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Great Country Farms

Community Supported Agriculture, CSA, Produce Farm, U-Pick, Field Trips in Loudoun County, VA

It’s Apple & Pumpkin Picking Season!

Open Weekdays 9am-5pm; ' til 6pm Sat. & Sun.
Advance Tickets Required for Sat & Sun Visits
Admission: See our Contact Page for Rates

18780 Foggy Bottom Rd, Bluemont, VA 20135

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We are Here ~ Farming for your Family!

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Loudoun Local farm fresh produce starts in our Greenhouse

Farmer Mark Dewey gets some help from farm dog, Sandy, watering the green house.

We are all finding new ways to shop, cook, entertain, connect and cope in the light of COVID-19.  One colleague encouraged, “Put down the phone and write.” That has inspired me to pick up the pen and share with you, our Pick your Own and CSA Community, the latest from Great Country Farms.

First and foremost, we are HERE and thankful to be able to support our community with wholesome, nutritious, food grown on this land that we are blessed to steward here in Loudoun County, VA.  This time of uncertainty is challenging for all of us and something none of us anticipated.

As farmers, we regularly have to cope with the uncertainties Mother Nature sends our way – be it frost, raccoons eating all the corn the day before we pick it, too much rain, too little rain or beavers cutting down 300 apple trees overnight as the tireless engineers they were made to be.  COVID-19 is one uncertainty we didn’t see coming but we are steadfast in our planting and plans to grow food for our community and we are here for you and your family. 

Here’s a quick snapshot of how we are pivoting to provide:

  •         We have purchased more seed, more onion sets and more potatoes to step up our spring plantings to help meet the needs for local food. 
  •         Our farmhands are coming into work each day to build our soil, plant the seedlings and nurture the seeds in the green house.  Our regenerative farming is in high gear!
  •         We have stepped up our creativity and computer savvy and are now offering online market ordering and curbside pick-up at the Farm Market. 
  •         We are working with other local farms such as Audley Farm and Baker’s Pork, to bring in more eggs, ground beef, pork and chicken for online purchase.
  •         UPDATE 4.15.20:  GCF Harvest Box CSA Shares are SOLD OUT!  Thank you all for your support. We are evaluating the demand to offer more shares.  If you would be interested in purchasing a 20-week subscription, please join our wait list and you will be the first to know if we open up more shares for the 2020 season.

It is our goal to ensure that the time after this crisis is filled with good food, family fun on the farm, and deeper connections with our community & neighbors.   When your family savors a meal from our farm at your table, you connect with the soil, the seeds, the environment, our farmhand team and our family.  We are honored to be your farmers! We thank you and send you a big “KALE YEAH!”

Peace & Pick Your Own,

Kate Zurschmeide, Founding Family

Kale for Dinner!

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Here are two easy ways to use the green kale you just brought home.

Braise it.

Heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a stock pot. When it starts to shimmer, add one diced yellow onion. Fry the onion for three or four minutes while you prep the kale. Note: this kale is clean as a whistle, so there’s no reason to wash it, and if you’re braising it, there’s no reason to take the ribs out either. Just chop it into bite-sized pieces, and then add about four cups of it to the stock pot. Add a teaspoon of salt, and then stir it around with the onion until it starts to wilt. Put the lid on the pot and let it steam for three or four minutes. Then serve it as a stand-alone side. It’s delicious with pinto beans.

Make a fresh kale salad.

Hold each leaf from the bottom of the stem and strip off the curly part. If the stem breaks half way up, you can leave that part. When your salad bowl is mostly full, sprinkle about half a teaspoon of coarse salt over the kale and massage it with both hands. Squeeze it about 25 times. Then add a stalk of chopped celery, a couple of chopped green onions, half a cup of dried cranberries, and half a cup of toasted almonds. For dressing, whisk together two tablespoons olive oil, two tablespoons high-quality balsamic vinegar (the kind that’s dark and thick and costs enough to not be cheap), one tablespoon real maple syrup, half a teaspoon of salt, and a little black pepper.

