Trevor’s Corner
Raising Pastured Poultry
Terms like free range and cage free can be quite confusing. Those terms are generally applied to laying hens, which are different from the meat birds known as broilers. Almost all meat poultry in the US is raised in broiler barns, generally in common configurations of 40 ft wide by 400 ft long, some longer. …
Read MoreThe Bees Have Arrived
This past Saturday Jason and Angie Bosler of Bosler’s Honey dropped off four hives at Wholesome Valley Farm.The hives were placed next to the future vegetable field. The honeybees, along with native pollinators will spend their summer pollinating the zucchini, melons, peppers, and tomatoes. The type of flowers that bees collect nectar from influence the…
Read MoreStarting from Seed
Spring is here and that means it’s time to start seeds for summer. Starting seeds indoors gives farmers and gardeners a head start on the season. In the hothouses right now we have tender spring greens, celery, onions, and cabbage. Soon we’ll have summer crops like tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers as well. Most of the…
Read MoreMaking Maple Syrup
It is Maple Syrup season. When the temperature rises above freezing during the day and drops below freezing at night, sap in trees starts to flow. This sap is made up of sugars, water, and nutrients that the tree stored during the summer. Many trees can be tapped to make syrup. Trees in the Birch,…
Read MoreRaising Pastured Hogs
Down at Wholesome Valley Farm the hogs we raise live most of their lives outside. Pasture raised pigs are allowed to root in the woods and pasture in the hunt for insects, nuts, and tubers. This allows our pigs to act like hogs (tear up the ground and make a mess!) and tillers that aerate…
Read MoreRaising Laying Hens
Sometimes we take for granted the schedule and activities around a farm. Our tours highlight some of the disconnects that can exist between our customers and us as producers. These are great moments as we find our customers always interested in deepening their understandings of the cycles that bring their food from our fields to…
Read MoreAdvice from an Older Farmer
When I started Fresh Fork Market I was 21 years old – arrogant and fearless. The trials and tribulations of a startup business are quite humbling. That is why I am grateful for the mentorship of the numerous small farmers we work with. One of the most enlightening pieces of advice I ever received was from one…
Read More2018 In Review
Fresh Fork Market has grown. When we launched in 2009, we only had 40 subscribers. Today that number is in the thousands. Our family of companies now includes a farm and a butcher shop: Wholesome Valley Farm and Ohio City Provisions. In 2018 alone we put over a million dollars back into our local economy.…
Read MoreHeritage Thanksgiving Turkeys
Thanksgiving — our favorite holiday of the year!– is still a few weeks away, but for our farmers,Thanksgiving is really the culmination of a year’s worth of planning and hard work, especially when breeding and raising heritage turkeys. Heritage turkeys are turkeys that can naturally reproduce their same offspring. Most commercial poultry breeds are cross-breeds…
Read MoreWhy Grass-fed
The fat from grass-grazed animals, either in the form of milk or meat, is one of the most efficient sources of these good fatty acids. Grass-fed beef is no exception: besides being higher in CLAs, you’ll notice in the color alone the mineralization of the meat, which is the result of a more mature animal…
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