With four local breweries already established, Charlottesville has been carving out a brew trail amid its grapevines: It started with Starr Hill, where Mark Thompson has been brewing national award-winning beverages since the early ’90s. Now with a tasting room in Crozet and a recent distribution deal with Anheuser-Busch, this local favorite is bound to […]
With four local breweries already established, Charlottesville has been carving out a brew trail amid its grapevines: It started with Starr Hill, where Mark Thompson has been brewing national award-winning beverages since the early ’90s. Now with a tasting room in Crozet and a recent distribution deal with Anheuser-Busch, this local favorite is bound to […]
Money Magazine has named Charlottesville one of the top 50 places to start a small business. Additionally, Charlottesville was ranked 19th among small cities in the country. It was the only Virginia locality on the list. Much of the success of small ventures is due, according to Money, to UVA’s Darden School of Business, to […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
L’étoile Executive Chef Mark Gresge is a big fan of Megan Weary’s tomatoes, and not just because the beautiful Striped Germans, Cherokee Purples and other heirloom varieties as well as classic Romas and cherry tomatoes that she and her husband Rob cultivate at their four-year-old Roundabout Farm in Keswick are flavorful in a way that […]
Planet Earth Diversified is a study in the new science of small farming. Arriving at the Stanardsville site, you’re struck by both the primitiveness and dirtiness with which small scale agricultural businesses must survive, but also, the creativity and innovation. On the one hand, there are the fields of crops, the noisy chickens, the old […]