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06/06/2011, Tasting Table Chicago, article written by Heather Sperling
06/01/2011, Lucky magazine, article written by Maura Lynch and Simone Kitchens05/23/2011, Forbes Life Travel Issue, article written by Richard Nalley05/13/2011, USA Today, article written by Larry Bleiberg03/15/2011, National Geographic Traveler magazine, article written by Margaret Loftus03/11/2011, Country Living magazine, article written by Beth Ann Fennely10/08/2011, Tasting Table NYC2010 Redbook magazine, article written by Marisa Cohen08/07/2010, Outstanding in the field, hosted by Paul Kahan and Brian Huston10/07/ 2010, Sun Times newspaper, article written by Lori Rackl05/04/2010, Travel + Leisure magazine, article written by Ann Shields04/12/2010, New York Magazine9/15/2009, Tasting Table NYC06/14/2010, NYCityMama website, article written by Carol Cain
06/06/2011, Tasting Table Chicago, article written by Heather SperlingFarm Away From Home Cook, eat, sleep and explore at Kinnikinnick FarmYou may know Kinnikinnick Farm as the stand that sells the great Italian greens cavolo nero, spigarello, bietina and more at the Green City and Evanston farmers' markets. But now you can know Kinnikinnick Farm.
The Caledonia, Illinois, farmstead is the country's third to participate in Feather Down Farms, a farm-stay program imported from Europe. For the occasion, Kinnikinnick's gently sloping field is newly outfitted with five charming pine-and-canvas tent cottages.
Tents are devoid of technology (no toilet or electricity; a vintage pump sink), and the few available activities are biking country roads, antiquing, befriending the farm's animals, cooking and relaxing. This is an ideal getaway for those who want to experience life far from the city, but drive less than two hours (prices start at $525 for two nights).
The farm's produce and other staples are stocked in a 24-hour honesty shop, and options for cooking on the cabin's wood-burning stove or a charcoal grill are ample. On our visit, dinner was grilled chicken with green garlic, and asparagus scattered with just-picked basil. For breakfast, there were blue-tinted eggs to crack, laid the day before by tawny Araucana hens.
The program just launched, and needs some streamlining--but we're confident Kinnikinnick's personable owners, David and Susan Cleverdon, will transform Feather Down Farms into an even more memorable experience as the summer goes on.
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06/01/2011 Lucky magazine, article written by Maura Lynch and Simone Kitchens
Beyond the spa
A field full of vegetables can get you in better shape than any stairmaster (if you're doing the picking, that is). And the thrill of saving a baby elephant is a mind/body experience unlike any other. Here are, unorthodox but powerful ways to both feel the burn and relax-body and soul-on vacation this summer.
Work on a farm: milk cows, pick fresh herbs and vegetables, water, weed and compost all day on this gorgeous working farm Nights are absolute serenity: You stay in large tents with hanging lanterns, a well-stocked kitchen and farm tables. Kinnikinnick Farm, Boone County, IL,
www.featherdown.com 716-226 6323
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05/23/2011 Forbes Life Travel Issue, article written by Richard NalleySurf & Turf: Feather Down FarmsFeather Down Farms welcomes city kids (and parents) to working farms and cleverly designed European tents
There's a pride of accomplishment in wrestling your breakfast-eggs, sausage, cheese toast, a watched kettle that damn near never boils-from a cast-iron stove while continuously stoking it with logs. It's a triumph I enjoy alone, since my 7-year-old-tent-mate has gone off with Nina DeBar, the lady of Ambrosia Farm, to roll pizza dough, gather eggs from the henhouse, walk the dogs and goats to the river-the goats, I'm informed, butt the dogs along the way, apparently for the sport of it-and "dig poo out of the horses' cage."
It's a big morning for a city girl, the kind Feather Down has been providing for thoursands of European families and is now beginning to make availible here. The formula: Take one lovely setting on a working farm-like this one in Bridgewater, New York-scatter trademark Feather Down tents that cunningly incorporate cooking stoves, wooden floors, carved bunks, coffee grinders, and basic flushing loos, and let the urbanites marinate in mindfulness.
If you have attentive hosts like the DeBars, who lay on extras like a local hayride, this might just be the trip of the summer for your kids.
