A New Winner, and a Reminder!!

Congratulations to our March Refer-A-Friend winner of a $10 MCLG gift certificate…

Keep those referrals coming! It’s simple – you let us know who referred you to the market, and we enter their name in our monthly drawing for a $10 MCLG gift certificate!!

We’ll be back next Tuesday, April 3rd, when we return after our one-week Easter Break!! :-)

Overtime for the game may be over...

Overtime for Kansas and Duke is history – thank goodness you’ve still got time to get your order in :-)

We will NOT reopen for orders next week!!

Pick-up will run as normal next Tuesday, March 27th, but the Market will not reopen that night!

We will take a ONE-WEEK break, and open back up Tue April 3rd, for pick-up on the 10th!!

We have local MILK!! :-)

Matthew and Mary Bayer, with their four children, have a lovely 400 acre farm, and have been milking since 2000. As a little boy Matthew fell in love with milking when he worked for a neighbor, and always wanted to start a dairy himself. What better way to enjoy working as a family together on the farm!

Last year, after touring other successful dairies that were bottling their own milk, the Bayer’s started their own creamery and became USDA inspected – a rigorous process that ensures quality and care!

I watched them working with their 12 year old son, and appreciated the efficiency and concern they had for their operation. Ready with answers and smiles, they were a delight to speak with and learn from.

This is good, whole creamline milk – with no cream removed, and NOT homogenized, so be sure to shake well!

What I probably love most about their milk? Since Tuesday is their bottling day, they’ll milk in the morning, bottle your orders, and deliver their products to our market all in the same day – less than 12 hours from the cow to your family?! How can you get more local or fresh than that?!

It was cute when they “warned” me before I tried the strawberry shake-up that it did have seeds in it, since they made it with real strawberries! I would’ve thought that was a perk :-)

And of course they also offer half gallons and gallons – and all four sizes of four varieties… Pure Whole White, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Orange Cream. And a shelf life of 17 days!

So many new additions to our ever-growing market – our little local community just keeps growing and embracing new families… I love it!

Sourdough Bread Baking Class!

Using wooden dough bowls (trays), registrants will work outside with her gorgeous, brick, wood-fired bake oven!

All participants in this intensive adult class will take home loaves of bread, dough, sourdough starter, and recipes at the end of the workshop.

Deborah Spencer, of 6635 StudeBaker “History in the Baking”, has over 10 years experience teaching baking, cooking, and preservation classes!

We're OPEN for orders with Stillhouse Maple Syrup!!!

Aged in their used whiskey barrels, this Ohio maple syrup with a touch of Staley rye whiskey is unforgettable…

When the Distillery hosted the Locavore Dinner in 2015, each guest had the privilege of taking home their own bottle of the Stillhouse Maple Syrup, after lacing their apple pie with it!

Talk about an incredible experience – their Syrup made that apple pie so memorable, I can taste it almost 3 years later.

Have you seen the new Herb Mix appropriately named “Your Mother’s Elderberry Syrup” kit from McGuffey Herb and Spice Co?

Bair-Trax Dairy is running a Special on their organically fed eggs again this week –
snatch them up while you can!

And you’ve got to love the Weekly Specials from Jeanne’s Garden – I was blown away when I saw for my own eyes her truly expansive gardens, where she grows so much of the fruits and veggies for her baked goods! That’s taking Local baking to the extreme!

Welcome our Newest Vendor!!

From the Perfect Burn of their Sweet Habanero mustard to the No Heat Zone of their Sweet Deli recipe, they’ve got something for every palate!

Whether you make some killer deviled eggs, a classic sandwich, or pair it with the perfect pretzel, possibilities are endless!

Bad Seed Mustard Company started out like any other condiment business; in the kitchen! Sam’s Grandfather Richard Powell came across a recipe for an Old Fashioned Sweet and Hot Mustard back in 1981 while traveling the state of Ohio as an Insurance Adjuster. He brought the recipe home to Springfield Ohio, and Grandmother Phyllis would spend the next 5 years fine-tuning and correcting the recipe so that is was just right.