Many variations are possible, in both the dressing and the salad. I just try to strike a balance between bitter and sweet.

Why Drink Apple Cider Vinegar?

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Why Drink Apple Cider Vinegar?

  1. It lowers your blood sugar, decreasing your risk for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
  2. It turbo-charges the energy centers in your cells, your mitochondria.
  3. It nourishes the bacteria in your microbiome.
  4. It helps you think better.
  5. It boosts good cholesterol.

Learn more here from Dr. Mercola.

Microbiome Is Our Inner Soil

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In our last post, we concluded that when soil is healthy, plants and microbes dwell in symbiosis which produces high concentrations of the nutrients both need to thrive. Well, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the same relationship exists between people and the microbes that live in our digestive tract.

   Ironically, however, the human species seems hell-bent on destroying those microbes, or at least reducing their numbers. One fundamental law of nature is that biodiversity is good, but modern culture seems to be at war with biodiversity. Most industrial agriculture functions on the principle of anti-diversity: single crops grown from genetically homogenous seed in soil rendered sterile by industrial grade antibiotics. And industrial medicine seems to work on the cleanliness principle as well: in 2016, the number of antibiotic prescriptions written in America corresponded to five out of ever six people in the country, and nearly a third of those were demonstrably unnecessary. We believe that cleaner is better, even though that may not be true.

   It’s becoming clear that fighting bacteria is both futile and wrong-headed. It’s futile because within any given person, non-human cells out-number human cells by a factor of 1.3, and the number of non-human species living within a single person is comparable to the number of individual people living in one large city. And it’s wrong-headed for the same reason it would be crazy for a city to attack its own population. Sure: some people in town are deadbeats who pee in the pool and shoplift candy bars, but that doesn’t mean you fumigate the village with mustard gas.

   We’re learning, for example, that some nutrients that play crucial roles in human health are produced only by the non-human species living in our gut, including three amino acids required to make the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. What’s more, many of those species appear to communicate with our human cells in ways that tell our DNA what kinds of proteins to manufacture. So in a real sense, the bacteria we’re fighting actually makes us who we are.

   As Dr. Zack Bush says, we should stop thinking of bacteria as invaders and realize that this space is more theirs than ours. We should thank them for letting us stay.

   One way to encourage that thought shift is to deliberately cultivate the growth of bacteria in our bodies, especially our digestive tracts, which do far more than process food. In our next post we’ll talk about things we’re doing on the farm to help bacteria grow inside us.

Strawberries — Watch out for Pesticides!

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The best reason to eat our strawberries is taste — once you try the real thing, it’s hard to go back to grocery store berries. But you might also consider this: industrial berries tend to be soaked with chemicals. In 2015 the Environmental Working Group reported that industrial growers in California use up to 300 pounds of pesticide per acre of plants. By comparison, sweet corn usually gets 5 pounds per acre.

Testing conducted by the US Department of Agriculture in 2015 and 2016 revealed an average of eight different kinds of pesticide per strawberry sample, compared with an average of two for most produce. “Ninety-nine percent of the samples tested had detectable levels of at least one pesticide,” according to the website Mercola,  “and 1 in 5 samples had residues of 10 or more chemicals. The most contaminated sample had 22.”

The USDA study turned up 81 different pesticides in the samples from growers in the U.S., Mexico, and the Netherlands, including carbendazim, a hormone-disrupting fungicide linked to male reproductive damage, and bifenthrin, a pyrethroid insecticide classified as a possible human carcinogen. Mercola reports that “40 of the 1,174 samples contained pesticides that are actually illegal for use on strawberries.” 

And even the organic label may not be a safeguard against chemical infusion. That’s because the standards for organic certification apply only to the practices of the certified grower, not to the practices of nurseries where he or she may buy their starter plants — and most nurseries sterilize their soil with fumigants before planting.

So the best way to avoid consuming a chemical cocktail with every berry is to know the story of every berry you put in your mouth.

Come on out to the farm, and we’ll tell you the story of our berries. They’re clean — free of pesticides unless some infestation forces us to intervene, on which case we’ll let you know.

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