Have you ever had trouble finding the local farmer’s markets and community gardens/farms in your area? Me too. Sometimes it’s hard to know who to ask or who to trust.
Local Harvest to the Rescue
Luckily Local Harvest has a great search feature to find just that. They have put together a nice farmer’s market map along with Google to help you find a lot of the goodies in your area. You can filter by the four different location types: farmer’s market, CSA, community gardens and community farms. If you’re looking for a little more, such as grocery stores, you can head over to Local Harvest’s main site. They have a search form that you can filter by the following categories:
- Online Stores
- Farms
- CSA
- Farmer’s Markets
- Restaurants
- Grocery/Co-op
- Wholesale
- Meat Processors
- Others
Start your search!
Enter your Zip Code or City:
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This can be a really great tool to get in touch with your local organic farmers. There are many benefits of being close to your local farmers. Often times they need a hand with harvest or another project. You can lend a hand by volunteering. They can also give you great discounts and sometimes freebies or products in exchange for volunteering. We’ve been able to get some pretty amazing greens in this fashion.
What if There is Nothing Near Me?
I feel your pain. We lived in Alaska where it was very hard to find organic food. Almost everything had to be barged up which, by then, the produce was at least two weeks old. Luckily we found two CSA’s that were able to ship quickly. We definitely paid more than we would have if we lived right next to the CSA’s but when given the choice of organic and non-organic, we’ll vote for organic. Be sure to check out the CSA’s near you, even if it’s in another city or state around you. This will help you eat organic and it will cut your trips to the store down. The other great thing is the variety you can get. I was getting things in my CSA box that I had never known existed before and it tasted great!
