Turtle Bend Farm is a sustainable vegetable farm in Polk County, Georgia. Adam and Mecca Lowe are growing vegetables on approximately 7 acres of family farmland using ecological methods without the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides or herbicides. Our goal is to produce clean, healthy, fresh vegetables for our local communities while protecting and enhancing our local natural and social resources.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Harvest and going to Market





















Our summertime vegetables have finally started rolling in and we have been able to start providing naturally grown produce to our surrounding community. We first visited the Dallas Farmers Market and we have really enjoyed meeting folks there and sending them home with a couple of pounds of green beans, some tasty cucumbers or some colorful heirloom tomatoes! So far, we have the following items for sale from our farm: heirloom tomatoes, green, red and orange bell peppers, hot peppers, french-style green beans, regular bush snap beans, fresh basil, black-eyed peas, corn, pickling cucumbers, slicing cucumbers, lemon cucumbers, squash and zucchini. We have also been visiting the Cedartown farmers' market on Tuesdays- it's quite a bit slower but we have enjoyed getting to talk to folks and meet the other vendors. Finally, we visited the Powder Springs Farmers' Market yesterday. We met some really wonderful people from My Dad and Me Family Farm who produce vegetables, raw cow's milk, broiler meat chickens and homemade breads. Much of our time was spent getting to know these wonderful people. The market would have been better had it not been for a few produce vendors who were simply hocking stuff they had bought from a wholesaler. They sell the same produce you would find in a grocery store for dirt cheap and many consumers can't tell the difference. It is the worst thing for farmers like us who have worked so hard to produce clean, fresh, local food only to have somebody who has not sweated and worked undercut us. I challenge all of you reading this to ask the vendor if they grew it or where it came from- You can tell the farmer who has been working hard to bring you good food because they will be able to look you honestly in the eyes and tell you it came from their own hard work. Then you will know why it cost an extra dollar or two- because it is reflecting the true cost of food, keeping your local farmers in business, and it is going back into your own community. Ok, enough soap-boxing but we just had to vent about that. Please come out and say hello to us at any of these local markets: Peek's Park in Cedartown on Tuesdays from 6:30am-8:30am, Downtown Powder Springs on Thursdays from 4pm-8pm, and Downtown Dallas on Saturdays from 8am-noon! If you cannot make it to one of these markets and especially if you are Rockmart, please contact us and we will make arrangements so that you can buy some fresh, naturally grown produce from us. We follow organic standards but we are not certified- no synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides- and we are growing our crops from organic and heirloom seeds!

2 comments:

  1. Looks like a good plan to me, we are eating about every thing from the garden except meat,and if I see a deer in the garden that will change also.THe problem we have here is that it is to cool,we will have 45 degrees for the next two nights.Adrian

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  2. The Cedartown market needs to reevaluate their times. 2 hours only, that early in the morning, doesn't really give anyone much time to get there. We lived 2 blocks from the park prior to moving and were unable to actually make it there once. I heard this repeated among several others who wanted to go, just couldn't get there that early in the morning.

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