One Local Summer

I'm a bit of a frustrated gardener. If it helps, I'm so frustrated my husband didn't know that I considered myself a gardener. To be fair, I have that black thumb of death when it comes to indoors plants. I was lucky to grow up with a beautiful garden at my mom's house and soothed much of my teenage angst by weeding for hours. When I was teaching I had a little garden and we started a beautiful garden when I was running the science programs at a summer camp. But since my graduation and move to DC, I did nothing but kill the plants my mom gave me.

Now that we're getting settled in 11215 and I have window boxes and a small fire escape I can attempt my own abbreviated version of gardening. Doing Once Local Summer is a no-brainer for us. At worst it means eating at Blue Hill every week and at best it means prowling the Brooklyn streets for locally grown fair.

Brooklyn is a wonderous place. Old meets new as new transplants from Manhattan abut old communities literally fighting for their survival (If AY was brining baseball back to Brooklyn I may have been a little more supportive). But since we've moved here we find this strange utopia where people have opted out of traditional careers and opted into old world style trades. My husband found a carpenter who not only had a PhD in something exotic but also had a degree in engineering and had built himself a time machine to travel back to ancient Japan to learn woodworking there. Not quite but it was pretty close.

Brooklyn seems to be a place that will support any trade, bee keepers, superheroes, vintage clothiers, iron workers and ancient shinto woodworkers. It seems so strange to only be a lawyer and an educator out here. So we could easily find someone to grow us anything that we wanted.

But in this excess, do we have the time? Do we have the money? Organic Prospect Park honey costs a ton of money and that's always my biggest concern with supporting locally grown, sustainable, LEED certified artisans. I worked on a curriculum where we tried to teach kids from the City to be locavores and it failed miserably. Why? These kids were given $20 a week and the choice between a locally grown cheese and fresh baked loaf of bread was nothing compared to a bag of chips, a lemon pie and a movie with friends.

So, how does the choice shake out for me? Is my time worth the money? I guess we'll see... but I'll have nice herbs if the pigeons don't kill everything with their roosting.

I think my first meal will be locally grown protein (maybe pigeon) with a heavy dose of cilantro and Brooklyn Brewery beer. I wonder where they get their hops...