CORNWALL — Local produce has a new home on Town Street.
While the roadside farm stand remains at the entrance to Ridgway Farm, a larger assortment awaits at the recently constructed barn deeper into the property.
Guests were welcomed Sunday, Aug. 24, for the debut of the store and a soft opening continued throughout the week.
A bountiful harvest was on display including peaches, flowers, leafy greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, melons, root vegetables and garlic. Jayne Ridgway offered samples of the produce along with her homemade vinaigrette, pesto and lemonade.
The store stocks cheese and ice cream from Arethusa Farm in Litchfield. And more items are available through collaboration with the New York-based family farm aggregator Hudson Harvest.
“Everything here is probably produced within 20 miles of where we are right now,” said Gordon Ridgway.
Also growing on the farm are 475 apple trees. Orchard tours are offered at 3 p.m. on Sundays to highlight the wide range of heirloom apples that will one day be pressed into hard and soft cider.
“We have 47 varieties,” said Ian Ridgway. “A lot of these are heirloom varieties that have strong ties to cider making... My goal is for some time next summer to be selling cider.”
Some of the apple trees that were planted are called Burnham Sweet, a heritage apple that dates back to the 1800s and is native to Cornwall. The Ridgways worked with an apple expert to identify the unique variety and propagate the only known specimen. Several of the other apple strains are also Cornwall originals.
On the process of unearthing and replanting Cornwall’s rich apple history, Gordon Ridgway said, “There’s strong representation all the way back to the beginning of the town. We have a friend up in Maine who’s involved in apple preservation, he says nobody else is doing all this stuff in one place.”
In their research, the Ridgways found a record that documented 1,555 barrels of cider produced in Cornwall in the year 1800. “One per person,” said Gordon Ridgway, who also serves as Cornwall’s first selectman.
The store’s fall hours of operation are Sunday 1 to 6 p.m., Tuesday and Thursday 4 to 6 p.m.
Sunflowers are among the homegrown products available at the newly opened Ridgway Farm Store.Riley Klein
Michele Paladino’s nursery, “Lindera” in Falls Village.
That’s where books come in.A well-written reference book can provide the kind of commentary that goes beyond a plant’s likelihood of survival in one’s garden.
Page Dickey’s (a well-known garden writer and landscape designer who lives in Falls Village) go-to on native plants is the three-volume set by Michael Cullina who led The Wildflower Society (now called The Native Plant Trust). Each book delves into different categories of plants: one on native trees, shrubs and vines (“one of my bibles” is the inscription on the opening page), another on native ferns, mosses and grasses and a third on wildflowers.
Dickey’s copies evidence of heavy use; in addition to hand-written commentary, there are check marks for the plants that she has either grown or identified. After a perusal, I looked more closely to get Cullina’s take on some of my favorite plants. While disappointed to find only one of the three types of aralias I admire — Aralia spinoza, the Devil’s Walking Stick — I was amazed to read about some fantastic species I didn’t know.
With their ease of use and combination of fact and considered opinion, the books function a bit like Dirr’s “Hardy Trees and Shrubs,” the subject of my last column. Unlike Dirr’s book — which ignores the role of native plants in maintaining habitats and glosses over the invasive tendencies of many plants that Dirr extolls — Cullina’s books help the reader understand the importance of specific plants and the roles they play in keeping our environments healthy for all animals, including us.
Doug Tallamy, the renowned entomologist and co-founder of Homegrown National Park, once provided data that was incorporated into the Native Plant Finder database for the National Wildlife Foundation. He stands by the practicality of digital databases for supplying information that can be updated as the environment continues to change.
Dee Salomon
Still, Tallamy is partial to a number of reference books and cited two he has relied on for years: “Native Plants of the Northeast” by Donald J. Leopold, and “Native Trees for North American Landscapes” by Guy Sternberg.
“They were among the early books I encountered when I started thinking about native plants,” said Tallamy. “They are rich in good photos, and they describe the conditions under which various species do well. I like Guy’s books in part because he does his best to talk about how they meet the needs of various animal species. No other book talks much about the insects that plants support because when they were written, we knew little about host plant associations.”
Much of what I’ve planted successfully in the past two years came at the recommendation of Michele Paladino, a plantswoman, landscape designer and proprietor of Lindera, a nursery specializing in native plants. She recently relocated the nursery to the former Falls Village Flower Farm.
Like Dickey and Tallamy, Paladino also turns to a few essential sources. “When I’m working on a project, I really want to ponder trees and their character. I always go back to books for inspiration.”
She, too, recommends Sternberg’s book as a go-to reference on trees, and highlights the two books by Carol Gracie on both Spring and Summer wildflowers. These two books delve more deeply into fewer plants — most, but not all, native — pointing out the insects and birds that they attract and including hand-drawn illustrations.
I was surprised to see two pages dedicated to broadleaf helleborine, a non-native orchid I’ve had my eye on in the woods for a while. Gracie argues both for and against this plant; her verdict is: pull them out.
Although she would not want to be characterized this way, Paladino is the best kind of human reference guide to native plants, sharing both essential plant information and her editorial perspective.
With Fall planting season at our doorstep, I recommend a visit to her nursery, located where the Falls Village Flower Farm used to be. Come with questions, as Paladino likes to consult and collaborate with clients.
There is always lasting affection for books that sparked our curiosity for a lifelong passion. The books Dickey, Tallamy and Palladino recommend were last published a couple of decades ago. They recognize that they are trading some up-to-date accuracy of information for prose that inspires and provokes — sentiment is preferred.
Might publishers reissue these books in digital form? That would allow for contemporary updates on plant diseases, soil chemistry changes and invasive species associated with climate change — as well as the resulting species decline we, and entire ecosystems, are rapidly experiencing.
Done well, it could thread the needle between accuracy and allure.
Dee Salomon ‘ungardens’ in Litchfield County.
