OPEN HOUSE MARKET CHITCHAT

And now a word for those of you who wish to place orders this week . . . .

As you know the majority of our Market Growers are smaller farms dedicated to producing the highest quality foods. Some will be present at Open House, some will not! So if you want lemon grass from Bain Home Gardens or microgreens from Smart Doc Resources, be sure to order them! Online ordering ensures first pick of each week’s products.

Order Pickup will take place at the Market Shed from 1 pm – 2:30 pm on Thursday, December 6. There will be no Daleville or Enterprise deliveries this week. We invite our friends from those areas to visit us at Open House. If you can’t arrive between 1 pm -2:30 pm to pick up an order because of work or other responsibilities, please send a message to marketatdothan@gmail.com so we can arrange something satisfactory for you.

Market at Dothan will continue our normal schedule with this year’s last pickup taking place on December 21. Then we will be closed for two weeks. The next order cycle will start on January 5 with the new year’s first pickup date being Friday, January 11, 2019.

THIS WEEK’S GROWER NOTES

We have the best Growers in the Wiregrass! Please learn more about them on our Grower Page.

AVALON FARMS: Taking inventory and checking it twice, getting ready for the Christmas Open House. Some of you may not be familiar with our “jarred stuff”. On the savory side we have garlic salt, rosemary salt and an herbed brine. This year we added these savory options to utilize herbs we were growing. Our eldest is a chef and pointed us in this direction and helped us with recipes that have a wide appeal. Not too fancy, but, oh so flavorful!

On the sweet side we have 3 jams; ginger pear, pear honey and sassy apricot. Sassy apricot is NOT your grandma’s jam. This is an apricot jam married to habanero pepper jelly! It is a heavenly combination of bright fruity flavor with a warm pepper finish.  Pair it with goat cheese for an amazing appetizer. Use as a sassy condiment for pork or chicken.

We still have several whole chickens, livers, gizzards, feet and hearts available now. We’ll be processing more next weekend. If you would like them unfrozen contact me at Avalon Farms to make arrangements to pick them up on farm. Put “Avalon Farms, Kinston” in Google Maps and it will take you straight to us.

BAIN HOME GARDENS: Marketeers,
    We hope you are all tucked away warm and dry on this wet Saturday afternoon. Admittedly, we are doing nothing. That’s right! It’s been an extremely rollercoaster kind of a week! Taking time to relax & recuperate with the people whom we love most in this world, each other, is a welcome change of venue.   

  Thanks to all who tuned into our Lemongrass video! Who knew so many of you loved Lemongrass! Thanks Virginia Schafer for sharing your Coconut Lemongrass recipe. We will share another video when we make it!
    Our little community of market supporters is growing! Thanks to all of the new supporters and special thanks to all you longtime loyal supporters! Our shared love of clean & healthy eating brought us together but it is your loyalty that keeps us together.
    We love sharing our adventures with you. What is more, we love hearing from you! Follow us on Facebook, Webpage , or Instagram for more gardening fun – from our family to yours!

HAWKINS HOMESTEAD: Hello Market Friends,

Thank you to everyone who tuned in for our big announcement on Cyber Monday! If you missed it, don’t worry it’s still up on our Facebook page, so feel free to check it out.

As promised we want to speak to you this week about “no added hormones.”
So what does that even mean? Why would poultry be labeled as having no added hormones?

FACT: It’s illegal in the United States for poultry to be given hormones. Whenever these labels are placed on poultry, it is then required for them to say something to the effect of how the use of hormones isn’t allowed in poultry. There is usually a star or a marker for you to read and follow the fine print.

So why the label? Simply put, it’s because the public assumes that all grocery store meat is produced under the same guidelines. But that’s not the case. And there’s no getting around that part of it is marketing strategy. (edited)

I will be the first to tell you that before researching this we had our chickens labeled as steroid free, but as we became educated we realized this was not necessary because of the laws governing chicken in the United States.  

I know what else you’re thinking….why the super chickens? You know those whose legs are huge and the chicken breast is bigger than the entire chicken. It’s called confinement and targeted nutrition. Remember from our last post, chickens are omnivores. They will eat just about anything they can find or are given. Let’s illustrate it this way. If a chicken is housed with 20,000 of its friends, given a diet that mostly consists of genetically modified corn, and they don’t have much if any room to move around, they can be marketed and labeled as “vegetarian fed” with “no added hormones.” Is that what you want to eat and feed your family?!?! NOPE! That is not for us! I’m sure that that is not for any of you either, or else you wouldn’t be here!

In the end we just want you to be educated. Anyone can slaughter a chicken and sell it. They can use creative marketing that looks like something you want, but the facts are that not everything that looks good, is!

Since the Market pick up is on Thursday this week, we will be sitting this one out, but we hope you will read our blog next time when we will tackle what “cage free” labeling means. See you then.

Editors note, This is the poultry industry’s position on the issue if you wish to examine their take on hormone labeling.