When you choose to live in a small, mostly rural community like ours, you surrender many of the accoutrements a big city affords. There's nowhere to catch a movie. There's nowhere to get sushi. There’s not even a decent bookstore for 20 miles.
What Pickens can brag about, though, is a prosperous community of locavores who love fresh, homegrown food and handmade crafts and support the farmers and artisans here who produce them.
The Jasper Farmer's Market is perhaps the most fulfilling, exhilarating shopping experience in the county. If you haven't been, go.
Saturday mornings, Lee Newton Park is bubbling over with vendors, their canvas tents and pickup trucks; with toothpicked samples of breads and pastries; with crafts that are off just enough to give them character; and with merchants' delicious propensity to cut deals near the end of the business morning. The market is also open Wednesday afternoons but is not as busy.
Vendors talk about the Jasper market being a pleasurable experience for them, also. It only costs $2 to set up a booth at Jasper’s farmer’s market. Markets in metropolitan areas sometimes charge $250 or more. One lady even slashes her prices by 50 percent when she’s here, because she doesn’t have to fork over a hefty vendor fee.
Customers line up at 7:30 a.m., eagerly waiting for the opening bell––quite a thing when many restaurants and small businesses are struggling these days to keep their doors open.
And let's not forget all those rogue produce vendors scattered in parking lots throughout the week, their trailers weighed down from the mountain of watermelons, cantaloupes and tomatoes they have in tow.
The Long Swamp Creek community garden (now in its first growing season at the Cove) offers Pickens residents, without room to garden at home, a place where they can try their hand at growing food. Plots only cost $20 for an entire year's worth of D.I.Y. produce. That's three growing seasons. Project coordinators say the effort has been overwhelmingly successful, due in large part to the graciousness of the City of Jasper: donating land, providing water hook-ups and getting the plot ready.
Whitestone Farm, a USDA-certified organic operation, is located on 515 North just past the first scenic overlook. They sell their own wide variety of produce and offer goods and wares from other farms at their weekend farm stand.
There's also Dig It Farms off Grandview Road and another beautiful, large farm operation with roadside stand on Highway 136 between Talking Rock and Blaine. Don’t forget Life is Good Health Food Store, offering local produce and goods on the corner of Grandview and Cove roads. On Main Street, there’s the Natural Market Place and, just next door, 61 Main, the farm-to-table restaurant always bustling during lunch hour.
Note that our county's infatuation with local food and crafts (the defining characteristic of a “locavore”) has no trendy aftertaste. Pickens’ love of the homemade is more a product of generational agriculture lifestyle, it seems. Think about it. Have you ever seen a community of people get so excited about fresh tomatoes?
Each summer various groups hold tomato sandwich rallies and picnics where Beefsteaks and Cherokee Purples become topic of lengthy conversations. It’s a passion that runs deeper than a faddish response to marketing and advertising, and you can’t fake it.
For such a small community to support all this homegrown, homemade goodness, it’s easy to see our county is ripe with locavores. We believe our farmers, gardeners, craftspeople and those who support them give this little corner of the planet an element of charm big cities (or medium-sized ones, for that matter) just don’t have.
For all the enticing amenities Pickens may lack, its enthusiasm for homegrown gives us a warm, tingly feeling all over that makes us happy to call it home.
So see you at the market.
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