Gathering Together Farm is an enterprise in certified organic vegetable and fruit production that began in 1987. Our home base is just south of Philomath, Oregon on Grange Hall Road. Our fields are small odd shaped parcels of land, 1 to 5 acres in size, hugging the Mary's River. All totaled, we farm over 50 acres.
Gathering Together is owned by John Eveland and Sally Brewer, husband and wife. Our daughters, Amelia, Carly, and Haylee, make it a feminine majority.
Rodrigo Garcia and Joelene Jebbia share in the management of the farm. In the heat of the summer, there can be over 80 of us working feverishly to produce high-quality food, and get it to market.
In 2003 we expanded our on-farm offerings by building our beautiful Farm Stand. Originally it was soups, salads, and pastry along with our own produce. We now offer lunch, dinner, and Saturday breakfast in the flavors of Italian-influenced Northwest cuisine. It's a wonderful location for tasting some of the fruits of our labor. The season's best is combined with locally grown meats and regional seafoods in the expert hands of our Chef, JC Mersmann.
We love to eat the food we grow. One of our most cherished farm traditions is farm lunch. Three days a week one of the kitchen crew, or sometimes a guest chef will cook lunch for the entire crew. It is a good thing most of what we cook comes from what we grow, because with the amount of calories this crew burns up, they can eat tremendous quantities.
Diversity is one of the keystones of our farm. Each year we sell over 50 different types of vegetables of over 300 different varieties. Our customer base ranges from the individuals we see at our Farm Stand and our Farmers' Market booths to local and regional food co-ops, markets and many premier restaurants in the Corvallis and Portland areas. We distribute wholesale quantities of many items through
Organically Grown Company
. Our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership program continues to grow and now includes over 320 households in Corvallis, Philomath, Portland, and Newport.
As if all that was not enough to keep us really busy, we also have Wild Garden Seed focused on organic seed production. That part of the business is in partnership with Frank and Karen Morton of Shoulder to Shoulder Farm. We produce farm-original varieties of many salad greens, vegetables, herbs and a few flowers. We sell seed to a variety of customers, including farmers like us. We do that through major organic seed distributors, both nationwide and abroad. We also sell locally in the Farm Stand and through the
Wild Garden Seed web site
. The Willamette Valley is a world class seed growing region and we are proud to be part of it.
