Pennington Farms- Grants Pass, OR by Diane

August 7, 2007

After the market, we went to Grants Pass to visit Pennington Farms, a sustainable berry farm and bakery. The whole Pennington family work togehter to produce a variety of jams and baked goods from berries on the farm, which they sell in their renovated barn. (They also sell berries when in season.) They're not certified organic but use sustainable techniques on their 90-acre farm that arguably could be beyond organic.

Sam Pennington was our host, and treated us all to a slice of Olallie berry mini-slab pie. huh? I hear you ask, what in the world is an olallie? Well, it's a blackberry cross fruit - it tasted to me like a cross between blueberry and blackberry.

And the pie - I promised myself I'd have one bite to be polite but ended up eating almost the whole huge piece. And to top our tour off, we walked away with bags full of jams, including peach conserve, marionberry jam, tayberry jam, nectarine jam, peach apricot, raspberry preserves, fig conserve, apple butter, and boysenberry jam.

So far, we've only opened the peach conserves, and if that's any indication, we've got some amazing sustainable jams ahead of us!

I do think, though, that I need to find out the difference between a jam, preserve, conserve and butter. It all simply tastes good to me!

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