In Season

Eating locally grown produce isn’t something to practice just while you’re at home. With a little research, you can eat local just about anywhere – even while you’re on vacation.

Each Memorial Day, I travel down to the Gulf of Mexico just south of Tallahassee. When stocking the beach kitchen, I’m always looking for what’s growing in the neighborhood. There are several Tallahassee farmers markets, one on Wednesday afternoon and three on Saturdays. That’s where I go shopping.

At the Frenchtown Farmers Market, I met Ed Duffee Jr. His booth offered melons and summer squash, pepper vinegar and cane syrup. And beautiful ears of sweet corn. His sign advertised that he was growing vegetables less than a mile from the market. When I left the market, I stopped by the garden plot and found a beautifully tended garden in the midst of a residential neighborhood.

Duffee told me later in a telephone conversation that what I saw was his “demonstration garden.” He also farms 20 acres in Lloyd, Florida, about 11 miles east of Tallahassee. The demonstration garden occupies two city lots that were once the garden plot of his uncle.

When his uncle died eight years ago, Duffee took over the space, and there he grows a little bit of everything he grows on the 20-acre farm. “Collards, mustard greens, sweet onions, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, corn,” he ran through the list of vegetables. “And scuppernong vines.”

The demonstration garden offers a chance for neighborhood children to learn how things grow. And on Mondays and Fridays he’s on hand to answer questions.

As for his corn, at the farm he grows twoand-a-half acres of white and yellow varieties and he says his customers will buy whatever he has available, although he detects a small preference for the white.

He planted his corn in late March or early April as soon as the frosts were gone and was harvesting in late May.

“We can pick corn for about three weeks at most,” Duffee said. “But if you pick it when it’s ripe, you can keep it chilled and it will store a little longer. If you don’t pick it once it turns ripe, it will dry out in the field and you can’t eat it. Chilled, it might keep for three or four weeks and still be really good.”

As for how he enjoys his corn, he keeps it simple. “We just boil it and eat it off the cob,” he said. “We do keep some back for ourselves and freeze it, and then we can enjoy corn for another eight or nine months.”

Duffee says there are two challenges of growing corn: weeds and deer. “You have to work at your corn or the weeds will take over. And you have to protect it from deer. Otherwise, they will go through the field and you’ll think a lawnmower went through there.”