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05/13/2011, USA Today, article written by Larry Bleiberg
10 great places for a rural 'haycation'
Forget about the beach for your next vacation. Why not try a farm? More are welcoming guests for what Country Living magazine calls "haycations." Visitors come to help with chores and to see firsthand how food is raised and harvested. The magazine's senior associate editor, Jourdan Crouch, shares some of her favorites with Larry Bleiberg for USA TODAY.
Kinnikinnick Farm, Caledonia, Illinois
Although guests sleep in a tent at this farm about 85 miles west of Chicago, with fresh linens, candles and even a wood-burning stove, they're hardly roughing it, Crouch says. You can gather freshly laid eggs to make a breakfast omelet, pick organic greens for a salad and hand-grind your own coffee beans. Kids will love walking baby sheep and goats on a leash. There's even a weekly treasure hunt. Guests at Kinnikinnick Farm in Caledonia, Ill., stay in an elaborate tent that sleeps up to six. Each is equipped with fresh linens, candles and a wood burning stove. 716-226-6323; www.featherdown.com
Stony Creek Farm, Walton, New York
You'll stay in roomy tented cabins on this 100-year-old dairy farm and have a chance to collect eggs, milk goats, make cheese and play with farm animals. The heirloom vegetable and herb garden offers a memorable souvenir. "You can take home a crate of what you harvest," Crouch says. 716-226-6323;
www.featherdown.com
03/15/2011 National Geographic Traveler magazine, article written by Margaret Loftus
Return to the land: Upscale farm vacations are the latest twist to the locavore movement
A new generation of Americans that plants kitchen gardens, cooks with local produce, and cans fruit is also literally going back to the farm, at least while on vacation. So-called agritourism generated $567 million in the U.S. in 2007 (the latest figures availible), nearly triple its take in 2002. Opting to spend leisure time on a working farm is nothing new: Farm stays are common in Europe, and many states in the U.S. have long promoted them to help boost income for rural residents. But now some enterprising farmers have updated the concept with stylish digs and hands-on experiences, such as cheese making, that appeal to urbanites with a yen for country living.
Dutch company Feather Down Farm Days, for one has teamed up with three small American farms to offer stays in shabby-chic, canvas-walled tents and plans several more in the next few years. The trend stems from a need to connect with our rural roots, says agritourism champion Bill Bryan, co-owner of travel company Off-the-Beaten Path. "The more urban we get, the more disconnected we can be, to the point where kids don't know milk comes from cows." Here are five places where they can learn that.
Stony Creek Feather Down Farm, Walton, New York
Visit this farm in the rolling hills of New York’s Catskill Mountains and you get your own safari-style tent and provisions available round-the-clock. The barn cum “honesty shop” is stocked with farm-raised beef, pork, chicken, lamb, freshly laid eggs, seasonal organic veggies, and glass bottles of milk topped with a thick layer of cream.
While hosts Kate and Dan Marsiglio and their two children welcome a hand with chores, including digging potatoes, bailing hay, or milking Sierra (their Jersey cow), “it’s all up to our guests how dirty they want to get,” assures Kate. Kids have free rein on the 85 acres of pasture and the eponymous creek that cuts through it as well as access to a neighboring swimming hole. When one guest fretted about his child playing in the mud last summer, his wife responded, “That’s why we’re here; he can’t do that in Brooklyn.”
The farm’s six canvas-wall, hardwood-floor tents are the hallmark of Feather Down Farms, with whom the couple partnered in 2009. Each is equipped with rustic furnishings, plush bedding, oil lanterns, and a cast-iron wood-burning stove to cook your own meals.
On Saturday evenings, the Marsiglios fire up an outdoor oven for homemade bread and pizza-green tomato, purple basil, and lamb sausage is a house favorite-and a chance for guests to mingle. Other nights, the activities-card games, stargazing, sleeping to the sound of babbling brook-are up to you. From $189 per tent, sleeps six; two night minimum stay;
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The Haycation
Across the country, farmers are opening up their barn doors to overnight guests. Writer Beth Ann Fennely spends an idyllic weekend with her family at Illinois’s Kinnikinnick Farm, learning where their food really comes from.
