We discovered Miller Farms by accident 3 years ago when we were heading up to a pumpkin festival in Lyons, CO. As we were driving up to the originally intended festival and storm was coming down off of the mountains and the festival was rained out. When we'd gotten off the highway we had seen a small, wooden, roughly painted sign that said Fall Festival with an arrow pointing to the east. The weather looked clear out on the plains so we decided to go check it out since were already out there and the kids were really bummed about the first festival getting rained out. It's funny how life throws you things like this sometimes and how much the outcome depends on whether you choose to ride the roller coaster or get off and go home.
Anyway, Miller Farms is a family owned farm that sells their produce at local farmer's markets, but every fall they also have this amazing festival. It's not all flashy and commercialized, it's just regular old good fun. (which is probably another reason why I love it) They've got so many thing for the kids to do there that growing up in the city, they would never get to do otherwise. There's a corn maze, a llama, goats, and horse that they can feed and pet, a hay mountain, a dirt mountain, little tractor peddle cars, a western "town", an old airplane they can climb in, bouncy house, etc. you get the idea. They also have live music periodically as well as honey people that come up from New Mexico with about 30 different varieties of honey that they farm from their hives along Rio Grande river area.
All of that stuff is great, but the highlight (for me anyway) is the hayride where they take you around their fields and you can pick nearly as much as you can carry. There are about 4-5 different stops and you're able to get 2-3 10lb. potato bags full of produce, per person at each stop. Perryn (my oldest son) has never been able to go to this because he's always had to go back to Ohio the previous years so we decided to take him up there this past weekend. We figured that for what we hauled away from there, we probably spent about $0.40 per pound for the produce we picked out of the fields. If you have the chance, go, go, go!!
I'm not sure if they're fully organic, a transitional farm or whatever but the lady working the little market barn in the front said that they don't use pesticides, herbicides, or anything like that. I felt good about the fact that I was supporting a local family farm and the freshness of what I was getting before hearing that, but it made me feel even better about the money I was spending. We're probably going to go up once more closer to Halloween with the other kids too since they were a little miffed that they didn't get to go this time.
So here is a picture of our first haul which more than covered our entire kitchen table that seats 6:
About 25lbs. of red potatoes, a ginormous bunch of flat leaf parsley, carrots, 4 bunches of celery, kohlrabi, turnips, a golden beet, pie pumpkins, green and wax beans, poblano, anaheim, hatch green and white bell peppers, broccoli, green and red cabbage, pickle cucumbers, patty pan squash, zucchini, red beets, baby artichokes, massive amounts of eggplant, and corn. What you don't see are the dozen peppers and 4 eggplants we'd already eaten, the huge bunch of basil, the other half of the pickle cucumbers, and the onions we were also able to get.
The past few days have consisted of scrubbing all of this (the picture was taken after the fact) and then prepping and freezing a good portion of this. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do with all this eggplant yet.
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