The Weblog
From vendor features & product spotlights,
to other important information,
including reminders of market closings,
upcoming classes, and events!
We're open!
Shop here
We have strawberries! Not a lot, but still worth celebrating – a sure sign of summer on its way; also garlic scapes, both grown by Burns Green Leaf Market. Enjoy!
Order today!
Shop here
Two of our beef and pork vendors are both part of the Buehler family. They’ve recently merged their companies and have a new name. Here’s an announcement from them…
Here at Phil Buehler & Matt Buehler Farms and J & S Buehler Family Farm, we would like to take the opportunity to thank all of our past and present customers for their support of us, and local food, specifically at Miami County Locally Grown.
We are excited to announce that the wholesale and retail meat portions of our farms are going to join to create a new name and label that we will sell our meats under. Our new name is Full Flavor Meats, LLC.
Some of you may have been noticing some new labels on your orders. There will continue to be a mixture of labels as we cycle out existing inventory. Don’t worry, it is still the same great meat, just a new look.
If you would like to learn more about our farms, you can check out our website at www.fullflavormeats.com and follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Thanks again, and please keep supporting our local businesses.
The Buehler Family
Shop here
More asparagus!
Shop here
The asparagus has been growing really well, so we’ve added ten more half-pound bunches. You might want to grab them though, as they go quickly!
Asparagus is one of those fun and easy vegetables to grow. They are a perennial plant, so they come back year after year. Deer don’t like them, so that isn’t a problem. Maybe a way to dip your toes into gardening?
On that note…
The Garden
A well-kept garden certainly is inspiring (despite the work involved!); it is a central idea in the first chapter of Genesis, and gardens are sources of food and beauty. But one of my favorite authors, Michael Pollan, paints a word picture better than anything I can come up with:
“The garden is a place of many sacraments, an arena – at once as common as any room and as special as a church – where we can go not just to witness but to enact, in a ritual way, our abiding ties to the natural world. Abiding, yet by now badly attenuated, for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connections to the earth. But in the garden the old bonds are preserved, and not merely as symbols. So we eat from the vegetable patch, and, if we’re paying attention, we’re recalled to our dependence on the sun and the rain and the everyday leaf-by-leaf alchemy we call photosynthesis.”
So wrapped up we can be in relationships, livelihoods, and other distractions without number that it is all too easy to forget and neglect our ties to natural surroundings, and that our bodies are part of this world of seasons and weather and all manner of birds and other animals and plants of infinite variety…Do yourself a favor and take a little time to be outside today.
Caroline McColloch
Chez Nous Farm
cheznousfarm@gmail.com
Shop here
Asparagus, oregano, and shrooms, oh my!
Shop here
This weather is super fantastically wonderful!! If the weather could be like today all summer long, I’d be in heaven.
Burns’ Green Leaf Market is offering Jersey Knight Asparagus along with their Candy onions – such a spring treat!
We also have Black Pearl Oyster mushrooms – a new variety. For those of you who weren’t at pickup today, here are some tidbits about the shrooms (as my Dad called them)… the Black Pearl Oyster is a hybrid cross between King Trumpet Mushrooms and Oyster Mushrooms. Unlike other oyster shrooms, both the stem and cap are edible. They’re very meaty and savory, and the flavor is earthy with a hint of pepper.
Get your orders in today!
Shop here
We still have Candy onions, spinach, microgreens, kale, and lots of baked goods and grilling meats available to order for pickup this Tuesday.
I’ll tell you – this heat is a bit much, a bit early, for me. Where’s the in-between weather? That’s what I love…60s-70s please come back for a while longer!
Shop here
Spinach, spring Candy onions, Winterbor kale...
Shop here for spinach, Winterbor kale, and spring Candy onions from Burns’ Green Leaf Market. Bring on the fresh produce – woohoo!
What is GMO?
As with so much in our food system, relatively new terminology comes along that is poorly understood by many shoppers. Genetically Modified Organisms (sometimes just GM) has been in our food supply for around twenty years; it continues to be controversial, and is banned in many countries, including 19 of the 27 countries of the European Union.