One last year, I took my children to visit a friend who raises chickens. She invited drew back from the coop. “Mom”, hissed Anna Claire, 8, “those eggs look dirty. They came out of…”Her mouth twisted in disgust. “They came out of that chicken’s butt!” It’s worth noting that my daughters and 4-year old son, Thomas, are far from city slickers-we live in a quit, little Mississippi town, not Chicago or Manhattan. Plus, country life is in these kids’ genes: Their great-grandmother kept chickens in her Alabama backyard. Now her descendants assumed that pristine eggs are laid directly into pastel Styrofoam containers.
Something had to be done. So I booked a weekend getaway at Kinnikinnick Farm in Caledonia, Illinois-pat of the Feather Down Farm network, which helps small, family owned farms function as “haycation” destinations, by handling bookings and providing custom guest tents. Should the word tent bring to mind dingy green canvas sagging off a rickety triangular frame, imagine this: 484 charmingly appointed square feet, with a wood floor and three sleeping area’s (enough to accommodate five to six people). There’s no electricity: Cooking’s done over a wood-burning stove, and candles and lanterns offer light in the evening. While that golden glow harkens back to a simpler time, you’re hardly roughing it. In addition to downy duvets and indoor plumbing, there’s a bathhouse with hot showers nearby. And the farm’s “honesty shop”-an unattended, informal store where you leave your payment in a box- stocks chili fixings and locally sourced food such as fennel sausage and peach jam.
Named for the creek that runs through the 114-acre property, Kinnikinnik’s owned by David and Susan Cleverdon, a couple as passionate about responsible living as they are about fun. (They grow all of their produce organically and, says David, “we’ve been known to throw a party at the drop of a hat.”) From the moment my husband, Tom, the two kids, and I pulled into the driveway on Friday afternoon, we felt like part of the Cleverdon family. And on a farm, family pitches in. We helped harvest Italian greens including bietina, a leafy chard, and spigariello, a flowerless broccoli, neither of which I’d ever seen at my market back home. I took pleasure in knowing that the apples we picked from the orchard, planted by Susan and David’s children for her 50th birthday, would be simmered into apple butter and spread by unknown knives over warm toast.
Later that night, we scrubbed vegetables, then ourselves, and prepared dinner in our tent. The tomatoes I sliced for our salad were still warm from the sun and picked by hand – my 4-years-old’s hand. We had met the cows who produced the milk and cheese we enjoyed. Of course, we may also have met, fed, and named the robust chicken, fattened on red clover, that we grilled. For now, this is one farm-to-table connection my children didn’t mane; had they asked if our dinner was “Fluffy Franklin,” I’m not sure how I would have answered.
Morning comes early at Kinnikinnick, courtesy of the rooster. We ground coffee beans in a hand-crank grinder, and then gathered eggs for omelets. The moment I was dreading – when Anna Claire and Thomas realized they’d been robbed of Saturday cartoons – never occurred. Chalk it up to the joys of the animal paddock: fuzzy baby sheep, rabbits, and a goat named Johnny Bosco, whom the kids walked on a leash. My husband and I didn’t miss our cell phones or laptops, either – it was lovely to be in a place where blackberry referred to an afternoon snack, not something vibrating in your pocket.
On our last night, we played Old Maid and read stories by candlelight. Tucking my son in, I gently tugged a piece of hay from his curls. “Mommy,” Thomas sighed, “I want to be a farmer when I grow up.” Maybe he will be a farmer, but I’m not even sure I’d wish it. The evening before, I’d seen David, still in his work overalls, fall asleep at the dinner table. Farming is a life of integrity and satisfaction, but also one of rigor and exertion.
For the time being, at least, Thomas and Anna Claire were satisfied with the delicious souvenirs, greenish-pink Ashmead’s Kernel apples, they’d picked for their classmates. And all of us returned home with sweet memories of raspberry-stained fingers stroking sheep, nights where LCD displays came in the form of constellations, and the feeling of a deep connection to this earth that, with hard work and a little luck, provides for us deliciously.
Author Beth Ann Fennelly; her husband, Tom Franklin; and their kids, Anna Claire and Thomas, stayed in one of Kinnikinnick Feather Down Farm’s five guest tents. Located 85 miles northwest of Chicago, Kinnikinnick welcomes guests from mid-May to mid-October, weather permitting. Tents cost between $189 and $239 per night and sleep up to six people each. Visit
www.featherdown.com to learn more.
