The NewEnglandGrown
Holiday Gift Guide

You want to support your local farms, but it’s 20 degrees outside and the only fresh local crops are icicles and snowballs.  You’ve also got a shopping list a mile long, and you're thinking of heading to the mall to buy the same stuff everyone else is buying – you know, the stuff that was made-in-China by underpaid workers then shipped to the U.S., where it will be sold for inflated prices and the money sent to line the pockets of overpaid CEOs who will hide the profits in offshore accounts so they don’t have to pay taxes? STOP.  Your local farmers have plenty of options for everyone on your gift list, and you can feel good about buying from them, knowing you’re helping to preserve the open space and traditional lifestyle of New England family farms.  

Despite what you might think, the gift options from local farms aren’t limited to potatoes, turnips, and winter squashes.  Consider these possibilities:

For your gourmet friends, a basket of fine food from Maine. Start with a bag of dried wild mushrooms from Oyster Creek Mushrooms.  The Maine Wild Mix is a beautiful blend of some of the highest-quality dried mushrooms you’ve ever tasted.  Then include a jar of smoked Maine sea salt from the Maine Sea Salt Company.  Add some of Painted Pepper Farm’s distinctive Coastal Red maple syrup, and finish off the package with smoked salmon or haddock from Mainely Smoked Salmon.

For your parents, consider a weekend away at a farm.  Our listing of working farm B&Bs includes a wide variety of get-aways, from sheep farms to vineyards, from the rustic to the luxurious.

For your friend who loves to watch movies curled up on the couch, the Maine Blanket is warm and elegant and truly local, woven in Maine of wool from Maine sheep.

Everyone brings wine for a host’s gift, but how many bring raspberry wine?  The raspberry dessert wine from Bartlett's Winery is sophisticated and unusual and would pair marvelously with a box of almond biscotti. Their wines are available for sale at the winery and from Maine liquor and foods stores. To find other local wines, see our New England winery listing.

Local goat and sheep farmers often use the excess milk from their animals as the base for very gentle, moisturizing soaps.  The soaps from Shaker Woods Farm include Lavender and Rosemary varieties, scented with herbs from their own garden beds, while Meadow Stone Farms offers raw milk/raw honey soaps and unscented soaps for those  sensitive to fragrance.

Speaking of honey, raw local honey has a far more complex flavor than the grocery-store stuff. Local honey is widely available from small grocery stores, farm stands and gourmet shops.  Pair a jar with Maine-grown herbal teas from the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester for a tea-lover’s afternoon treat.

Does Uncle Fred take great pride in his homegrown carrots?  Help him to expand his home garden with a gift certificate to Nourse Farms, a nursery which specializes in small fruits that grow well here in New England, including currants, gooseberries and blackberries. Pinetree Garden Seeds offers unusual seeds grown on their farm in Maine; a few packages would improve any gardener’s stocking.

Everyone loves the lovely scent and warm glow of beeswax candles, so having a few in the house is good insurance against coming up empty-handed for a gift. Warm Colors Apiary offers pillars, rolled comb, and novelty-shaped candles made with wax from their own bees. (Personally, my favorite is the bear with his hand in the honey hive.)

To fill the stocking of your favorite sweet-tooth, pick up some maple sugar candies from  Green’s Sugar House in Vermont. These traditional New England sweets will melt in your mouth.

Finally, a few book suggestions. Buying these books won’t put money in the pocket of your local farmer, but they do provide an education about New England agriculture and the rural life. Jane Brox’s trilogy on farming in New England (Here and Nowhere Else, Five Thousand Days Like This One, Clearing Land) is an elegy to the life of a small family farm along the Merrimack river. Brox intertwines the story of her family with the story of the land they cultivate. Buy it for the book-club member in your family.

You see?  No turnips!  Just distinctive gifts that help support local farms.  And that gives everyone a happy holiday.