Availability for October 25th

I spent the weekend making our place look presentable for the big Hunter’s Moon Feast next Saturday. It’d been quite a while since I’d mowed some of areas, so it turned out to be quite a lot of work. But, it all looks nice, the weather is supposed to be about like it was the past few days (perfect!), and the blackberry mead just stopped bubbling. In short, we’re all set.

You’ll find the event listed in the “Event Reservations” category. Add the right number of reservations to your order this week if you plan on coming. I’ll send directions to the farm out to everyone who has placed reservations (including those who did so in previous weeks) on Wednesday.

Members of The Would Be Farmers will be on hand to make music for us. The BBQ (made from local pastured pork, naturally) will be ready at 2pm, and I’ll have the grills fired up. You can come any time from 11 or noon on and stay as long as you’d like. The sun sets a bit after 7, and it’s getting chilly fast after that. Bring a tent if you want to camp over (I’ve got five gallons of mead, and it’s a long drive back to town). I’ll provide a wide selection of meat dishes from local sources, and you can bring a dish to share to go alongside them. (I just happen to like meat more than most organic vegetable farmers, but vegetarians are most welcome too, of course). Bring the kids and some shoes to wear while splashing in the river—this being the 21st century, there’s far too much glass mixed in with the sharp river rocks. We’ll have some chairs and tables, but you might want to bring some chairs of your own.

Enough about that… here’s something really interesting. Many of you eat organically grown local foods because, above all else, they just taste better. You’re not the only ones. A team of Swiss and Austrian scientists recently completed a 21-year study of organic wheat. After lab tests showed little chemical difference between organic and non-organic wheat, they put them to the taste test. Using rats. When presented with two biscuits, one made with organic wheat and the other with conventional wheat, the rats overwhelmingly chose the organic biscuit. Other studies and your own experience has shown that organically grown foods have more flavor, and the leading theory is that plants grown organically are under more stress (from bugs and other conditions), and that stress makes the plants produce more chemicals as a defense that just happen to taste great to us. You can read all about these studies (and another just over the state line at Clemson) here in the New York Times.

Thanks for all your support of local organically grown foods! We’ll see you on Thursday at Gosford Wine from 4:30 to 8pm.