Wooden Hill Farms

I just returned from Wooden Hill Farms. I returned with a grocery bag full of fresh, organic vegetables. Really nice ones, of course, because the farmers at Wooden Hill trained at the Cook CSA. An extension of the Rutgers university agricultural college, the Cook CSA is among the oldest and most well known organic farms hosted by an agricultural college in this country. In fact, the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) at Rutgers provided a model for the CSA movement throughout this country. Basically, this means that the farmers at Wooden Hill really know what they're doing AND what they're up against.

Here's one of their foes: it's the Colorado potato beetle, and it's totally gross. This is the adult form. The Colorado potato beetle, as the name suggests, through its own miraculous education, seeks out and somehow finds potato plants...and then it attempts to eat devour their leaves and reproduce its kind.

Here are a couple immature potato beetles. They have not hardened up yet. You can just squish them with your fingers. See all that munching they've done? Little bastards.

Anyway, here is a gorgeous "eight ball" squash:

but I don't mean to suggest that Wooden Hill grows nothing but cabbage and potatoes and squash. They don't. They grow all kinds of things, and all of their vegetables are beautiful. Cultivating just under two acres (it's their first season), Wooden Hill is technically a garden, but if my visit taught me anything, it taught that these are some dedicated organic farmers, and you can be sure that their fields will expand year after year.

Megan, their biggest horse