The best things in life are free . . .

I may have said it before, but the best local food is the free kind and it’s that time of the year for making the most of what is on offer gratis.

Yesterday Karen and I took a trip to just outside Faversham and scoured some hedgerows. Just 20 minutes’ work yielded more than 5lbs of damsons and jam-making will soon be under way.

We’ll probably get out again today to another hedgerow location which last year had a super-abundance of damsons, plums and cherry plums. Blackberries are in the offing too, so there will be forays for those.

Thanks to Teddy Kempster for the mint tea idea. We made some from mint from the back garden and it was yummy, far better than the decidedly dodgy sage version!

Nathalie Banaigs made the pertinent point that this full-on local food shtick seems to take up a lot of time and she is right, it does . . . 

Lesson No. 4 – being totally purist about local food is not practical in the long-term for Mr or Mrs Average; it takes too much time and overall costs too much money. But, there are many local foodstuffs readily available of good quality and good value, so it is possible to change one’s foodie habits to a much more local orientation without being inconvenienced or out-of-pocket.

Having said that, we’ve decided to extend the experiment. While the original two weeks comes to an end today, we’ve decided to do another week, but allowing ourselves a few non-Kent basics such as tea and coffee (the headache’s gone, but the yearning’s still there!). That feels closer to a sustainable, long-term way of operating, so it will interesting to see if that does indeed turn out to be the case.