Dairy

I can foresee that, ultimately, some of the most tricky customers to localise are going to be tea and various herbs and spices. But I'm well stocked on tea for the time being, having been in the habit of buying several catering size packs at a time of Taylor's Yorkshire Tea for some years. This wasn't for any other reason than the baffling difficulty of getting the hard water version in the economy size boxes. I mean to say, everywhere within a huge radius of me is a hard water zone, and yet for some strange reason all the shops stock the normal blend in gigantic boxes and the hard water blend in tiny ones (if at all), so I've been buying in bulk from Amazon and have enough in the cupboard to last probably until Christmas.

More immediate however is the issue of the milk I still can't quite wean myself off having in my tea. Now, given that milk isn't a product that lasts out the distance of long journeys, you would expect most of the milk on sale here to be relatively local in any case. A dairy farm in Wilksby (2 miles from me) for example supplies Sainsbury's stores in the area. But I want to be sure, and I want to buy direct whenever possible, so our local producers can get a bigger proportion of the price I pay, rather than most of it going into retailers' and marketers' pockets.

My house is in fact inside a hedged enclosure in the middle of a field full of cows, so I figured it'd be a simple task to find out who owns them and strike a deal. Now, one of my neighbours - in suburban terms you could say next-door-but-one, although it's about a quarter of a mile away - is a building labelled on the OS Landranger as Dairy Farm. So naturally, it was my first port of call.

Unfortunately (for my purposes) it turned out to be derelict, and in the process of being converted into a sort of social healing/retreat centre - which I Googled when I got home, found really interesting and emailed them about getting involved with. But no milk.

So I went up to Grange Farm, where I'm told a lady I know from church has lived all her 90-odd years (they go in for long term tenancies on the Revesby Estate!), and inquired of the two chaps I found there, kicking their heels whilst waiting for an engineer. Nice people, and good to meet more of my neighbours - they told me the cows are owned by Hall Farm and not milked. It's a beef herd: the calves drink the mothers' milk, nobody milks them.

Eventually, having exhausted all avenues that I had time to explore before S (15 year old daughter) made my head explode with her insistent insisting on going home so she could have her post-school caffeine fix, I went home and turned to Google.

That was when I found out that the Lincolnshire Poacher people (whose delicious cheese I've been buying from the Coop for years) sell their own milk at the local farmers' markets. And what's more, a peruse of their website told me that the butter problem I'd also been anticipating could be solved through their humble market stall. That's a relief - I remember churning butter at the age of about 8 or 9 when, out of curiosity, I spent several hours shaking a coffee jar of our goat's milk to see what would happen, and I really didn't fancy adding that time consuming task to the existing daily grind.

Annoyingly, they won't be at my local farmers' market for another three weeks, unless I can find another excuse to go into Lincoln next week to justify the diesel... But that's one problem solved, and something to look forward to anyway!