Availability for May 24th

It was great seeing several of you at our first “Farmer for a Day” event of the summer at Two Swallows Farm yesterday. The weather was beautiful, the many hands made light work of a number of projects (from planting tomatoes to spreading mulch to tidying up the hoophouse to shoveling out the barnyard [Marc claimed that job before we even got started]), and a great lunch under the shade tree was had. We rounded out the day with a full tour of the farm, including the beautiful pond tucked back in the woods that was dug out using mules back in the day. We’ll continue to hold these events through the summer, with the next one out at Double B farm next month in Oxford. You can find out more on the website (a graphic at the top of each page will point you in the right direction) and you can make reservations as you place your order—just look in the “Event Reservations” category.

We welcome two new growers this week. First, 10 Signs Garden & Gourmet is offering both turkey and duck eggs. Both of those are exceedingly hard to find, but well worth the search. Second, Jan’s Garden is a well-known in-town garden in Athens, and is supplying a number of live plants this week. You can find out more about both growers (and all the rest of them as well) on the “Our Growers” page of the website. We have 23 growers now, and many of them have started putting up photos so you can take a “virtual tour” of their farms.

We have a number of new items this week. The “New Products” carousel at the top of the Market page is a great way to keep up with those. I tweaked it to show the new products with photos first. It’s my goal to have photos for most all of the products that get listed.

On final note about the dairy runs. As mentioned last week, due to your demand for the great raw dairy you can purchase from South Carolina dairies, we are now making dairy runs every week instead of just twice a month. We have tweaked the route a little, though, so now we’ll be pairing Split Creek and Milky Way, and then on alternate weeks going to Diamond Hill. This week we’ll go out to Diamond Hill for raw milk form their pastured Jersey cows.

Welcome to all the new people who found us via the recent press! I know the influx of customers has made Thursday pickups much busier, and we’re adjusting things on our end to match. I know there was a sizable line early on on Thursday, but it seemed to be moving pretty quickly. We’ll try to keep it that way. Remember that pickups start at 4:30. We use every minute before that to organize the back room so we can quickly pull orders, so it may not be possible to pull your order is you arrive early.

Thank you for all your support of your local food producers! When a community can feed itself, everyone wins. Athens is a long ways from doing that, but you are bringing us closer to it. We’ll see you on Thursday from 4:30 to 7pm at Gosford Wine!