From Queens, A New Farmstand in Morningside Heights

Cows along the Sawkill, in warmer climes. Photo courtesy Michael Grady Roberson.

Good news for Morningside Heights: Michael Grady Roberson, the former farmer of Queens County Farm Museum (you can read about him in Edible Queens) has started selling at the Sunday Columbia Greenmarket on Broadway and W.115th Street, right outside the gates of Columbia University. About a year ago Roberson bought a 62-acre farm near the Sawkill River in Red Hook, raising chickens, cows, pigs and sheep. (Plus a half-acre of vegetables.)  Until this weekend you could only find Roberson’s stand at the Jackson Heights Greenmarket, at 34 Avenue and 77th Street.

He was calling his Hudson Valley operation Grady’s Farm, after his grandfather, a Southern truck farmer, but last time we ran into him  in Queens he said he was getting ready to rechristen the place Sawkill, after the river that makes the grass you see above so lush. His reasoning? It’s really the land and weather and terrain that rule him, rather than the other way round.

 

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