Tastefully Local program brings community awareness to locally grown food

The world of agriculture studies is a bit different than the world most teachers operate in.

For Nation Ford High School’s Lee Petitgout, half her time is spent outside the classroom – either with her hands in the soil or on or under a farm animal, and in various venues doing community outreach.

“I really only spend a third of my time teaching in the classroom,” said Petitgout, agriculture instructor and Future Farmers of America adviser at Nation Ford. “A third of the time leading the FFA and the other third is devoted to adult education. Unlike most of my counterparts, I wanted to find a way to educate the adults in my home community on how important local farmers are to our community.”

For the past two years, Petitgout has hosted a community Farm to Fork dinner that showcases locally grown produce as chef-prepared meals. The dinner itself, which is hosted in May, has sold out two years in a row. To feed interest in local feed year round, Petitgout started Tastefully Local.

The monthly program began in August and introduces participants to a local food-related business. Most of the guests do their presentations at Nation Ford High School but this month, Tastefully Local took a field trip.

The November program was held at Fort Mill’s first brewery, Full Spectrum, and included special guest Matt Gusmer from York’s Windy Hill Orchard and Cider Mill. Those who turned out for the free program were educated on how the brewing process works and invited to sample Full Spectrum’s craft beers and cider.

Though brewing beer technically only requires grain, water, hops and yeast, co-owner and brew master Troy Bigelow has combined everything from rose petals, cucumbers and butternut squash to create craft brews and makes it a point to only incorporate local produce.

“We’re not going to make a new beer unless I can get the flavor locally,” he said. “It just tastes better.”

Bigelow told the Tastefully Local crowd he roasted butternut squash to make a seasonal alternative to pumpkin beer. The squash was grown by Springs Farms in Fort Mill.

Full Spectrum is fermenting a pecan porter for the coming year and is planning to use Springs peaches to create a smoked or roasted peach beer. The farm’s strawberries will be a part of a Neapolitan beer for the summer, Bigelow said.

“We try different ingredients and different techniques and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. If I like the taste, we brew a bit and open it up for our guests to try,” he said.

The spirit of experimentation is how Windy Hill Orchard in York started making hard cider, said Gusmer, whose parents started the orchard. It was more than 20 years ago after Hurricane Hugo caused a major disaster for his family’s orchard, but it ended up being the best thing that could have happened to them, Gusmer said.

“My parents started creating cider from apples that we grew in 1988, just two days before Hugo (hit). Our farm lost power for 10 days, which basically ruined the fresh cider. Instead, we discovered that we had accidentally created hard cider and it turned into a huge success,” he said.

“We’re in a position nearly two decades later that I only want to grow apples for hard cider and I’d be fine if we never made fresh cider again.”

Windy Hill invites visitors to pick their own apples, go on hayrides and experience fresh pressed apple cider, apple cider donuts and hard cider where it’s all grown and produced.

This story was originally published November 25, 2015 at 11:47 AM with the headline "Tastefully Local program brings community awareness to locally grown food."