My dad works very closely with Organically Grown Company (you can find his produce sometimes under the Andersen Organics label, and other times under the Ladybug label) and while I was home for the summer I had the chance to attend a farm tour and dinner OGC was hosting for buyers like Whole Foods. The goal here is to introduce grocery store representatives (and other buyers) to the farmers who grow the produce they are buying, in the hope that a strong relationship will develop and the buyers will continue to use OGC in the future. It’s also great for places like Whole Foods because they can talk about how they know the farmer who grows your onions, potatoes, or carrots personally.

In the picture on the right you can see a circle. I think in some places they might be called by a different name? We call them that because they are planted in the ground on one end, and move around the field in a circle, spraying the crops as they go.

Confession: I didn’t know asparagus grows in the ground like this! It’s not like I thought it grows on trees or bushes, but I guess I had never thought about it. I tend to only know things about the plants my dad grows, or the plants that grew in the fields surrounding our house growing up (like alfalfa and field corn).

This is the man who grew the alfalfa. He owns the farm with his brother.

This is NOT alfalfa growing out of the ground. The guy in the hat in the middle of the far right photo above? He staged this shot to be funny .

These are my dad’s onions.

I didn’t know I’d be going out into the field, and I wasn’t wearing the most practical shoes. I’m a farm girl though, so I made it work.

See how straight those lines are? That’s a source of pride for farmers (they drive around checking out other fields to see how straight the rows are ).

After the asparagus and onions, we went out into a potato field. The same guys who grew the asparagus grew the potatoes too.

The potatoes were still really tiny. I heard the Whole Foods guy say he was impressed though, he liked how uniform they all were in size.

After the farm tours were over I stopped by to pick up the baby from my grandma’s house and we went to dinner at the house of a farmer who grows with my dad.

In the middle you can see my dad’s right hand man on the farm. My dad runs both a farm, and a business, and he really needs men like this one to help everything run smoothly.

Our dinner was prepared using local, seasonal ingredients (some of them heirloom varieties grown by the host) by a professional chef brought in for the evening. I would have paid a lot of money for a meal like that!

Emmer is something I’ve never had before, and I really want to find more of it and start using it in the future.

After dinner was over, the hosts turned on some Latino music and started dancing on the porch. It was absolutely magical, and I realized that this is the life I want. A porch, a house, dancing with my kids as the sun goes down.

Break it down little one.