Certified Organic Fruits & Vegetables Grown Locally

All of our fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs are certified organic under standards established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. What does this mean for you? That the food you buy from us is free from synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers; none of our products are irradiated; we use no sewage sludge to fertilize our crops; we observe agricultural practices that build healthy and productive soils full of beneficial organisms, less prone to erosion and better at storing carbon; the water we use for irrigation and washing is clean and safe; and we are independently inspected each year to ensure our compliance with these and other regulations governing the production of organic food.

In short, the organic label guarantees you a high level of transparency and accountability in regard to how we grow our produce.  It underscores our commitment to providing healthy and nutritious food and to protecting and restoring our environment. Beyond meeting the organic standard, we adhere to additional principles in our aim to be sustainable.  For example, we sell all of our food within 70 miles of the farm and are expanding efforts to make our fruits and vegetables available to those living closest to us.

We recognize that our produce may be more expensive than the food available in the supermarket.  Our prices incorporate the costs of growing organically, providing our staff the opportunity to earn a decent income, maintaining our facilities and equipment and otherwise striving to achieve sustainability. We are deeply grateful for your patronage and hope to earn your continued trust and support.  Our goal is to offer the best tasting, highest quality food produced in a way that will make you as proud to eat it as we are to grow it.

The Farm At Sunnyside follows three core principles in deciding what mix of products to offer our customers:

  • We emphasize diversity in what we grow, thereby providing our customers with exposure to a wide array of healthy, flavorful and nutritious food; sustaining our soil and environment by rotating crops, reducing pest infestations and minimizing reliance on any one method of organic pest control; lessening our risk of catastrophic loss from weather, pests or disease; and affording our staff an enjoyable, challenging and educational work environment.
  • We try to select crops that are seasonally, geographically and environmentally appropriate, thereby ensuring that our food possesses the best possible flavor; working with nature to take advantage of pollination and other ecosystem services; and reducing our need for petroleum products, water and other external inputs.
  • We are mindful of our niche within the local agriculture community, thereby increasing the range of agricultural products available for local purchase and helping to strengthen the local food economy.

With these principles in mind, we produce an assortment of fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs, honey and eggs.

Fruits

The Farm At Sunnyside maintains an extensive orchard in which we grow multiple apple varieties (including Gold Rush, Pristine, Liberty and Enterprise), two types of sweet cherries (Bing and Lapin), Asian pears and peaches. We also specialize in small fruit with approximately two acres planted in blackberries.

Vegetables

We grow over 40 different varieties of vegetables throughout the year. A partial list includes: arugula; Asian greens (pac choi, tat soi, bok choi and others); asparagus, beans; beets; broccoli; cabbage; carrots; cauliflower; chard; collards; corn; cucumbers; eggplant; escarole; frisee; kale; kohlrabi; leeks; multiple types of lettuce; melons (cantaloupes and watermelons); okra; onions (red, white and yellow); peas; potatoes; pumpkins; radishes; scallions; squash (summer and winter); spinach; tomatoes (cherry, heirloom, paste and others); and turnips.

Flowers & Herbs

During the summer, we offer a variety of cut flowers, including lilacs, snapdragons and sunflowers. We also grow a range of herbs including basil, cilantro, lemon verbena, mint, oregano, parsley, rosemary, stevia and thyme.

Honey

Honeybees have the distinct ability to define the taste of a place. The flavor, color and amount of honey in a hive tell one as much about the character of a landscape as they do about the bees who made the honey. Our honey is raw, unfiltered and originates primarily from native wildflowers. Raw means that the honey has not been heated and therefore retains all of its beneficial components such as pollen, bits of comb and propolis—an antibacterial product bees produce. And while our honey is gravity filtered to remove debris, it is not pumped through a micro-filter like commercial honey. Being extremely efficient foragers, bees harvest from the closest flowers available. It is the floral community that determines the character of honey, and our bees are surrounded by a complex assortment of native wildflowers and organic fruits and vegetables.

The Farm at Sunnyside is an ideal place to raise honeybees because our diversity of habitats provides abundant, high quality food throughout the season. In return, the honeybees transform the flowers from our forests and meadows into a delicacy and supplement the work of our native bees to help pollinate our crops. We maintain wild areas in and around our fields which provide the necessary habitat for native bees, butterflies and other pollinators. This mix of agriculture crops, meadows and wooded hedgerows ensures a season-long feast of flowers. We amend areas around vegetable fields with patches of showy native plants that act as beacons to pollinators and direct their attention to our fields.

The Farm at Sunnyside established its first honeybee apiaries in May of 2012. Honeybees have been a part of the North American biota since the 1600s but still are not a truly native species. We carefully considered how to reconcile the introduction of exotic European honeybees with our conservation program, which actively promotes native species. We ultimately decided to move forward after a large sampling effort detected 33 native bee species already living at Sunnyside alongside feral honeybees that made it here on their own. Our conclusion was that bringing additional honeybees to the farm would not threaten this already robust pollinator community.

Eggs

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