Winter Market Season is Coming!

The winter farmers market season is coming, and some of our vendors will be selling during the later fall and winter season at the following markets:

Nottingham Farmers' Market:  2nd Sunday of each month, November through March, Nottingham Community Center, 139 Stage Rd. (Rt. 152)
   
Newmarket Farmers Market: October 6 and 30, November 3 and 17, December 1 and 15, January 5 and 19, February 2 and 16, March 2 and 16, April 6 and 20  newmarketfarmersmarketATgmail.com

We don't have to give up our fresh local products just because summer is over!

Giant heirloom tomatoes

Sanborn Mills Farm had the most amazing huge heirloom tomatoes at the market last week!  To give you an idea of the size, we put an iPhone in the picture as a comparison.

Organics have no advantages? Wait a minute...

Did you hear about the study that says organic food isn't really any better for you than the other stuff?  Well, here's some more information you need to know before you stop looking for organic food at your supermarket or your farmers market.

In this article the author only looks at pesticide exposure:

In short, the Stanford study seriously underplays the benefit of going organic to avoid pesticide traces, especially for vulnerable populations like pregnant women and kids. In a future post, I'll show why it does the same for exposure to antibiotic-resistant pathogens in meat, and doesn't give organic its due with regard to nutritional benefits.

Future articles will look at nutritional values and the affects of antibiotics.  Always do your homework when scientific studies make headlines.  

 

Apples!

The NH Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food shared a beautiful picture of apples this morning.  They're early, as all our crops have been this year, with such a warm spring and summer.  But they sure are beautiful and tasty looking.  Apple pie, anyone?

Farmers and climate change

Because we in NH are just coming back to agriculture, perhaps there is less resistance to overcome when talking about climate change to farmers.  But in the west where farming has been the main "industry" for over a century, changing thinking is not so easy.  Certainly the awful drought there now is a hard way to learn.  So how can we talk to farmers, who work so hard and are so subject to the vagaries of weather and the climate, about this issue?  Here are some ideas.

How to freeze tomatoes

The University of Maine Cooperative Extension has a great short video on how to easily freeze tomatoes.  For those of us who don't can, this can be a great way to preserve some of the seeming millions of tomatoes we have this year.

Climate change and food supplies

Most Americans seem to have been convinced by this year's drought and fires that the planet is warming, and fast.  Now we need to think about how these changes in our climate will affect our food supplies.  And we better start asking schools like our UNH to work on it.  That's one of the things that our public universities do very well, and have been doing for a long, long time.

And it's another reason to support our local farmers.  Small farms close by can adapt to climate change much better than enormous farms far away.  Love your farmer, s/he's going to be an important person in the not so distant future.

This article was part of the weekly e-mail from the American Meteorological Society.