Morning temp: 72F
Afternoon high: 90F
Tonight's projected low: 69F
Wind: NE at 6 mph
Humidity: 52%
Moon: Waxing, 99% Full

1. It's been extraordinarily hot here, so hot that working outside beyond 11am is a bit insane by my standards. Raised in New England, I've never really gotten used to the heat here in the South, even after 25+ years.

2. We're harvesting some wonderful vegetables from the Garden on a daily basis, Sungold and Black Cherry Tomatoes, Squash and Cucumbers just to start.

3. As M indicated in her post, we've also been visiting a Saturday morning market where local farmers come to sell their food. There seem to be two sorts of folks who attend. The first kind are specifically seeking local produce, either out of some ethical impulse (shipping food across the country is fantastically unwise in about a hundred major ways), or because they realize that food grown locally is not just fresh, they're better food. If you're running Money Mart Empire, and you want to ship California Tomatoes to Virginia, what kinds of Tomatoes will you want? The kind that taste great but don't tolerate shipping very well? Or the kind that tolerate shipping but are washed out and tasteless? At real markets with real farmers, the kinds of tomatoes available are themselves superior to those at Money Mart.

The other sort of patron seems to be the curiosity seeker, perhaps expecting that food grown locally would be far less expensive - after all, what kind of truly successful person would grow food for a living? I believe we were beset by such patrons this last Saturday. While M was picking her way carefully through the crowds of shoppers eagerly buying up the last of Spring Onions, Strawberries and Turnips, one fellow in front of me looked down at the baskets of produce, at the signs posted here and there, at his wife, and burst out in disbelief, "I can't believe you're going to pay this much for some food!", and stalked off to wait in the car. Well, there's always Money Mart, where tasteless veggies sit waiting, after a 2,000 mile, gasoline sucking, climate-warming truck ride!

4. 51% of all gasoline used in America is used to transport food across the country. In 80% or more of these instances, this food could easily be grown locally.