Good to Go Local and Organic

Turkey Canadian bacon grilled cheese with caramelized
onions, arugula, and tomato.

Long time readers know we're big fans of organic gardening and organic and local food in general. Now that we live in a rural area surrounded by great organic farms, we've decided to put our money and effort where our mouths are: a small, take out restaurant that focuses on local and organic food: Good to Go.

We've just begun the venture, so we're at the fundraising stage. Rather than trying to borrow all the money to start the business, or going to accredited investors through a crowd funding site, we've decided to sell a 20% interest in the soon-to-be-formed LLC to our friends, family, readers, and community. We see this as a chance for anyone who truly believes in the resiliency of the local and slow food movement to help us create more demand for our local farmers.

Shares are $100 each, and represent a 0.1% share of the company. After we've been in business a few quarters, we plan to start buying back the shares over a 5 year period. During that time, by law, the LLC must pay each co-owner (known as members in New York) their percent of the net profits.

Visit the Good to Go Organic and Local Food web site, read the business plan, and decide for yourself. We're sure you'll see this as a great way for the slow, organic, and local food community to create more demand for food that gets eaten as close to where it's grown as possible. And while we're not getting too dreamy about the whole thing, we see this as a kind of co-op model for financing these kinds of ventures as an excellent opportunity for investors and those who want to do something similar.

So, please, get involved today. We're also looking for suppliers of organic and local food in the Cherry Valley, Cooperstown, and Sharon Springs New York area. If you have any questions, just leave a comment, or contact me directly (scott at supak dot com).

Nectar Hills Designs on Etsy

Our friends at Nectar Hills Farm have started an Etsy store: Nectar Hills Farm Designs. The store features handmade sheep skin pillows, handbags, and hats, plus this amazing Scottish highlander cow skull.

This is a great way to shop for gifts that will help support our local organic farmers!

Organic Kona Coffee Is Back, Talking Story on Hawaii

Back in 1998, when we were living on Maui, I was contacted by an organic Kona coffee farmer about helping him sell his gourmet coffee beans. He was one of my best clients until he sold his farm and retired in 2006. So, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard from Mike Tucker, one of the guys who bought Dr. Faust's farm.

Tucker has been refurbishing the farm, getting organic control of the weeds (cutting them), installing his own processing equipment, starting and planting his own coffee tree seedlings, getting the Hawaiian coffee farm certified organic, and much more. It's an amazing amount of work to farm anything organically, especially coffee.

Great thing about this story is that you can read the entire experience, because Mike kept a journal of the entire organic coffee farm refurbishing story, and it is now his blog. Judging from what is there already, this would be a good blog to subscribe to if you're into organic agriculture at all. All you organic coffee farmers will love it!

Or maybe you just love fresh roasted organic Kona coffee beans showing up ot your front door when there's a foot of snow outside. Like me.

Maybe you're a real coffee nut and you want to home roast your own organic green coffee beans from Hawaii... Mike says you can use an old popcorn air popper!

You don't have to Digg organic Kona coffee in order to Digg the story of organic Kona coffee farming. It's an enticing blog, like the aroma of fresh brewed... Ah, you get the idea! Plus, there are all kinds of great pictures of Hawaii, the big island of the Hawaiian Islands.

The organic Kona coffee from 1500 feet up the side of Mauna Loa near the Hawaiian sanctuary town of Honaunau is back! And it is better than ever!

Organic Gardening And Blogging About It (again)!

Back in the cave man days of the internet, I created one of the world's first organic gardening web sites. We lived in the mountains north of Los Angeles, and I had a great backyard garden. Then we moved to Hawaii for a year, and we had a banana tree and a small tropical garden. Then we moved back to LA, and for over 10 years I just didn't have enough room or soil to grow anything but a few flowers. So, I got a little out of practice.

Because of my recent disability retirement from the stagehand world, we moved to upstate NY, and now I'm gardening again, blogging about it in the Organic Gardening News Blog, and loving it. The fall garden of greens, peas, lettuce, spinach, and, of course, arugula for election night are all doing great, despite the four frosts we've had already. Every day is another day of fresh, local, solar powered food before a long winter.