The cloud of pandemic continues to hang over all daily activities. Our sales at the Bellefonte Farmer’s Market will necessarily be changing to comply with PA Department of Agriculture guidelines for everyone’s safety. To begin the season, Cramer Farm will be offering all our products on a pre-order basis. Your order will be packaged and available for pick-up Saturday morning at the Gamble Mill parking lot. It won’t be the same market we all enjoy, but we are determined to have just as wide of a selection as we have in the past. Cramer’s will be trying our best again this year to be there for you. Hope we can count on your support. Visit the online store here: https://www.localline.ca/cramer-farm

If you’ve found your way to reading this, there’s a pretty good chance that you are interested in eating locally sourced food. Making the commitment to this usually means that you care about what you eat, where it comes from and how it was raised.

 Joining our CSA is just one of many options you have, but we’d like to think it is one of the most interesting enjoyable and authentic ways of doing so. Purchasing a CSA share almost always means that more of your diet will be fresh nutrient dense vegetables. The delivery arrives, usually picked and washed the day before, and you have 8-12 items to cook with that week. The varieties we grow are chosen for flavor and nutrition, not how well they ship across the country or keep on the supermarket shelf. This applies to carrots, tomatoes, melons and many others.

To consider where your food comes from can mean the environmental costs of growing in California desert climates and 3000 miles of trucking. But the flip side of that is buying local boosts the local economy. We learned at a recent local food summit that only 1% of money spent on food in Centre County, PA goes to local producers.

To care how one’s food is raised may be the most important consideration in choosing your local farmers. We welcome all customers to visit us to see and discuss our practices the first Saturday of every month. You be the certifier. The term sustainable agriculture is often used to describe our approach to growing. Author and poet Wendell Berry explains what that practice means much better than I could:

“It must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well. (“Nature as Measure” in What Are People For? 1990, 206-7)

We would sure like you to consider joining our CSA this season. It is great fun to share the garden’s bounty with family or friends from the first spring shoots of asparagus through the tomatoes of summer to the last frost sweetened crops of the fall. We’ll see to it that you know what fresh tastes like. The details of our program are listed under the CSA menu of the website. If you have any questions at all please don’t hesitate to email or call.

Diane, Lucy and Bruce Cramer

The new high tunnel is full of green stuff all through the winter. Some beds are overwintering crops that will start to grow again and be harvested early in the spring including carrots, spinach, onions, shallots, swiss chard and some baby kale.

The bed of beets looks beautiful but probably didn’t get quite large enough before cold weather stopped all growth. They won’t be tender enough for sale in the spring, so the chickens will be happy to eat them as winter greens. Win some, lose some-but waste nothing.

The Cramer’s are looking forward to going whole hog with the Berkshire Pigs. Our trial experience offering pork at market in fall 2016 got such a positive response that we will be expanding our offering this year.

Customers may purchase custom processed half or full shares as well as individual cuts processed and packaged under USDA inspection. Details still being finalized but if you’d like more imformation just send an email to Diane.

Red Ranger Broiler Chickens will also be available from the farm this year. Our experience is that we prefer this breed for both their health and flavor over the typical Cornish X Chicken raised for meat. Available after June 1st to both CSA and Farmers Market customers.

Red Raspberries are back on our grow list after several seasons off. We lost previous plantings to soil born disease but we hope to be picking again for our CSA members summer 2017.