High Country Farm & Garden Tour

From the CFSA mailing list:

High Country Farm & Garden Tour

July 23 & 24th 1 – 5 PM

Whether you are coming from out of town for a blissful retreat to the High Country or a native of the area celebrating summer with your local farmers, the High Country Farm and Garden Tour is the event for you! Visit 9 farms on July 23rd and 24th and see apple orchards, an apiary, 20 different varieties of garlic, and so much more! You’ll get great ideas for your own gardens and your kids will thoroughly enjoy seeing barnyard animals roaming happily on pastures! It’s an event that no one should miss!

Make a vacation out of it if you are coming from out of town. There are so many peaceful places to stay and fabulous restaurants where you can dine, just check out http://visitboonenc.com/ or http://www.blowingrock.com/ for ideas! If you have never been to the High Country, you don’t know what you are missing!

Volunteer! By volunteering at one farm on either Saturday or Sunday of the tour, you can take the tour the other day for free! Volunteers are needed to help greet visitors and collect money at each farm – what a great way to get to know a local farmer too! Just contact Siri McDonald for more details and to get signed up: 828-265-3278 or sirimcdonald @ yahoo. com.

This is your last chance to enjoy a farm tour this year:

WHEN: Saturday and Sunday, July 23 & 24, 1 – 5 PM

WHERE: 9 Farms in beautiful Watauga County – Just pick up a map at a Boone area store or the Watauga Extension Office (828)264-3061, download one from the CFSA website: www.carolinafarmstewards.org, or call (919) 542-2402 and we’ll mail you one! Then you can choose which farm you’ll visit first and plan your weekend!

COST: $5 per car per farm – OR $20 per car for all 9 farms – buy an admission button at the first farm you visit – OR $15 in advance – buy your button from the Watauga County Farmers Market the next two Saturdays to receive a $5 discount to take the whole tour!

• Visit 9 Watauga County farms!
• Breathe the fresh High Country air!
• Celebrate summer’s bounty of fruits, vegetables and honey!
• Support your local and organic farmers!
• Support the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association!

See Things Made

Charlie and I have realized we have several YEARS of programming ideas based on “See Things Made” i.e. demonstrations of local food production. A beginning list includes: molasses (we can go to HartRich Farm, a farm north of Winston – Salem that makes Molasses with horses!), apple butter (our family makes apple butter every fall outside over the fire in a big copper kettle), cider making, vegetable canning (tomatoes, etc.), fruit canning (peaches, etc.) winemaking, hoophouse vegetable growing, grass fed meats (beef, pork, poultry, etc.)

We need to figure out a way we can take our “show” on the road to farms that do not have the public facilities like we have here at Goat Lady Dairy. Perhaps we could go out in a bus (solving the parking problem and saving fossil fuels and having a fellowship time on the ride out to the farm), taking our pot-luck with us, maybe even a tent we could set up at each farm, or more simply take blankets for a pot-luck picnic. This allows the farmer to focus only on the demonstration. We realized after Sunday that a much easier way to do the potluck would be to have everyone bring their own plates, cutlery, cups etc. and then take it home to wash. This solves the dishwashing problem without creating massive paper waste for the landfill!

If we do something like this, we could have a photographer document the demo to add to our “See Things Made” section on the website. We have already planned to turn our cheesemaking slideshow into a stand alone presentation with captions. It IS amazing what can be done with digital cameras and photo software! I’m sure offering this on the web-site would generate lots of interest in future farm visits for demonstrations. To me this is among the best Slow Food activities we can offer because we bring ‘eaters” out to the farmers and make it easy for the farmer to share their craft and philosophy. This is the kind of interaction which inspires slow food loving urban folks to really care about their local farms!

Steve
Goat Lady Dairy

The Splendid Table

The link below is a GREAT resource for food. It is for THE SPLENDID TABLE, a public radio show that comes on 91.5 FM WUNC at noon on Sundays (or check your local station schedule) On the home page you can sign up for the “Weeknight Kitchen” and Lynn send you a FREE recipe each week based on great SLOW ingredients but designed for weekday use when you don’t have a lot of time to cook!

http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/

Steve
Goat Lady Dairy