I was recently invited to a farm dinner at Three Leaf Farm in Lafayette, CO. For those of you familiar with popular stops on my tours, Three Leaf Farm is owned by Lenny and Sara Martinelli of Leaf and Aji in downtown Boulder. As I’ve been featuring both Leaf and Aji since I started Local Table Tours four years ago, I was excited to visit the farm they purchased, which is starting to supply their restaurants (seven in total) with local, organic produce and eggs. The Three Leaf Farm, besides being ground to grow almost every fruit and vegetable possible to harvest in the front range, is home to chickens, goats, pigmy goats, horses, donkeys, and bees. The evening started off with Bellinis and farm animal admiration- especially of the donkeys and goats.
We were invited on a tour of the farm with Chase, the head farmer, and came to understand the gravity of the recent flood: We were asked not to touch, and NOT TO EAT, anything growing in the fields. Three Leaf Farm was entirely under water for some time, and the flood waters had chemicals, oils, and potentially lots of nasty stuff in them. Consequently, the Martinellis have been instructed by authorities to leave all crops to rot in the fields and not practice any farming until the soils have been tested and they receive notification it is safe to start planting. The implications of this are clearly enormous.
Our farm dinner in honor of the tomato by the staff from Zucca was delicious. Sara let us know they brought in veggies from other local farms that weren’t flooded, and as the evening grew dark, we dined al fresco, made new friends, and appreciated our local farms and this year’s harvest more than before. Please enjoy some photos I took before the sun set and we dined by candle light.
