Farms and Farm Markets Tour
It's still called The Garden State for Good Reason
Take a ride with me and check out some of our blueberry, cranberry, tomato, corn and bean farms. They may not be as big as they once were but there's still plenty of them. We can stop of some of our most popular roadside farm and garden markets. Go home with a brand new outlook on the real New Jersey. My buddy owns a tractor and might let you plow or plant something!
Pick your own Jersey Tomatoes to take home with you!
The Garden State? Here?
...all produced in the nearby farms of the Garden State. They were brought in daily by horse-cart, as well as grain, garden truck, milk, pork, firewood, even barrel staves!
New Jersey was called the "Garden State" because it was the backyard vegetable garden, chicken coop, pig sty, timber patch and cow pasture for New York City, Philadelphia, and the sandy shore resort-towns. As Benjamin Franklin, a man who knew it well, said, New Jersey is like "a beer barrel, tapped at both ends, with all the live beer running into Philadelphia and New York." (It was also the brewer, hard cider as well as beer.)
All those McMansions presently in New Jersey, and their accompanying highways? They were all built on those former tomato fields, potato fields, corn fields, fruit orchards and cow pastures, after the Second World War and the Interstate Highway Act. Most developments have one lone farmhouse standing by the access road, often with large chicken coops still standing behind them, the palimpsest of New Jersey's agricultural heritage.