The Slower Road

Today, let’s meet some of Elmwood Stock Farm’s beautiful chickens and heritage-breed turkeys!

First, the Red Star hens, who each lay one egg a day, and a visitor, and (farther down) their resident rooster.

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Next, we visited the Narragansett turkeys. The breed is a cross between birds brought to the original colonies and native eastern turkeys.

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And then we walked farther along the pasture to meet the beautiful Bourbon Reds:

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After a lovely visit (thank you, Ann and Mac!), it was time to drive home …

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As I’ve mentioned here before, and as I shall no doubt mention again, Lexington is blessed with a fantastic farmers’ market. During the summer months, we can choose from a wide variety of fresh, seasonal, and local fruits, berries, vegetables, cheeses, meats, breads, pasta, chocolate truffles, and so much more. Even in the winter, when the market moves to an indoor location, we can still get local squash, root vegetables, meat, and eggs.

A.J. and I are dedicated farmers’ market shoppers and, over the years, have scoped out our favorite local producers of berries, vegetables, tomatoes, apples, goat cheese, and more.

Elmwood Stock Farm is one of our favorites and, for the past decade or so, they’ve been our go-to supplier of organic vegetables, strawberries, eggs, meat and, once a year, a heritage-breed turkey for the holidays.

Over the past few years, we’ve been doing more and more of our weekly shopping at the farmers’ market, and we’ve become more and more committed to cooking at home. So this year we decided to sign up up for Elmwood’s Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. This means a steady supply of fresh seasonal goodies (delivered to our “drop-off point” each week), including some things that we would probably have never bought on our own. So not only will we be cooking this summer, we’ll be experimenting as well!

One of the benefits of (finally) being a member of the CSA program is Elmwood’s annual farm tour, which we enjoyed last weekend.

We walked past fields where our vegetables will be grown, and we met the pastured chickens who lay the delicious eggs we enjoy each week. So, yes, we do know where our food comes from.

In this first part of the farm tour, I’ll focus on some of the beautiful, peaceful scenery we saw on the walking farm tour … and the most delicious strawberries in the world … and some adorable sheep. Tomorrow, we’ll meet the beautiful chickens and turkeys.

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our vegetables will be growing soon in these fields

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strawberries!

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… these little gems are the sweetest. juiciest. best. ever.

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Since I’ve run out of time (again!) for a proper blog post, here’s a preview …

Tomorrow, we’re going to head down this road, take a left, and enjoy a farm tour:

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