Dear Ace: The fall is here, and the leaves are starting to turn. It‘s putting me in a real circle-of-life, survival-of-the-fittest kind of mood. Ace, what is the most prevalent tree in Virginia? I want to plant one in my yard, to teach my sons how to be stronger and more prolific than their rivals.—Eugene […]
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 […]
‘‘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” […]
The old adage says that patience is a virtue, but then so is drinking a wine when it’s in its prime. Here are five Virginia wines ready for the glass. Shop the City Market, plan a meal, phone some dear friends, pull up an Adirondack chair, and savor the simple pleasures of another beautiful fall […]
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 […]