Good things grow hereThe Greenbelt is Ontario's fresh food basket. With more than 7,000 farms operating on over a million acres (400,000 hectares) of some of the country's best farmland, the Greenbelt is a great source for healthy, fresh foods. And fresh, local food is where it is at when it comes to both nutrition and flavour. Foods picked fresh in the Greenbelt can make the short trip to your plate without losing valuable vitamins and minerals and can picked at peak ripeness instead of being picked unripe and packaged and processed for a bruising ride of hundreds or even thousands of kilometres.

Good Things Grow Here, the third booklet in our series explains the big advantages of fresh local foods and why the Greenbelt is such an important food source for Ontario consumers. You'll also find information here on where you can buy fresh local food and you can take a look at what to shop for when to get the best flavours on your plate.

Niagara's 2.1 million tender fruit trees produce about 40,000 tons of fruit annually - that's more than 800,000 bushel baskets of fruit. Lined up, they would stretch from Niagara Falls to Kingston.

Ontario Nature Ontario College of Family Physicians