Green Aisle Grocery

Photo courtesy of Green Meadow Farm

Yesterday, American Express’s Open Forum ran a story by Serious Eats‘s Ed Levine on our dude Glenn Brendle and his farm Gap, PA farm, Green Meadow. If you read our blog, shop at our store or follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you know the name Green Meadow. Glenn and his son Ian supply us with about 50% of the local produce we carry. Our sensationally spicy arugula? Green Meadow. Beautiful heirloom tomatoes? Green Meadow. Bangin’ beef jerky? Green Meadow. We like this graf.

Long before it was in vogue, Glenn was growing everything organically. Part of the reason was selfish. “I didn’t want to subject myself to those chemicals,” he says. “Or other people.” Plus, chemicals are expensive. Glenn employed solutions like spraying with oil-soap emulsions, and companion planting to encourage good bugs and discourage bad ones. “It’s nothing new. People farmed for thousands of years without chemicals. We work with what we have, and it works.”

Levine goes on to shout-out some of our favorite Green Meadow goodies, including the exotically aromatic kaffir lime leaves, candy-sweet red cipollini (currently in stock) and the pawpaws we’ve been talking about all month. A great article on a great farmer who keeps us stocked with local goodness year-round.

Winner, winner, Marra's dinner!

From the Department of Tell Us Something We Don’t Know, Philly Mag‘s annual Best Of issue just declared Passyunk Square Avenue the victor in a neighborhood shopping face-off with Northern Liberties. Awesome! Congrats to all our neighbors mentioned.

We’ve been written about before for our use of Twitter and the Fache, but special thanks to John Paul Titlow of Read Write Web, whose post about us has brought all kinds of digital traffic to this blog. Here’s a snippet:

On a typical day, Green Aisle might use Facebook and Twitter to announce the arrival of fresh-picked apricots, natural almond milk and hummus, all accompanied by camera phone-snapped photos of the actual products as they come in the door.

and

While the real-world success of the social media initiative is not as easy to quantify as, say, page views on a website, Erace says that each day about 40% of their customers mention something they saw on Twitter or Facebook.

That’s true. Nearly half of you tell us you saw the new Mast Bros. chocolate bar/pickle tasting/milk sale/etc. on our Twitter feed or Facebook page. Keep it up, kids, and so will we.