Join us this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, join us for our incredibly large and juicy blackberries. Also, local sweetcorn, peaches, Shirot plums (those amazing little yellow ones we’ve had for years), and, of course, yellow and green squash.
Don’t forget our new summer hours at the farm: Friday, Saturday and Sundays from 10 am – 5 pm, and at the Shepherdstown Farmers’ Market Sundays from 9 – 1.
We’re opening the season with about the most perfect food found on our planet! BLUEBERRIES! And here’s why.
We’ve got lots of blueberries and yellow and green squash. Also, we’ve gotten some outstanding Eastern Shore sweetcorn that you always hope your friends will bring you back from the beach.
In the coming weeks we’ll have our usual abundance of peaches and blackberries, as well as the fresh farm produce people have come to expect from Ridgefield Farm.
Please make a note that our hours have changed. Until the fall, we will be open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 5 pm.
Also visit us at the Shepherdstown Farmers’ Market from 9 am to 1 pm on Sundays, in Shepherdstown, WV.
Thanks to Old Man Winter hanging on to every day he could, everyone around here has been working double time to get the farm ready for planting. The cold, the rain, the cold again, then the floods from the melted snow, then the wind…finally, we can do something outside. And, we’re already 3 weeks behind.
Apple trees are pruned, the flower and vegetable gardens are now prepared, and we’ve begun to plant what we can. Another 1200 Christmas trees just arrived, and they have to be planted right away, so that means finding a spot for them and preparing the soil.
The huge snow before Christmas crushed our high tunnel and everything in it, so we’re now erecting new one. It’s crucial to get it up again, because of course, it holds Ridgefield Farm’s Halloween International House of Panic. We were making a lot of progress until we discovered that we were missing parts, and that much of what we got was wrong. So we shifted gears again and went back to fertilizing and weeding.
Manuel has a couple of newcomers working with him in the fields this year, George and Ovi, and we’re delighted to have them on board.
The pick your own strawberries look to be fantastic this year. I can’t imagine how they survived the winter with several tons of snow piled on them for 3 months.
People who cut their own Christmas trees each year do so because they appreciate the freshness, the color and the unparalleled fragrance the tree brings to your home at the holidays. Equally important, though, is the fact that fresh trees hold their needles far longer than store-bought trees.
True story: in late May this year, a gentleman and his family had just finished picking strawberries at Ridgefield Farm, and as he was checking out, he made a point of telling me he had just thrown out the Christmas tree they’d cut from our farm last year. Naturally, I had to tell him I hoped it hadn’t been in their living room the whole time, and thankfully, it hadn’t. Nevertheless, he said that all the needles were still on the tree when they threw it out in May.
Now that’s a testimonial!
Judging from a random sampling of our customers, I’d have to say most people assume fir trees just grow naturally into lovely, conical Christmas trees. Truth be told, we spend much of the summer shearing West Virginia Balsam, Douglas, and Concolor Firs, so they’ll be perfect for the holidays. They can be pretty wild looking. Here are before and after shots of one such West Virginia Balsam, the hands down favorite at Ridgefield Farm.
Beautifully shorn Balsam Fir ready to be chosen and cut by a lucky family.
West Virginia Balsam Fir in need of a trim.
We ship lots of our apples and preserves all over the US, but today we filled an order that sent Pumpkin Butter to North Pole, Alaska!
Barb is going to have fun telling her grandchildren about that package.
Due to the constant rain on weekends in October, we’ve got a huge overabundance of pumpkins. Carry off as many as you physically can for only $10. Any size.
Popcorn, rescued from Berkeley County, WV.
Kelly, rescued on Capitol Hill
Those how have visited our farm know how much we treasure Kelly, our cockapoo and Popcorn, our Beagle mix. Both were rescued, and through some wondrous quirk of fate, both ended up being integral members of our family.
So we couldn’t be happier to host the Animal Welfare Society dog and cat adoptathon here at Ridgefield Farm during PumpkinFest on October 3. Several cats and dogs will be here looking for new homes from noon until 4pm.
Please join us and learn first-hand what others have said about the special gratitude pets who have been rescued and adopted show their new families.
Click here for more information about the Animal Welfare Society
Alan and Scott
Just in time for our opening of PumpkinFest Saturday, September 26, we have plenty of Jonagold and Empire apples. Jonagold, for those of you not in the know, is a combination of Jonathan and Golden Delicious and great for eating and cooking.
Empire was developed from Red Delicious and Macintosh and is another versatile apple.
We still have some Honeycrisp and Gala on hand, so there’s plenty of variety for everyone.
Since I was a little boy, I’ve loved Halloween and haunted houses. The really scary ones and the truly lame ones were all fond memories. During the heyday of my marketing career, I even had a client who asked me to help develop a haunted theme park. For years I visited the Halloween trade shows and met many of the industry leaders. It was so much fun to keep up with the new fright technology and the costumes, it scarcely felt like work. (The clients, on the other hand, not so much.)
For the past three or four years we’ve created our Friday and Saturday “Fright Nights.” Friday night is geared to be family friendly, with plenty of edginess to go around, but appropriate for younger kids. Saturday night is, as we say, NOT family night.
We couldn’t be happier our Fright Nights have become so popular with church groups, scouts, moms’ groups and other groups of all kinds.