Fruition: Local Foods Blog

May 13, 2021Erica LaFountain

Meet the Local Foods Team: Erica LaFountain

What is your role on the local foods team?

I’m the Community Horticulture Educator, so I help county residents with gardening questions and skill-building through programming. I also coordinate a dedicated group of Master Gardener Volunteers who amplify this work, and I teach classes to the public as well as BOCES Ag Studies Academy students, NorthWind after-school students, and 4H.

How did you come to be in the North Country?

I consider my dad both a local and a back-to-the-lander. He left after college and returned to the North Country with a young family. A generation later I followed that same trajectory. I left the area for college in 2000 and returned with my partner and first child in 2013 after some years pursuing farming, community gardening, and cooperative living in Ithaca and Boston. The land prices here are a real draw and enabled my family to start an orchard and garden and to pasture goats and chickens. Raising my kids in the same special place that formed me has been a real gift. I believe the North Country forges resilient, resourceful, appreciative people.

May 5, 2021Lauren Olson

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

May 1, 2021Ken Kogut

How to Build a Raised Garden Bed with Optional Hoop Cover

Raised Beds are a wonderful way to garden, but there’s more to it than buying some wood to build a box and filling it with soil for your transplants and seeds; before you even begin the process of building a raised bed, here are some important considerations:

Orienting your raised bed: You will need a location that gets at least 6 to 8 hours of full sun. Placing it under trees guarantees failure since nearly all vegetables require ample sunshine. Additionally, never place your raised bed on the north side of a house or other building. The best location for a raised bed is on the south side of a house with the raised bed oriented east to west on its long axis.