Featured Products - Jericho Settlers Farm

Jericho Settlers’ Farm By Chris French Three of the fundamental principles for creating Sweet Clover Market include: supporting local family farms and Vermont artisans; having access to and providing healthy, wholesome products; and nurturing community relationships. To help foster these principles, we will contract with many local vendors to provide the Market with fresh, locally-grown and produced products as much as possible. The local focus provides broad access to information about food producers, while allowing the customer to cultivate a sense of connection and mutual support with those producers and places. Sweet Clover Market will also have an onsite butcher offering fresh cuts of the finest local beef, chicken, lamb and other Vermont farm-raised livestock.
	One of the farms on the list to provide meats and vegetables to us is Jericho Settlers’ Farm (JSF). “Partnering with Sweet Clover Market helps us provide for a broader community,” says Christa Alexander, co-owner of JSF. Christa says that Sweet Clover Market will play a great role in linking the community with local producers. She believes that making the public aware of what JSF has to offer is part of the educational process—it’s important when looking at where our food comes from and the impact that this has on the environment. “Being able to provide our neighbors, friends, and the community with what we grow, whether through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) memberships or via Sweet Clover Market, is a primary reason we farm.”
The farm consists of a couple of gardens, the hoophouse, the pigs, the chickens, the baby chicks, the lambs, perennial gardens, annual flowers, a couple of pear trees and some berry bushes! I KNOW gardening, and I can only imagine the amount of work involved in keeping this operation going. They also sell eggs, produce and jams, pickles and jellies from their farm stand at 22 Barber Farm Road in Jericho. AND, they are at the Mills Riverside Farmers’ Market in Jericho on Thursdays (3-6:30pm, through September) and the Shelburne Farmers’ Market on Saturdays (9am to noon, through September). Right now they have around 28 CSA members who pick up their weekly product at the farm. I asked Christa how much help she has, and she laughed. “I put in over 80 hours a week, and my mother helps me a lot. It’s a lot of work, but I enjoy it!” Christa says they are looking at hiring help for next year, possibly a summer intern or two. She and her partner Mark Fasching added another farmer to their operation last year: baby Asa, who, she hopes, will become an excellent weeder!
	Nearing the end of August, and yes, those cool nights are here, the harvest is reaching its peak with beans, heirloom tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, and more in full production. The garlic harvest is complete and the onions nearly so with yields very high this season and large bulb size. Still to come for the fall harvest are winter squash, pumpkins, fennel, celery root, carrots, beets, turnips, leeks, winter cabbage, many varieties of potatoes, and the fall greens of spinach, arugula, kale, mesclun, and lettuce. Tomatoes and peppers will continue to be available from their hoophouse into late October, assuming no freak cold snaps. They will soon harvest their fourth batch of broiler chickens, and always have fresh eggs available, as the layer hens are busy cleaning up pastures in search of bugs, grubs, and grass. “The pigs are doing a great job helping us to restore old pastures and they are growing steadily for market in October,” Christa points out. “The lambs are on track to reach a good size for market in September.“ Sweet Clover will sell pork, lamb, eggs, and selected veggies as well as any high quality surplus from their CSA operation.
The cold August nights seem a bit odd for this time of year, and Christa says that the whole growing season has been full of odd weather and has also thrown many challenges at them. They are looking forward to a bountiful fall harvest.
	For more information about Jericho Settlers' Farm you can check out their website at www.jerichosettlersfarm.com or e-mail jsfarm@gmavt.net with questions.

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