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'Skills Set: A weekend of eating and drinking (and sleeping) in the Catskills
Stony Creek Farm Drop your bags and take a restorative nap in your plush tent at this farm, which is part of the Feather Down program. For dinner, cook your collected spoils on top of the wood-burning stove, then enjoy a glass of your Tuthilltown whiskey around the fire. In the morning, go on a tour of the fields with friendly farmers Dan and Kate Marsiglio before packing up for the drive home. For bookings please visit
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Take a Totally Unplugged Vacation!
What happens when you replace your iPhone and your kids' DS with cows and chickens and composting toilets? Good things, reports Marisa Cohen after a three-day weekend on an organic farm with her family. Find out how to go back to the land and reconnect with one another.
When I told my daughters that we were going to spend Memorial Day weekend sleeping in a tent, milking cows, and cooking our meals over a wood-burning stove on an organic farm, 9-year-old Bellamy said, "Cool! Can I bring my DS?" I explained that there would be no video games, no computers, and no TVs. "It'll be just like when you studied pioneers in school!" I said with perhaps a little too much forced enthusiasm. "Okay," Bellamy responded, "as long as I can play on your iPhone."
I'll admit I was a bit nervous about this "back to the land" thing. I like nature in theory, but I do not like to sleep in it. So why the urge to rough it? Well, I'd noticed that my family had become overly dependent on our electronics connections at the expense of our human attachments. After dinner and homework, Bellamy and her 7-year-old sister, Molly, would typically play on the computer or watch a rerun of iCarly while I'd log onto Facebook and my husband, Jeremy, would check his email. Sitcom laugh tracks and the whir of the computer had replaced lively conversation as the dominant sounds in our house. So when I heard about Feather Down Farms, a company that offers "back-to-basics" family vacations on three farms in the United States, I jumped at the chance to detox from our high-tech lives and reconnect with one another.
On a sunny Saturday morning, we drove for three hours from New York City to Stony Creek Farm, in Walton, NY (with the kids watching a DVD in the backseat--hey, I'm no masochist!). When we arrived, it was hello, country life, as one of the owners, Kate Marsiglio, helped us load our bags into a wheelbarrow, which Jeremy then pushed across a footbridge, over a gurgling creek, to our tent.
Actually, that tent was more like a cottage with walls that happened to be made of canvas. The master bedroom had a double bed with fluffy duvets; a second room had bunk beds, though the girls chose the "canopy bed" hidden in a cupboard over a storage space. There was even an indoor composting toilet (low-tech, yes, but it got the job done).
As soon as we unloaded our stuff, Bellamy and Molly went with Kate to gather eggs for our lunch--and by gather I mean pluck them right from under the chicken's bottom. Any fears I had that my girls would have trouble adjusting to the slower pace of farm life were dispelled as they rolled down the grassy hill outside our tent and mooed at the milking cow who grazed nearby. "Mom, this farm is awesome--can we live here?" Molly asked.
For me, one of the most refreshing aspects of our stay was the lack of a schedule. We did what we felt like, when we felt like it. Jeremy spent an hour or so showing our daughters his secret method for roasting marshmallows. We drove to a local farmer's market, tasting banana bread and homemade ginger ale. We cooked a stew over a campfire and ate it by candlelight, with each of us talking about our favorite moments of the weekend. And the girls never once asked to play on my iPhone or grab the DVD player. Instead, they devised their own activities, such as building a teepee out of firewood. Of course, it wasn't all paradise: Bellamy simply could not get used to all the bugs, and Molly had a knack for stumbling into both the creek and the cow patties, making me very glad that we'd packed several extra pairs of pants and shoes. Overall, though, it was liberating to be so unplugged.
I'd love to say we came home completely changed, gave away our TV, and started growing organic food on our windowsill, but when we returned, I happily re-embraced my blow-dryer and corner Starbucks. We also went back to our wired conveniences, but they seem less important now--I still enjoy Facebook, but I don't feel compelled to update my status several times a day, and the girls haven't picked up their DS once since we've been home.
Feather Down Farms (featherdown.com) Check out one of these three working farms: Stony Creek Farm in Walton, NY; Ambrosia Farm in Bridgewater, NY; and Kinnikinnick Farm in Caledonia, IL.