“The project has quickly grown into a small business, one I know my Grandmother would be proud of. Her culinary passion extended beyond the food she plated, it encompassed even the condiments that complemented her dishes. Bad Seed Mustard Company continues this passion, providing the World’s Most Versatile Mustards!”

New updates!

And if you haven’t checked it out before, go to the Our Growers tab – the map that shows just how truly local we are is now available!

Less than three hours until market closes for the week! :-)

We are OPEN for orders with a New Featured Vendor!!

As we near the end of the Maple Syrup run for this season, it’s only fitting to feature Sugar Grove Maple Products tonight!!

If Braden Fisher is cooking down his sap to produce maple syrup when you step out of your car at Sugar Grove Maple Products, you’ll think you walked into a candy kitchen – the cooking maple syrup smells so rich, and so sweet, you can almost taste it. I was instantly sorry we didn’t have more maple trees on our own farm, or a fresh batch of pancakes!

And I was shocked by his infrastructure… the romanticized picture in my mind was of old-fashioned buckets on the trees collecting sap, and a simple pan heated with woodfire, not the super-efficient vacuum tubing collection system through the trees and sleek, ultra-modern, diesel-powered evaporator and reverse osmosis separator he could adjust with the touch of a button. With reverse osmosis, he can remove 80% of the water from the sap before he ever begins to cook it into syrup… the essence of efficiency!

When he said this had been a hobby for twelve years, I wanted to laugh – other people call collecting stamps, reading, or knitting a hobby, not this kind of massive annual undertaking. Collecting and processing 20,000 gallons of sap from 1,000 trees? I think we’re all glad Braden is so committed to his “hobby”!

At the family farm stand on State Route 41 just west of Troy, it all began when Braden, then in high school, learned the art of maple sugaring from his cousin in Indiana. With a convenient location on a high-traffic road, and more than a little determination, his first year saw him collecting sap with buckets, stoking his fire with wood, and cooking down the sap in a 2 foot by 5 foot pan… and one year the old-fashioned way was enough! Enter a new evaporator, the tubing pipeline to collect the sap from the trees, and Braden was on his way to becoming the area’s go-to maple syrup producer!

When I visited recently to see his process in action, he was constantly and capably working, fine-tuning this, adjusting that, moving here and there… it was all I could do to be relatively quiet (believe me, a herculean feat), so floored I was by the art unfolding before my eyes that I asked only one million questions. It cracked me up that he was so calm and nonchalant about what to me was the neatest thing I’d see in some time.

Like so many agricultural productions, the maple syrup process is severely affected by the weather – changes in barometric pressure can fluctuate daily or hourly, and hinder production. The warm weather we’ve enjoyed recently is scary to the maple syrup producer, as just the right mix of warm days and below freezing nights allow for optimum yield. This season Braden says the run started two weeks earlier than normal, but it won’t be until the trees bud out and the run is finished that he’ll be able to know whether this was a great syrup season or not. So much thought, planning and care goes into Braden’s syrup, and you can taste not only the quality but the effort it’s production demands.

You couldn’t find a lovelier personality than his mother, Marilyn, who is a familiar face both at the Downtown Troy farmers market in the summer with both Braden’s syrup and the scrumptious sweets she makes with, of course, maple!

Braden attracts many customers to Miami County Locally Grown… We are undoubtedly fortunate to be in an area able to support a plethora of delicious, quality products… Home Grown Great, indeed!

A New Winner, and Tasty Samples!

Congratulations to February’s Refer-A-Friend winner of a $10 MCLG gift certificate…

Keep those referrals coming! It’s simple – you let us know who referred you to the market, and we enter their name in our monthly drawing for a $10 MCLG gift certificate!!

And everyone coming to pick-up on Tuesday is in for a treat -

Covington Cheese Co. will be on hand with samples of their artisan raw milk cheeses! Yum!