Putney Farm

Website: www.upstatesc.locallygrown.net

Putney Farm

Chemical free crops.
Products offered:
Produce: lettuces, peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, heirloom tomatoes, herbs, herb teas, beans, Cut flowers, plants, pumpkins, melons, and and squashes.
Free-ranged Eggs; both Duck and Chicken.

PUTNEY FARM is located in the rolling hills in the Friendship Community of Honea Path, SC. The land consists of hills, pasture, wooded areas, ponds, wetlands, and a creek. There, in the valley of the Saluda River, and centrally located in an area where S. Greenville, Anderson, Laurens, and Abbeville counties merge, free-ranging laying hens enjoy grazing, dust-bathing, and scratching up seeds and insects during the day, either under the safety of trees, or out in their large fenced pastures. The flocks roost safely in their airy houses all night long, secure from any worries about predators. Ducks and farm cats are their playmates in this peaceable kingdom. Their colorful eggs, for which Putney Farm is known, are produced by a selected variety of Heritage breed hens who exhibit the qualities of gentleness and calmness, plus being dual purpose (meat and eggs) birds who are either rare or endangered. Animal Welfare Approved every year, the hens have a wonderful life living under the highest standards in the nation, and possibly the world. (Animal Welfare Approved.com)
The Putney’s show a passion for embracing nature and all things natural.
Putney Farm, a teaching farm, embraces the permaculture design methods, which enable a homestead to work in harmony with nature to incorporate the dwellings into a natural setting which provides food, fodder, and shelter while healing the land and helping the environment surrounding it. Some of the additional methods used area centuries-old, sustainable way of making raised garden beds called hugelkultur, or hill culture. It’s like sheet mulching or lasagna gardening. Forest gardening is utilized, where we plant from the edge of the forest out, as well as some companion planting, French intensive gardening, a form of Square foot gardening, deep litter composting, sheet mulching, cover crops for green manure, rotating our flocks onto the gardens when not in use, and rotational planting to increase the season’s yield from a single planting area by planting early crops and later crops in the same area. Students from surrounding universities and schools have come to visit the humble farm as a part of their sustainable agriculture experience. The homestead is indeed humble, but all natural.
About the Putneys:
Lenard Putney, born and reared in the hilly Upstate New York, where he says that there were more dairy cows than people in his county, feels right at home here in a scenic land that reminds him of his roots.
Donna Putney, a master gardener, has been a “Green Thumb” an organic gardener since her teen age years, and has raised birds and fish most of her life. She originally hailed from Northern Illinois, in the corn belt.
Agriculture is in their blood, and the Putney’s can’t imagine that there could be a more rewarding life than living where they live, doing what they do.