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There's always something new happening at Kinnikinnick Farm. This year David and Susan have partnered with Feather Down Farm Days an exciting farm stay concept that's already a big success in Europe. That means their beautiful farm now features 5 spacious, Dutch-designed tents complete with wood floors, comfy beds, fully equipped kitchens with wood-burning stoves and flush toilets. Guests will also find a chicken coop for gathering their own fresh eggs each morning, a wood-burning bread oven (for unforgettable pizzas and roasted chickens)hot showers and flush toilets in a bathhouse, a petting zoo for the kids and a "farm store" that sells all the local foodstuffs you'll need for a weekend of good eating.
Feather Down Farm Days allows families to reconnect with nature, their food sources, and each other. The entirely unique, less-is-more experience is great for families and urban foodies alike.
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Take a family 'haycation' on an Illinois farm
CALEDONIA, Ill. - "Anyone want to help me get some eggs?" a voice called around 7 a.m. from outside our tent. You'd have thought it was an invitation from the Easter Bunny, what with the haste my stepson and niece bolted from their bunk beds and headed for the chicken coop. They came back 10 minutes later, gingerly holding a wire basket full of beige eggs, still warm from the hens that had been sitting on them.
Welcome to life on the farm. Kinnikinnick Farm is only 85 miles northwest of Chicago, but it feels like another world - and another time. Our old-fashioned tent had no electricity, just oil lamps and candles. The only water came from a manual pump by the kitchen sink. When we were ready to turn our eggs into breakfast omelets, we first had to feed the wood-burning stove with logs.
It couldn't have been more different than modern-day city life - and that's the point of Feather Down Farm Days, a European-based company whose "haycations" are taking root in the United States.
Feather Down partners with working family farms like Kinnikinnick to give urban folks a crash course in country living, while providing small-scale farms with supplemental income. Guests can play "Little House on the Prairie" and roll up their sleeves to help plant and pick crops, play with the farm animals, see how hay is made and drink raw, unpasteurized milk straight from the neighbor's cow (dubbed "thick and extra milky" by my 9-year-old stepson).
"Every child grows up knowing how to make a picture of a church or a barn, but let's face it: fewer and fewer people actually go to either," said Kinnikinnick owner Susan Cleverdon, a former Chicagoan who likes the idea of showing kids that food doesn't grow in supermarkets.
"There's something special about eating asparagus while looking out on the field where it was grown," she added. "I want people to experience that."
Feather Down started in the Netherlands in 2004 and spread to Britain, Germany and France before hopping the pond last year to two farms in New York. Kinnikinnick, Feather Down's first Midwest outpost, plans to open officially early next month.
Each Feather Down farm has several spacious canvass tents with wooden floors, decked out in a style that's Pottery Barn circa Civil War. Tents sleep up to six people in comfy beds and include a kitchen stocked with pots, pans, plates and other necessities. Guests cook the food they either bring with or buy at the on-site honor shop, selling items grown on the property or at local farms. At Kinnikinnick, guests share a bath house with showers and toilets.
Keep in mind that this is a farm, not a hotel. You won't get turndown service with a mint on your pillow - but I'd happily forgo that for fresh organic eggs each morning.
You're doing your own dishes, making your own beds and sweeping your own floor. And the only wake up call you get (whether you want it or not) comes bright and early, courtesy of the roosters.
Don't worry about doing all the chores yourself. On the farm, mundane tasks magically transform into high entertainment for the kids. Ben, my stepson, couldn't wait to empty the gray-water bucket under the kitchen sink. He never balked at running to the barn to fetch more frozen hot-water bottles to keep our perishables cold. I think he'd trade in his Wii for the hand-cranked mill he used to grind our coffee beans each morning.
He and my 5-year-old niece, Sara, spent a good hour in the summer sun planting two long rows of broccoli.
"I did jobs, so I'm a real farmer now," Sara said, proudly displaying 10 tiny fingernails caked with dirt.
A finnicky eater, Sara usually doesn't like food unless its covered with frosting. But being surrounded by so many freshly picked vegetables - she barely recognized the radishes and garlic with their long stems still attached - inspired her to explore other parts of the food pyramid. I watched in amazement as Cupcake Queen ate a few forkfuls of arugula and declared the asparagus "delicious."
