Charming the snake Think of the plumbing snake not only as a cool, money-saving D.I.Y. tool, but also as an investment in foregoing many future embarrassing moments. Because if you have to call a professional at 10pm (in tears) on the night before hosting your entire family for Thanksgiving dinner after thinking it would be […]
The Shelton family loves apples. “We make apple pancakes all the time,” says Chuck Shelton, one of three Shelton sons who retired from full-time employment in North Carolina to manage Vintage Virginia’s apple orchard, Rural Ridge, and its new cidery, Albemarle Ciderworks, along with his sister, founder Charlotte Shelton, his 90-year-old father, Bud Shelton, and […]
Read up and drink it up: • eggs • peppers • goats • apples • tomatoes • cucumbers • peaches • goat cheese • microgreens • beer • wine • take-out For many, many reasons—for the good of our communities, our environment, our bodies—our food intake should start with the local produce, meats and […]
When Susan Vidal left her job as a cartographer for the federal government, she thought she’d be a pumpkin farmer. She and her husband had bought their farm as a getaway from Northern Virginia and future retirement home before they finally moved there full-time and began their commercial operation with one acre of pumpkins eight […]
The Farm at Red Hill is hot, and we don’t mean that only with respect to their business. Though, figuratively speaking, they are tearing it up on the regional Whole Foods scene, having placed their value-added products in every store in Virginia, D.C. and Maryland over the last year. I mean it’s actually hot. Walking […]
‘‘We’d like to get an egg a day out of everybody,” says Kathryn Bertoni. “ That would be a 100 percent lay rate.” From happy hens to their hands: Cathryn and Michael Bertoni offer their CSA subscribers egg shares from their free-range flock. After six years of operating Appalachia Star Farm, which offers “egg shares” […]
For many, many reasons, for the good of our communities, our environment, our bodies
There are local farms with cute monikers and logos that we all recognize, and then there’s Rob Brown. You might not know his name, but if you’ve toured the Monticello vegetable gardens, you know his work —he was a gardener there for seven years until this past February. You probably also know his booth at […]
The closest many of us around here get to actual agriculture is at the pick-your-own fruit farms and orchards, of which we have several in the area. Strawberries, apples and pumpkins are all ripe for the picking at various places when in-season, but we really have the Chiles family and their peaches to thank for […]
Gail Hobbs-Page, who is an activist for small farms and a vocal proponent of local food —the “Vote with your Fork” section of the CaroMont Farm website and blog links you straight to government officials on the topics of small farm agriculture—is a great spokesperson for the movement. As a trained chef (most recently at […]