Fall Field Day Brings Customers To Pepper Farm

Fall Field Day Brings Customers To Pepper Farm 31-2-8 An event that drew 25 people its first year now brings visitors by the thousands in the fall. Then they come back to James Weaver's Meadow View Farm to buy home-grown chili peppers and hundreds of related products. "We had 4,000 to 5,000 people last year," says Weaver. "It became so popular that it expanded into a separate event called the National Chile Pepper Food Festival held the same days at a park just down the road. We run four horse-drawn wagons to shuttle people from the park to our farm." At Weaver's farm, visitors can pick more than 200 varieties of hot peppers, 30 varieties of sweet peppers, 25 kinds of eggplants, 40 kinds of gourds, pumpkins and squash, not to mention more than 100 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Of course if you don't feel like picking your own, you can stop at the farm store and select from every kind of hot pepper food imaginable. Pickled peppers and pepper vinegar are popular, but there are also cheesecakes, bars, bread, cookies and pumpkin pie, all with hot peppers in them. If you like your hot peppers cool, try some strawberry, peach or blackberry soft serve ice cream with habaneros in the mix. This past field day, the Weavers sold more than 2,000 cones of hot pepper soft serve. Nearly all the foods offered for sale are made by Weaver and his family. Weaver held his first field day because he couldn't sell pepper plants in the spring. After a chef friend told him in the early 1990's that hot peppers were going to be the next food fad, he decided to try selling seedlings. "I planted about 50 varieties of hot peppers, but when people looked at them, they were overwhelmed," says Weaver. Realizing that they didn't know enough to pick out what they liked, he decided to plant the unsold seedlings, identify them with signs and hold a field day in the fall. "I figured people would walk the fields and be able to make informed choices the next spring," says Weaver. As the crowds have grown, so has Weaver's plant selection. Last year he grew 12,000 hot pepper plants and 15,000 heirloom tomato plants. He and his family plant 20 to 25 acres in produce with four to five acres set aside for pick your own. And he still sells seedlings. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Meadow View Farm, 371 Bowers Road, Kutztown, Penn. 19530 (ph 610 682-6094; fax 610 682-0777).

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