Our Local Foods CSA (Customer Supported Agriculture) is now accepting subscriptions for the session starting in Late Spring (we’ve sold out the Early Spring). We are still offering 2 subscription models:

• Full Year subscription – Five six 6-week sessions
• Single 6-week subscription – you can subscribe to one or more of these during the year, just 6-weeks at a time (next session starts Late Spring- April 19)

For those of you want to subscribe for the Full Year, we have reduced the price accordingly and your deliveries will start with the Late Spring session. For those of you who want to subscribe to a Single 6-week session, deliveries will start with the Late Spring (rather than Early Spring) session. In both subscription types, we are still offering the Large and Medium sizes to help you best match your produce needs.

Here are the planned delivery dates:

We appreciate the subscriptions we have already received for 2010, and look forward to the start of deliveries. We’ll keep you posted by email, but if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call us on (843)887-3500 or email us.

Thank you-

Maria Baldwin

First Annual Local Music on the Farm A Big Success!
Thank you for attending our first fundraising event in support of Adaptive Gardens of the Lowcountry! We count ourselves very lucky for the perfect day we had for our event yesterday. The beautiful weather, fabulous oysters, great barbeque, and fantastic music made it a fun time to be had by all. We’d like to once again send out a special thank you to our event sponsors and donors:

Coastal Caterers, Clammer Dave’s Sustainable Gourmet  Seafood, GP Sound, Livingston Seafood, High Hammock, McCrady’s Restaurant, McClellanville Rentals, Meadors Construction, Pearl Cadwell, Sun Bay Logic, Town Museum of McClellanville, Trident Tech Culinary Program, Queen Anne’s Revenge, Beth & Jerry Zink, Holy City Sinners, Skye Paige & the Original Recipe, The Hungry Monks, French Toast, the Toasted Beets, Wando High School Special Needs Class, Tom Knisley, Julian Levin, Thomas Beach, Guy Artiguse, the Staff of Our Local Foods, and all our cherished volunteers.

Also a special thank you to all of you who came out and made it a great day – we hope you’ll come have fun with us again the next time we have such a wonderful event hosted here at Thornhill Farm.

Thank you!

Maria

Our Local Foods and Chef Sean Brock from McCrady’s Tavern in historic Charleston, SC celebrated the garden this week in an extraordinary way. We hosted “dinner on the porch” as fulfillment of a pretty classy auction item from the coffers of the local fundraiser circuit.

The wonderful meal consisted of vegetables freshly harvested from the damp rows that afternoon, as they were hastily collected in the rain for the evening event.

Guests arrived just as the rain subsided to find the table all set with linens and candles on the screened-in front porch of the cabin that will become our farm store. Mini-lights and citronella lanterns filled the space with a soft welcoming hue of light that said “settle in for a comfortable evening with the chef…”.

With a glass of champagne in hand, poured by the classic Andre from the same restaurant, we loaded into the six passenger golf cart and took a tour of the garden at dusk. The rows were tidily laid to bed, with glimpses of squash blossoms folding in their petals for the evening. The low shadows of the grand oak that stands in the middle of the garden told of a restful day, being that this dinner on the porch was on a Sunday evening in May.

After the tour, and back at their respective assigned seats, each guest was greeted with a celebration of “turnips!” Chef Sean had elegantly attired these springtime tenants in fine fashion. A triptych of preparations, the cylinders of raw root and roasted triangles of the same were sandwiched between a disc of gelatinous seaweed and a silky broth of turnip puree. Sound exciting???

The second course consisted of an explosion of fresh ingredients. Some thirty in number, the collage of freshness was the backdrop (or not) of a simple pan roasted portion of indigenously (from Alaska) harvested halibut. Chef draped the mélange in his version of a pistou, elegantly infusing the palate with fireworks from the earth!

And if this is not more than we could imagine, the next course was “steak and eggs”! A digitally controlled “bain marie” was the cooking method of choice for both, and the results were amazing. A slow and delicate cooking process resulted in texture to sleep on. It turns out that you can cook slowly at a temperature that will not melt butter and keep all the flavor completely intact. Our garden fresh poached eggs were nested in a plump bed of Russian Red Kale. Amazing!

For a finale that was a true celebration of the earth, Chef prepared Chocolate Dipped Carrots! Dig that!

Many thanks to the chef, McCrady’s staff, Joan Perrie, and the lovely dinner guests that spent a Sunday evening in May on the porch at Thornhill Farm.

We have 300 chickens on the farm now – they arrived last weekend.  We have a chicken tractor for them to live in (see the picture below).  The chicken tractor is a chicken house built on a trailer. Our Local Foods would like to acknowledge the incredible design of the chicken tractor by George and Celeste Albers of the “Green Grocer” on Wadmalaw Island (just outside of Charleston, SC).  The house has booms sticking out on each side with a shrimp net draped over it that hangs down to the ground.  This area is approximately 25′x35′ which is the area the chickens have to run around and feed in.  Each day, while the chickens are in the house, the trailer is moved a bit to a new spot, and the chickens are let out to roam around.  At night, the chickens go back in their house to roost, and egg laying is also done in the nesting areas.  The reason for moving the tractor each day is so there are plenty of new bugs and such for the chickens to find and eat. In a nice symbiotic way, the chickens also dig up the topsoil, add some fertilizer to the soil, and reduce the insect count.

And here’s a picture of one of the hens:

We will be harvesting eggs for the farmers markets at Daniel Island and Park Circle – so come visit us and get some fresh eggs!

Maria