Kinnikinnick supplies some of Chicago's top restaurants - Spiaggia, North Pond, Naha - with its organic Italian cooking greens, more than 25 varieties of tomatoes, snap peas, sunchokes and squash. Its produce and eggs also are sold at the Evanston Farmers Market and the Green City Market in Lincoln Park.
"We started with a little half-acre garden and it got bigger and bigger. Finally I said, ‘I don't need a garden. I need a farm,'" said Susan's husband, David Cleverdon, one of the most unlikely farmers you'll ever meet.
A former civil right activist and political strategist (he was a top aide to Gov. Dan Walker), Cleverdon went on to work for the Board of Trade. He and Susan were among the first loft owners in Printers Row.
In 1987, they bought a dirt-cheap patch of rolling farmland overlooking Kinnikinnick Creek near the Wisconsin border. The farm house was unlivable; the land needed a lot of work. They spent their weekends fixing up the place. Five years later, David hung up his business suits and broke out the overalls, and the couple moved here for good.
The Cleverdons have always done a lot of entertaining on their 114-acre organic farm - chef dinners, family gatherings, the occasional wedding. They toyed with the idea of opening a B&B but opted for the Feather Down route instead.
It hasn't been one of their easier rows to hoe. They've had to jump through plenty of administrative hoops from local governing bodies to get the necessary permits and approvals. And a few of their neighbors weren't shy about voicing opposition to tourists invading their pastoral turf. But the Cleverdons kept plowing ahead.
They were close to being finished with the Feather Down part of their property when we visited late last month. Susan's carpenter son from Evanston had the exterior of the bath house built. An outdoor wood-burning oven for crispy pizzas - a mandatory feature at any Feather Down franchise - was up and running. A truckload of sand was waiting to be made into a play area for kids, and Susan was working out the logistics of offering hayrides.
"We anticipate a lot of our guests will be our children's ages - late 30s, early 40s - with kids of their own," Susan said. "I want this to feel like a visit to grandma's house."
Knowing how much kids like animals, the Cleverdons have been bulking up their inventory. They brought in a bunch of new chickens and a couple of alpine goats that live near their fuzzy rabbit. David plans on adding sheep, too.
"You want to walk the goats?" he asked Ben and Sara, snapping leashes on the gently bleating animals named Violet and Johnny Bosco.
David didn't have to ask twice.
"I can't believe I'm walking a goat," Ben said, as Johnny Bosco bent down to chomp a mouthful of grass. "Not many kids can say that."
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Back to the Land: Farm Stays (in Luxury Tents)
As a young child, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Rereading them as a parent, I’m charmed anew (but kind of stunned by what a single-minded nut job Pa seems to be). However homespun my reading material, though, I’m closer in temperament to Woody Allen than to Ma Ingalls. My family’s method of getting down to earth will have to come with an escape hatch. Like a farm stay.
Feather Down Farms, a farm stay company from Europe that has set up housekeeping on three American farms in the past two years, offers curious city-dwellers a chance to experience a rarified and charming rural experience without any of the hardships that plagued pioneer families like the Ingalls and the Wilders (No locusts! No prairie fires! No wolves!), or even those that faced by modern small farmers today.
Instead you check into a “tent” (canvas sides, yes, but a wood floor and indoor plumbing and woodstove and real beds with down duvet covers) on a real working farm. Each farm runs a store where you can buy supplies, locally sourced when possible, for your meals. On some nights, the farm family uses a wood-burning oven to make bread and pizza to share with guests, but other nights, you’re on your own in the oil-lamp-lit tent to eat dinner and play cards or tell stories or read.
During the days, you can choose to lounge around your tent or deck (tell the kids you’re observing the Sabbath, Wilder style) or you can explore. The farms all grow organic vegetables and raise livestock, so you’ll be invited to participate in chores and activities if you want. There’s a water pump near the tents and as most parents can attest, playing in water can eat up an afternoon pretty fast. The farms have bikes for rent and nearby towns to visit and antique shops to plunder and local fairs to attend. The pace is slow but not boring.
The three Feather Down Farms, two in upstate New York and one north of Chicago, allow parents to show their kids where their food comes from without sanctimony. I wouldn’t have thought my kids were ready for conversations about the politics of food, but miraculously, they seem to be. So maybe it’s time to get beyond petting zoos and backyard gardens and reading Little House books and take it to the next level: It’s time to check into a luxury tent for a weekend in the country.
