On October 12, Farm to YoU NH hosted Harvest Day, a day to teach UNH students and the Durham community about all of the hard work we do over at Fairchild Dairy in our two high tunnels and half acre of land. Our intention was to educate the community about the work we do with UNH dining and the capabilities we have to bring more local foods into our dining halls. The Farm to YoU NH set up is something that could be duplicated in dining halls all over the country to increase awareness of local foods as well as teaching students hands-on experience in running a small farm.
In conjunction with a farm tour, we also had canning examples with instructions how to can, how to plant garlic to overwinter, as well as a garlic tasting with freshly roasted garlic. Not only were we lucky to have most of our class in attendance, but also a beautifully sunny fall afternoon. For our canning examples we brought cans of tomato sauce and salsa that we had made and canned from all of our own produce. Canning is a great way to preserve food over time without having to ad several additives. We filled the fields with the aroma of roasted garlic by roasting garlic on sight on our grill. After all garlic was roasted and mashed, we set up a "garlic tasting" to score how different and similar each variety of garlic is. We used our own sweet potatoes to make a sweet potato sage dip that we served with tortilla chips. We supplied guests with an array of flyers and media to teach them more about Farm to YoU NH as well as more about what we presented to them at Harvest Day. We had a slow turnout, though it allowed us to give individual attention to all of our guests. All in all we enjoyed having a day to show off our successes and to teach ourselves how to host farm events in our future careers.
