One of the best ways to save money on produce and eat well is to grow your own garden. I find so much satisfaction with picking my own vegetables, knowing that they are fresh. As much as I like shopping at the farmers’ market, which I will always do for things that I can’t grow and don’t plan to, I find it so much more convenient to “have that market” in my backyard. Every year I grow salad greens, spinach, cucumbers, snow peas, green beans, tomatoes and squash. We’ll be lucky if we get tomatoes this year in Seattle with the extended cool weather. I’m hoping for a late summer so I can enjoy fresh tomatoes that are not from Sacramento.

I recently read the book “Plenty” which was about a couple living in Vancouver, BC who followed the 100-mile diet for a full year. They only ate foods that were grown within a 100 mile radius of where they lived. I give them loads of credit for all the effort they put into finding locally grown foods, canning and preserving for the lean times, and experimenting with unfamiliar foods. It’s not something I think I could do due to the time required to search for these things and the inconveniences of searching them out. But I wonder if there will be a time in the near future in which gas prices become so high that we can’t expect to get our food from all the corners of the world. Maybe we would be healthier to invest time in the preparation of local foods and lowering our expectations for certain foods to be available year round. For now, I’m happy to harvest from my garden and shop at the farmers’ market with the occasional trip to Trader Joes for special foods. I plan to learn and explore how the 100-mile diet would work in Seattle.