box gardens (hope to write more about those in a future blog post). I have been really happy with the results so far, and expect that we’ll have a LOT of produce available later in the summer. Thankfully, we recently bought a small chest freezer, so now we have some place to store a lot of the extra veggies.

Anyway, I hope to write a lot more about all of this on the blog in coming weeks and months!
Stay tuned!

Almost forgot…

One thing to mention for those of you living in Waterloo Region – if you are interested in the 100 mile diet challenge, it is my understanding that there is a group of people in Kitchener-Waterloo who are doing this right now. Be sure to check out the “100 Mile Diet Blog” put together by the folks at Healing Path in Waterloo. I’ve only had time to quickly skim over the content, but it looks really interesting! Once I’m able to spend more time reading, I may write more about it here.
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