The farm is all a flutter with activity!
| We hosted a special wedding the first weekend of the month and a bridal brunch the day after! Love is in the air here! We are beginning to see many of our “spring crops” move into production and we are gearing up for our CSA program that will start THIS Saturday!
We have three different tiers for CSA participation this year: 1. Couples box: perfect for a busy couple and one or two young children , same size box as last year and same price… $20 2. Family box: a bushel box meant to feed 2adults, plus a passel of kiddos, including some hungry teens …$40 3. MY CSA: which is a pack your own box… you can go through the market and pick the produce items that best suit you! A few basic guidelines are in place, for example you can’t take all tomatoes! But this is the one if you know what you like and want to get only those things. We use our green door packing box for this… $30 Music City Cravings, an awesome new food truck will be here on Saturday, cooking up BREAKFAST and LUNCH so plan to come and chow down!
They will be using fresh ingredients from the farm and our co-op members in their culinary creations, and Sam Miller will be here cranking out BBQ for here or to go! Sounds like a Saturday picnic to me! I mentioned last blog about some of the fantastic new members of the on farm co-op this year. We are so excited to welcome lots of new folks to the fold. Click here to check out our new Farm to Fork page on the web! With the addition of so many new and exciting co-op members, as well as Jeff Poppen working with us to move towards biodynamic farming, AND our new farm shed, I think it will be a great year to visit the farm. I mentioned in the last blog a little bit about a place from my childhood, Hugh Helms store. This “grocery” was about a mile from our house in the country. This was ” the big store”, before We stopped at Ben Heanver’s on Sunday for ice cream on the way home from church on hot summer days, if we were good. He had the coldest ice cream box in the county! Neopolitan ice cream sandwiches and orange push-ups, fudge cicles, and chocolate dipped vanilla bars were there, along with nutty buddies and banana twins pops. Thus began my sheer delight in all things ice cream. I believe ice cream is my favorite food, which I guess coming from a dairy farmer’s daughter, that is probably not a coincidence! My folks made homemade ice cream and I cannot remember any ice cream I have ever tasted, from the finest ice cream in Paris to some pretty spectacular churnings at the Martha O’Bryan Ice Cream festival, being better than a homemade vanilla laden with home canned peach preserves stirred through. The milk came from our cows, the peaches from our trees, and the love and patience of sitting there taking turns loading in the ice and rock salt and turning the handle. We told family stories and sang songs and had a grand time. I miss those days of childhood when things seemed so simple. I am lucky to have found Jeni’s Ice Cream a couple of years back. It is the closest thing to home churned tasting ice cream yet. They just won a James beard award for their ice cream and their cookbook! FOLKS, WE HAVE IT RIGHT HERE AT THE FARM. I met Jeni at Chef’s Garden in Ohio and was thrilled to learn of their Nashville connection ( Vandy grads) and to learn that Nashville would be the second place to find Jeni’s in the nation outside of Ohio. We will have an ice cream freezer stocked with their best flavors, all made from the purest farm ingredients. Ah, the summer is better already!
Now, back to the store story. Although we invaded Ben Heavner’s for ice cream, we did our “stop in ” casual shopping at Hugh Helms store. Here are a couple of photos the Helms Family was kind enough to share with me. They closed the store when I was still a child, maybe 7 or 8 years old, but I remember lots about the store. Big plate glass windows across the front, with hooks that held items of interest to catch your eye, included dolls and stuffed animals. The shelves and the floor were old wood. I remember Mr. Hugh, who with his silver hair and kind smile, made everyone feel welcome. He was the epitome of a shop keeper… white apron, firm handshake, and knew his customers by name. He knew entire families names and how folks were related. He always stocked octagon soap, mexanna powder, bluing (for turning older ladies hair from white to silver) borax, ball canning lids, and the list goes on. You collected things on the counter, not in a shopping cart. Hugh would follow and retrieve things back to the counter as you picked them out, or you could just give him the list and he would gather items for you. Of course, visiting and story swapping was a part of this. I also seem to remember that men did a lot of the shopping too, from lists sent from the wives with specific notes advising Mr. Hugh to not let the husbands swap out items for something else.
He carried Sealtest milk (we were a sealtest dairy back then) and Bost bread. He certainly did his part to buy local produce to have at the store, lots of it from uncles, cousins and other family of mine. I also remember there was a section that you could get motor oil or wiper blades, shoes or osh gosh overalls, and upon occasions some unique things. For example, for a while he carried some pieces of carnival glass. My brother had gotten a job and one of the first things he did was buy my mother a carnival glass pitcher and a compote. Today they are collector’s items! All from a little country store.  Mr. Hugh would box everything up, He preferred using boxes that products had arrived in, (a true early recycling program!) not paper bags. He closed for lunch every day and walked across the road home where his wife, Ms Faye had food on the table. Folks just knew not to come at lunch time! One scene often experienced was the farm men, all piled atop trucks and wagons loaded with hay, sitting out front drinking a soda pop after hours of hot toil in the sun. Mr Hugh would get them all set, then leave for lunch and the fellows had a little refreshment before heading to the fields. They all left their pop bottles, so there was no need to charge a deposit. That’s customer relations folks!
My goal is to make our on farm stand feel much like that store : where we know your name, and your families’ name, what you like, (and don’t like) and how we can be a place that just feels good to visit. We want our prices to be fair: that means we won’t be as cheap as Wally world, but not as exclusive as Whole Foods. We want to be the place you stop for homemade bread and fresh no hormone milk, farm veggies and local things, no hassle parking and a friendly cashier. Our first box of spring will have lettuces, kale and chard as well, local hydroponic tomatoes, spring onions, green garlic, beets, carrots, turnips, radishes and more. We will have homemade wheat bread, raw granola, and flour tortillas from Goodness Gracious bread available, Cruze dairy milk, Benton’s Bacon, Shelton Farm Grits, William’s Farm and TruBee Honey, Bang Marshmallows and syrups (did you see they were featured in Bon Appetit!), and more! Also at the market Baber cutting boards, Mabella soaps, O.liv olive oils, Miel’s take away items, Noble Springs Goat cheese, Kenny’s cheese, meats, fresh eggs, herb plants and lots more. Don’t forget to visit our e-market to place your order after 8pm tonight! (please bear with us… it is week one and we hope cyber space will be kind to us!) We invite you to come Saturday and see us! We can’t wait to see you! |
