Get Your Seacoast Harvest Guide

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The guide includes a listing of the farms, orchards, and vineyards in Rockingham, Strafford, and York Counties as well as a map of the region's twenty farmers' markets and a harvest calendar to help consumers know what is in season and available from their local farms.

Seacoast Harvest was first published last year as A Local Foods Resource Guide and included 52 local farms. This year's updated version has a new name, a new look, and over 100 farms.

The guide will be available at the Portsmouth Farmers' Market as well as other area farmers' markets and farm stands. The official release of the guide will be on July 13 at Slow Food Seacoast's Down on the Farm Potluck Picnic. The picnic will be from 12-3pm at Tuckaway Farm in Lee. More information about this event is available at www.slowfoodseacoast.org

In order to help consumers find local farms and support their local economy, The Wire also included Seacoast Harvest's farm listings as part of its annual Summer Guide. The Summer Guide is widely available and is a great resource for finding fun things to do on the Seacoast all summer long.

Wire co-owner Karen Marzloff said it was important to her as a member of the community and local business owner to support access to locally grown food, "We included the Seacoast Harvest Guide as way of doing what we can to make sure that the groundswell of interest in our region's meat, eggs, cheese, honey, dairy and produce traditions—good for our bodies and our environment—continue to grow in years to come, giving people of all incomes access to healthy, fresh food."

An online version of Seacoast Harvest lists the farms in a searchable database that will help consumers find specific locally grown foods, pick-your-own farms, CSA shares, and more, available at www.seacoastharvest.org. For chefs and small food retailers, farms that sell to restaurants and retailers are indicated. The website provides information on other regional food organizations and a glossary of farm and food terminology. The glossary will help consumers to better understand what goes into producing their food and to help them ask better questions of the farmers they buy from. A downloadable version is available for consumers to print their own copies of Seacoast Harvest.

"It has been an amazing effort, an amazing collaboration," said Seacoast Harvest committee member Sara Zoe Patterson, "Seacoast Eat Local was awarded a grant from the New England Grassroots Environment Fund to help us pay for the artwork, created by local artist of Giant Ant fame Nathan Walker, and for help building the website, for which we hired a farmer in the off-season, Andy Gagnon of Andy's Greens. Both of these individuals, actually everyone involved, put in far more effort and many more hours than they were compensated for, donating their professional services to the project." In addition the group was able to hire a project coordinator to help manage volunteers and coordinate between Slow Food and Seacoast Eat Local.

Volunteers were also essential to completing this project. Project Coordinator Jeff Donald describes the process, "For the guide to be useful it is necessary that it is accurate. Volunteers contacted all of the farmers listed in the guide this spring to find out what they produced and where it was available, and asked for additional information like agricultural practices. The listings are free for the farmers to make sure we include as many as possible, and the website makes it possible to keep the information updated throughout the year, ensuring we can add farms we weren't able to contact in the spring. Thanks to our volunteers, consumers can be sure that they are able to find what they are looking for."

CLICK HERE for more info on Seacoast Harvest