Boalsburg Farmers Market – Boalsburg, PA by Patty

Tuesday, September 4. We spent our afternoon at the Boalsburg Farmers Market with our friends from the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and lots of folks who were lining up for free samples of local pie. It was a great way to get people to come over and check out our bus and our materials. And the pie was great too (we had to have some samples while we manned our table…)

I’ve been to lots of farmers markets in my time and this one was very nice for a couple of reasons. First, they had live music with a keyboard player who took requests, but made you sing along with him. And the other was the “Heirloom by the Hour” contest that the folks from New Farm magazine organized. They conducted taste tests of different varieties of heirloom tomatoes all afternoon, with a different line-up every half-hour. They are going to tally the results and share them with farmers as a way to help them plan what varieties of tomatoes to plant. Besides the fact that I ate a disturbing number of samples and that they were really really good, the cool thing was the sheer number of varieties of heirloom tomatoes and the crazy names they have. Just in case you don’t believe me, here’s the list:

Brandywine
Garden Peach
Jane Flammee
Leonardo
German Johnson
Black from Tula
Hughes
Nebraska Wedding
Goldie
Watermelon Beefsteak
Permission
Aunt Lizzie
Cherokee Green
Evergreen
Speckled Roman
Black Russian
Coppa
Teddy Bear
Lucky Cross
German Red Strawberry
Great White
Black Prince
Kellogg’s Breakfast
Arkansas Traveler
Black Pineapple
Federle
Verna Orange
Anna Russia
Tangerine
Prudens Purple
Striped Orange
Pink Paulina
Carbon
Paul Robeson
Croatian Heart

Article Tag(s):

If you are interested in commenting on this blog, please go to our forum...