Who's At The Farmers' Market This Week?

The Sally Frank's Farmers' Market has a new addition: Wright-Locke Farm, a fully certified organic farm located in Winchester. This is the third week that they bring their produce to Melrose. 

Locally grown produce has many advantages over supermarket imports: if you buy locally, you cut out long transit times and fuel consumption, you support small businesses, the produce is always fresh (picked in the morning of market day) and seasonal (no apples in July, no spring greens in September). This gives you actually a bigger variety in your diet, because you will try different vegetables that you would not consider at the supermarket, where you probably go for your well known produce. There might be the occasional beetle in your lettuce and maybe the odd snail on your potatoes, but that only means that they are fresh and untreated by chemicals. Just think about the bleachy smell you sometimes get opening a bag of supermarket carrots!

And if this locally grown produce is also certified organic, you double the benefits. No chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or insecticides, no GMO. A lot of care and work and science goes into growing organically, it is a very delicate process to balance the needs of the land, and it is stringently controlled by Baystate Organic Certifiers according to standards set by the USDA. 

This week's produce includes various kinds of tomatoes, fall greens like kale, cucumbers, squash, raspberries, and many more.

Wright-Locke Farm also offers organic eggs. If you ever wondered about the greenish or blueish eggs: these come from Araucana chicken, who have either blueish, greenish or yellowish feet. The eggs each hen lays corresponds to the color of their feet! Why buy organic eggs when you can find a dozen at the supermarket for a dollar and a quarter? Well, just try them! Organic eggs from free-range chicken have a deep yellow yolk full of nutrients, and the flavor doesn't even come near the one's from a chicken farm, where the animals are kept in tiny cages in inhumane conditions. What is fed to the chickens and how they are allowed to live is reflected in the flavor of their eggs.

You can also order tender farm-raised lamb by either signing up at their market stand, or going to the website.

If you prefer to pick your own raspberries: the fields are open now for picking! Wright-Locke is not far from Melrose, it is worth a visit. Farming started on the property as early as 1638, and crops are still being grown and sold in 2012. You enter by a 1827 Barn, greeted by 3 different kinds of heirloom chickens, and are taken back to an earlier agricultural time when horse drawn wagons and plows were the tools of the farming trade. Most of these orginal wagons and tools, left in place as if they were just used last week, can be seen in the Barn. A nice trip to do with your children!