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The Peripatetic Family
Walton, New York: Feed the livestock at a camping-without-roughing-it farm-stay. Take sheepshearing workshops, gather eggs from heirloom chickens, and milk a big, brown-eyed Jersey named Sierra alongside the young farming couple Dan and Kate Marsiglio and their two kids at Delaware County’s Stony Creek Farm (stonycreekfarm.org). It’s one of the first U.S. farms to host the Feather Down farm tents (from $219, sleeps six; featherdown.com), a “plushrustic” farm-stay concept imported from the Netherlands last year.
Each of the farm’s six handsome, hardwood-floored tents comes equipped with a cast-iron wood stove, bathroom, and rustic farmhouse furniture like gas lanterns, enamel camp cookware, and a cold hutch for perishables—though no electricity; everything is lit by candles.
Think of it as a locavore safari, where you’ll drift to sleep beside a gently babbling brook and gather provisions at a 24-hour “honesty shop” stocked with organic kale and beets grown on the premises, not to mention jars of honey-sweetened apple butter, double-maple yogurt, and bone-in Slope Farms beef rib steaks.
Ask the Marsiglios for recommendations on where to hike or swim nearby; you’ll have ample opportunities to earn those cream-topped bottles of milk.
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Stony Creek Farm: Where a rooster is your wake-up call
The bucolic weekend getaway is a favorite remedy for hemmed-in city life, but while a countryside B&B suffices for some, there are many of us who yearn for something more...agrarian.
That's exactly what Stony Creek Farm offers. This Walton, N.Y., property is among the first in America to team up with Feather Down Farms, a Dutch company that's taking agritourism to new, semi luxurious levels.
Feather Down supplies the accommodations: roomy, wood-floored tents outfitted with enough beds for six, gravity-powered plumbing (yes, there's a flushing toilet) and wood-burning stoves, which power the wannabe-homesteader's fantasy kitchen.
The 85-acre farm, of course, supplies the ingredients, which are sold--along with fresh-baked bread and other staples--at the ultimate minibar, the 24-hour "honesty shop." During our stay, grass-fed beef and just-picked greens ended up in a quick steak salad one night, and a chicken with loads of root vegetables made a handsome stew the next.
Speaking of chickens: You're welcome to grab all the eggs you can find in the "hens-in-training" pen, which is guarded by your morning wake-up call: a very chatty rooster. Good luck.
But the best way to experience the aggie life firsthand is by taking a tour with the farmers themselves: Kate and Dan Marsiglio. They'll show you how their sustainable farming and free-range pasturing practices affect the food they produce and the land it grows on. Which is every bit as important as escaping the city.
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06/14/2010, NYCityMama website, article written by Carol Cain
Feather Down Farms at Stony Creek Farm, Walton, NY
My love for travel, especially travel with my family in tow, comes from the fact that almost always I come away with a new dimension of me and of my kids. The more unique the trip, the more opportunities I have to discover something new about all of us. Thus, those are usually the trips that I am remember the most.
When the opportunity to visit a Feather Down Farm came up I was thrilled. The concept of Feather Down Farms, which originated in Holland, is to provide a true rural experience to travelers looking to escape the big-scale vacation ambiance. There are several locations in Europe and in the US, but we decided to venture to our closest one on Stony Creek Farm.
All Feather Down Farms are located in working farms and provide amazing tents that comfortably fit a family of five like mine. A master bedroom, canopy bed, and two bunk beds in a separate room along with a flushing toilet, a wood burning cooking stove, and a dining/living room area provide all the comforts one will need during their stay. The beds are incredibly comfortable and each tent comes with all the towels, linens, kitchen, and dining supplies you would need. The shower house at Stony Creek Farm, located away from the tent, but at walking distance, does have electric lighting, and warm and cold running water. I thought the showers were really nicely set up. The interior was made up of cedar wood and gave the feel of a nice, spa-like space, which was both secure and comfortable.
With no electricity, and in our case, no wifi or phone service from our tent, we were completely set up to commune with nature, and each other. I truly wasn’t sure what to expect, but the drive through the Catskills Mountains and into Walton, NY really set the tone for what would turn out to be an amazing weekend.