If you live in Asheville, if you've ever been to Asheville, if you've heard anything about
Asheville; you probably know that things like sustainability, local produce, local farms,
farm-to-table produce, farm-to-table restaurants are huge in Asheville.
That is why I wanted to talk about Asheville farms, not just talk about them, but take
you on an actual farm tour.
I'm so excited!
Hi.
My name is Elena Kovrigin.
I am a local realtor in Asheville, North Carolina.
On this channel, I educate buyers and sellers about real estate and share videos about Asheville,
and what it's like to live in Asheville.
So, if it's your first time on my channel, consider clicking that subscribe button so
that you don't miss another video.
And I create them weekly.
One of the best ways to learn about Asheville farms is to go to ASAP Connections Annual
Farm Tour.
ASAP Connections stands for Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project.
And here's your first test question: How do you pronounce this word?
A. Appa-LATCH-uh B. Appa-LAY-shuh.
Put your answer in the comments, A or B, and if you have absolutely no idea, check out
this video.
Now, to learn more about ASAP Connections and what they do, check out their website
asapconnections.org.
Now that all housekeeping is done, let's go on an actual tour.
Our first stop is Venezia Dream Farm, and it's where they grow alpacas and use their...
fibers to make all kinds of stuff.
Weather is not cooperating, it's raining.
So, all the alpacas... inside.
We're not going to be able to see them, but we're going to go inside and ... watch some
demonstration.
This farm specializes in farm-to-fabric.
Pretty cool.
A soft rope to hold their feet, and a person holds their head down.
The reason we restrain them is so that we can safely use our electric shears to give
them a shave right at the skin line.
What comes out the back we call the cloud.
It's basically just untangled, individual hairs.
Opened, but it's the cloud.
Olden times and modern times and craft fairs, you probably see people carding fiber.
They want to use brushes to organize the fibers to get them all going more or less in the
same direction for you.
This is an electric carder, and as you can see, the big wheel is the brush.
It draws the fiber in on this end, and brushes it out onto the big wheel there.
It's doing this same thing.
It's taking fiber and twisting the fibers together.[crosstalk 00:03:10]
Today is a much better weather for farm touring and we came to Franny's Farm.
She's just got a combination of raised bed vegetable gardens, and edible gardens.
She has livestock, goats, and Heritage Farm chickens.
She does raise Hemp here.
She has events here, so, if you'll notice there's a nice beautiful barn.
When you go inside its really pretty and spacious.
People get married here.
She has an air BNB on the second floor.
Some camp grounds up the mountain, there's some community buildings and some log cabins
and a couple places for tents... several places.
All right, so we got our stickers... and there.
All right, lets tour this farm.
This is living micro greens so you cut it as you go and add to all your favorite dishes.
Those are duck eggs right there.
Duck eggs.
Yes ma'am.
[inaudible] We sell the lotion for 50 and then I've got
three different sizes of the massage oil.
Okay. (music playing)
So each farm has either a demonstration of some sort, or they sell something you can
buy.
Produce or whatever they make.
And of course, activities for kids, and I am ... I'm afraid, what's going to come out
of this activity for kids because its pretty dirty... but happy, so happy kid.
Elena Kovrigin: Here is the result of going down those slides.
Our next stop is Greenshine Farmers, all the way in Marshall.
Our nursery greenhouse, and we've got tomato plants inter planted with cucumbers.
You see the way we are interlacing our tomato plants, we're trying to make them grow vertical.
So we got the cucumbers on the other side, which is kind of experimental but we are just
going to continually train them up.
We got our hemps... we got our hemp starts.
So these are all grown from seeds.
These are feminized seeds, so these are all female plants, or at least they should be.
We do all of our hemp plants down the two center rows which will give them about three
feet on either side, and about ten feet or so to grow.
Then down here we got all of our lettuce seedlings.
If you notice, we are doing them in...
This is called a paper pot trays.
So you can see here, they are kind of all like a little honeycomb structure.
They are all just chained together in these little cardboard chains.
The great thing about that is it is very quick to seed and its very quick to transplant.
If you're getting stuff from California, it's going to be a week old by the time you get
here and it has a two week shelf life.
Are stuff you are getting within 48 hours every time.
So, salad greens have really been our niche.
We do everything.
Pre-washed.
Pre-mixed.
So summer months we are doing a lot of lettuce because that just holds up well to the heat.
In the fall... in the spring and the fall we will do stuff like spinach, arugula, kale,
Azana, ruby streaks... but in the summer the flea beetles are really bad and we're not
spraying anything.
We really found that... to get like maximum shelf life, and to get a really good leaf,
you want them to be fully hydrated before you harvest.
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
If you harvest and they are dry, they're almost going to be like feathery.
They're just not going to last.
So what can... somebody in Nashville find your produce?
Oh yeah, yeah.
We are at Hoppy and Co., Fresh Broad Co-Op., West Village Market, Roots and Fruits.
We're also with a couple of distributors, Mother Earth Food, Mountain Food Products
and then we sell to several high end restaurants in downtown.
Rhubarb... the Rhubarb is great, I think they are probably one of the top restaurants in
Asheville- Farm-to-table kind of?
Oh they are so farm-to-table.
Yeah.
Chestnut, Po sana all really, really great chef's.
They really try to support local and they do some incredible stuff.