Mississippi is where we live, so it gets the longest look. It is also not one place. The hill country north of Batesville farms nothing like the Delta, and neither of them farms like the piney woods coming down toward the coast — different dirt, different water, different weeks in the calendar.
So we browse it by region, not by compass point, and we started where we could walk out the door and check. The country around Oxford has had its own edition of this almanac since before the national one existed. The capital country came next, an hour’s ring drawn around Jackson. The rest is honest work still to do.
Same rule here as everywhere else in the Almanac: nothing goes on a page that we haven’t read in the farm’s own words, no fee to be listed, and no ads sold against anybody’s name.
Rings are drawn by drive time, so a couple of them cross the line into Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana. A farm always carries the state it’s actually in, not the state of the city it’s near.
And the standing rule, on every page of this thing: call or check their own page before you drive out.
Red clay and hardwood ridges from the Tallahatchie up to the Tennessee line — Lafayette, Panola, Marshall and DeSoto. Small places, cattle on the good bottoms, and more roadside produce in July than anybody writes down.
We live thirteen miles out of Oxford, so this corner got catalogued first and it got catalogued deeper — not just farms but the markets, the orchards, the nurseries, the barns and the people who shoot the pictures. It has its own edition, and it stays its own edition.
Nothing on that list is repeated down here. Go read it there.
Our own thirteen-mile radius, written up long before the Almanac went national: working farms, orchards and u-pick, farmers markets, nurseries, antiques, country stays, event barns and photographers — the places we’d actually send you.
The far north end of the hill country gets pulled toward Memphis, and the Almanac follows the drive rather than the line on the map. Three DeSoto County places — two at Hernando, one at Nesbit — are listed in the Memphis ring, carrying Mississippi as their state, because that’s the hour people actually drive.
The prairie and loess country around Jackson — Hinds, Madison, Rankin, Scott and Copiah. Blueberries and blackberries south and east of the city, herdshare milk out of Rankin, and a sixty-eight-acre farm inside the city limits.
One ring so far, drawn an hour out of the capital in every direction that makes sense to drive. It never leaves the state.
Empty so far. The Delta is row crop country on a scale that doesn’t sell you a bucket of berries, but the places that do sell direct are out there — Greenwood, Cleveland, Clarksdale — and we’d rather list six real ones than pad it out.
Farm in the Delta, or buy from one? Send us the place and you’ll be in the first batch.
Also empty. Hattiesburg, Laurel and the country between them keep blueberries, satsumas and a real Christmas tree season, and it’ll open the same way everything else did — one ring at a time, nothing in it we haven’t read in the farm’s own words.
Know who to call down there? Tell us.
Furthest off, and a different growing year than ours — the six counties down on the water plant when we’re still cold. We won’t pretend to know it yet.
Coast grower? Send us your place.
This is our own state, so getting it wrong here would be worse than getting it wrong anywhere else. Every farm on these pages is here because somebody read its own words and wrote them down. If that’s your place and something’s off — or if you’re not on here at all — we want to hear from you. No fee, no ads, no catch.