If you live in upstate New York, come visit us at the Pepper Market this Saturday! We’ll have a great mix of Smock goods for sale (including letterpress holiday cards and our double-sided gift wrap!) and you’ll have the chance to support other local CNY designers. We hope to see you there!
If you love letterpress and live in the Syracuse area, stop by our shop this Thursday, November 29 from 4-7pm! We’ll have complimentary sweets and holiday stationery goods for sale, and we’re giving away a free gift when you spend $25 or more! We hope to see you there!
It’s not often we get to see what we eat outside of our homes and the grocery store. In September, a few of us had a chance to get up and personal with our peppers and onions during a tour of the beautiful Grindstone Farm in Pulaski, New York. Many Smock employees have CSA shares from Grindstone, and it was enlightening to get a good, hard look at what goes into creating our tasty, organic produce.
We spent a long time talking with Vic and Dick de Graff about what it’s like running a small organic farm in the snow belt of upstate New York, where snow comes early and often, and the local food movement is just catching on. They have adapted to the weather over the years by growing many of their vegetables in hoop houses, like the one featured above, in order to extend the growing season into November.
While Grindstone farm may look like an idyllic place to live, farming is anything but easy. One mistake, like forgetting to cover the lettuce before a potential frost, can ruin an entire crop for the rest of the year. As a farmer, your backyard is your home office, and there is always more work that should be done. But just like our love for creating beautiful, sustainable letterpress goes beyond the normal 9-5, the farmers at Grindstone choose this life because of a passion for growing and providing food for friends and neighbors, and because they want to spread the idea that feeding the world can happen one small plot of land at a time.
Interested in finding a farm like this near you? Check out localharvest.org for CSAs, U Pick Farms, Farmers Markets, Grocery Co-ops and more! Want to see more photos from our trip to Grindstone Farm & our CSA pick-up spot here at Bella Figura? Check out this slideshow!
Receive free gift wrapping (with our 100% post-consumer recycled gift wrap) + a free cute matching gift card with your message handwritten inside. All you need to do is purchase $25 from smockpaper.com and then plant a tree during checkout ($1 donation to American Forests). Smock, by the way, always matches tree donations, so if you plant a tree, we’ll plant a tree too. This promotion begins now and goes until Dec. 25. Here are some autumn photos to get you in the mood, taken at our local neighborhood park one frosty morning when the light was lovely and bright and the trees were all aflame.
