Emerie Brine, executive chef with Bernardin is hard at works making peach jam at the canning workshop of August 25 at Moira Community Hall. He will run another on September 8 at Bridge Street United Church in Belleville at 6.30 p.m. Please call (613) 395-4388 or (613) 962-9178 to book your place. Unfortunatley he broke down on Highway 401 and didn’t get to Maynooth for the September 1 workshop. We hope to re schedule it.

About Cheese is a website dedicated to helping you get more out of your cheese. They sell a tempting collections of cheese, wheels of cheese and cheese by the piece on line boath retail and wholesale, and give information about cheeses and cheese makers. Seven year old Cheddar from Mapledale is featured on the site.

Death of a Farm By Verlyn Klinkenborg New York Times, July 31, 2010 Farms go out of business for many reasons, but few farms do merely because the soil has failed. That is the miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield — nearly forever. America is such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there has been new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be.

Still, there are some very old farms out there. The oldest is the Tuttle farm, near Dover, N.H., which is also one of the oldest business enterprises in America. It made the news last week because its owner — a lineal descendant of John Tuttle, the original settler — has decided to go out of business. It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary.

Owen and Jackie Harder run Harders Heritage Farm at Tuftsville in Stirling-Rawdon. They power their home with solar and wind power and their farm with draft horse power. Grade 12 students from Bayside Secondary School visited the farm in May to learn more about sustainable agriculture. They also visited Donnandale Farms, a very progressive dailry farm generating hydro from manure with a anaerobic digestor.

by Catherine Porter I went out to the Stonegate Farmers’ Market in south Etobicoke one afternoon this week.

It was exquisite: potted basil, fresh apricots, pickled white asparagus, mustard seed loaves all on display in the parking lot of a little Anglican church.