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Eat Local: Foster The Plant Cafe

Written by Lynzie Schulte Owner of Foster the Plant Café

Foster the Plant Cafe on Market Street in Potsdam opened in December of 2019. Our aim is to bring healthy, plant-based food options to the North Country community while maintaining our mission of environmental awareness, local sourcing, and highlighting other small business owners, artisans, and associations. We love to teach the community what kinds of food can be made with locally farmed items and how meals can be delicious and filling even when there are no animal products used. One of the menu items that we make year-round with local ingredients is our pesto. Our pesto veggie wrap consists of housemade pesto, zucchini, tomatoes, bell peppers, and lettuce. We love it when we can get all our veggies locally during peak harvest season, but we are able to make pesto all year long!

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May Fruition Showcase

We live in a vast rural county, larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island. In a place this spread out, sometimes it takes a while to know who is doing what. There’s a brand new way to learn more about agriculture in our area and the stories behind our area’s food businesses.

In addition to this blog, just launched in May 2021, the Extension Local Foods team is bringing the farmers and food businesses right to your computer screen with a new livestream called the Fruition Local Food Showcase. We are passionate about connecting consumers with the people who grow or sell food items available in St. Lawrence County.

The showcase features three new people every month, who have their chance in the spotlight for a 15 minute interview. Community members tune in on YouTube or Facebook, where it’s livestreamed and also saved as a recording to view later.  The program gives viewers a unique opportunity to learn directly from the people who run these businesses about what drives them, what’s new this season, and how to access and best use their products.

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Meet Your Farmer: Sugartree Village

Meet your Farmer is a series of in-depth stories about producers in St. Lawrence County. 

Michael Greer of Sugartree Village has a passion for maple syrup. What sets Michael apart from other small-scale maple producers is he set up his maple production behind his home in the Village of Potsdam and collects sap from the trees in his residential neighborhood. 

With permission from his neighbors, Michael taps trees on 28 properties in the village. He has as many as 450 taps, which he says is his human production limit, as he collects the sap by hand-pouring it into a 170 gallon steel collection tank in his truck.

Buckets filled with sap outside of Greer’s home

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