Friday, April 19, 2024

“TEN MILE RIVER RAMBLES”

THE CORN CRIB

BY DON DOUCETTE

One more productive growing season completed – this past week we purchased our last fresh sweet corn from a local long-standing and dependable source. Fact is, we purchased the last available nine ears from the display bin.

For several recent months, this sweet corn has been some kind of good and taken as Gospel from our personal perspective, never a bad ear.

The produce coaxed from the soil on this flat glacial outwash plain at the intersection of Anawan and Tremont Streets in Rehoboth has produced vegetable crops for millennia beginning before recorded history. 

The ancients associated with the Woodland Era peoples planted subsistence garden plots throughout our local watersheds as they recognized the production capabilities of vegetables grown on well drained, fine-grained alluvial soils associated with glacial outwash plains.

It was the melting action of the last great ice sheet washing fine soils out of corse glacial soil rubble and fanning at the perimeters to help create fine silt-like level soil deposits for use as future farming plots.

During modern times for multiple generations, the Fine-Handy family has carried on this farming tradition of excellence both in the quality of product produced…and, family integrity dealing with their many customers.

The Fine Farms Corn Crib icon has stood for decades as comfortable as an old shoe located at this well-known Rehoboth intersection and all the while, gently and quietly nestled in the gathering area of the East Branch of the Palmer River Watershed.

And the natural and ancient trademark identifying the Fine Farms Corn Crib location…a thick stand of healthy little blue stemmed grass growing behind this cozy little building…the most widely identified prairie grass type growing across our great nation. 

Fine Farms, fine soil, fine prairie grass, fine produce and a fine local family.

Don Doucette

“Ten Mile River Rambles”

Friends of the Ten Mile and Bucklin Brook

Citizens of the Narragansett Basin