The gist of the technology is that genes (DNA) from one species are mechanically inserted into the DNA of a different species, to achieve a particular physical trait. The best known example is Bt corn. A soil bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis makes a toxin that kills caterpillars; its genes were inserted into corn to resist the corn borer—a built-in insecticide. Roundup-ready soybeans are engineered to withstand glyphosate (Roundup) that kills broadleaf weeds.
The problem is that Bt corn also kills the caterpillars of Monarch butterflies, and perhaps other species in the same taxonomic genus. Glyphosate has been linked in studies and court cases as a likely cause of lymphoma. These “unintended” consequences are not mentioned in marketing data.
Saying genetic engineering is the same as selective breeding is a rationale sometimes used as a justification. Selective breeding is choosing seeds or offspring exhibiting desirable traits, as the sole progenitor for the next generation within the same species.
As with any technology, there are benefits and costs, good and bad. No technology is all one or the other. My personal opinion is that genetic engineering of crops and derivative foods are marketed without adequate or objective testing as to the possible dangers, thus my attitude is guilty until proven innocent when it comes to my personal food choices. Were it not for labeling laws, we wouldn’t know the difference. The label has been changed recently to an innocuous looking blue and green logo termed Bio-engineered. Interestingly, fresh produce is exempt from these labels.
Caroline McColloch
Chez Nous Farm
cheznousfarm@gmail.com
shop here to support MCLG!
Plant an herb garden today!
Shop here
Since the rain has finally stopped (for now!) anybody want to get outside and plant a little salad/herb garden? If you have a small bed right outside your back door, say, you could plant lettuce starts, basil, dill, and Swiss chard, all of which we have available here at our local market.
Today is the last day to place orders for this Tuesday’s pickup. What a beautiful day!
Erin
Shop here
Diet and Heart Disease
Shop here
Diet and Heart Disease
Some years ago I stumbled across an article by Dr. Dwight Lundell, a heart surgeon who corroborated a refutation of the lipid hypothesis, which proposes that a high fat/cholesterol diet causes heart disease, our conventional wisdom. This has led to widespread use of cholesterol-lowering drugs (statins).
But a little known fact, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation, is that heart disease in the United States was insignificant until after the 1920s, when traditional fats (lard, butter) began to be replaced by hydrogenated plant oils such as margarine and vegetable shortening.
Fast forward a century. Most of us have heard by now of the dangers of trans-fats. This is what margarine and shortening are, and they are being promoted as a healthier alternative to animal fats. But it’s not insignificant that the incidence of heart disease began to rise along with the introduction of hydrogenated (trans) fats into the American food supply.
Add to this scenario the increase of sugar in the average diet (including high fructose corn syrup beginning in the 1970s), and now diabetes is added, along with heart disease and obesity—the so-called diseases of western culture. But back to Dr. Lundell.
He gives an interesting explanation of how diet affects the health of our blood vessels. Zeroing in on one aspect of this three-page article (see link to full text below): Omega 6 and Omega 3 fats. The former comes from the seeds, the latter from a plant’s leaves and roots. Ideally, our diet should include a ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 of about 3:1. But with highly processed carbohydrates (cookies, crackers, cereal, bread, etc.) that ratio in the typical diet is about 15-30:1. And this situation causes a chronic inflammatory response in blood vessels. Cholesterol is deposited in blood vessels as a response to this inflammation and is not the cause of it. It’s like blaming the ambulance driver for the accident.
Caroline McColloch
Chez Nous Farm
cheznousfarm@gmail.com
Shop here
Studebaker's breads; marinated chicken drums; plants...
Shop here
Thank you everyone for supporting our local market tonight! We lucked out and dodged the rain and storms for the most part – until all the vendors were packing up that is, then it let loose just in time for everyone to get soaked. Oh well…all in the name of supporting easy access to local food, right?
Studebaker “History in the Baking” is back on the market after a bit of time off – it’s a good thing too… we were certainly missing her sourdough and other delicious baked goods. And King’s has a new item – marinated chicken drums. Sounds like an easy, toss-on-the-grill type of meal!