When Lynsey Gammon first started Gracie’s Farm in Wanship, Summit County, the soil was dry and barren. Seven years later, her team is hosting dinners among the rows of crops, and their abundant seasonal produce is the star of the show.
Gracie’s Farm Dinner Series, hosted by The Lodge at Blue Sky, Auberge Resorts Collection, celebrates local and seasonal ingredients by spotlighting specific crops in a fine dining experience. The first dinner in the series, held on June 19, highlighted baby spring vegetables like radishes, peas and early spring greens. The following three dinners will feature garlic, tomatoes and the final harvest.
It’s taken a lot of work for Gammon and her team to get to this point, but she says their efforts pay off when members of the community become more engaged with local growers and enjoy eating produce in their seasons.
“It’s a really good way to highlight everybody and get people together to enjoy what farmers do and how chefs can actually make a kind of magic with those ingredients,” Gammon said. “We wanted to really focus on seasonal eating and allow people to become aware of what it means to eat seasonally.”
The dinners are held at the farm itself, with one long table set up between the rows of the garden. It’s a whole new take on farm-to-table eating — rather than bringing fresh produce to a local eatery, guests come to the farm itself to get as close as possible to the source of their food. The courses are even prepared in an outdoor kitchen set up specifically for the occasion.
This table-to-farm setup presents some challenges — Zoltan Lucskai, the banquet captain at Blue Sky, says it takes several hours to prepare and requires a lot of organization and walking back and forth. However, he says it’s worth the effort.
“It’s just beautiful. The outdoor event is more challenging, but it’s much more heartfelt, and just gives you more value in the end, I think,” he said.
Making the garden grow
It’s hard to imagine, standing among the rows of abundant crops, but the land that is now Gracie’s Farm was once a dry pasture that had been overgrazed by horses and cattle.
Gammon, who actually has a background in public health, got into agriculture after starting a small garden in Salt Lake City and selling produce to a local market. She said Mike and Barb Phillips, the owners of Blue Sky, always envisioned a broader connection to the land for their resort. When they hired Gammon to start a farm from scratch, they didn’t just want to grow crops to supply the lodge’s restaurants; their goal was to foster a unique, local, farm-to-table experience for their guests.
Farming in Utah presents some unique challenges. To begin with, the soil is dry and can lack essential nutrients, which means it needs a lot of water and organic matter before anything can grow. Once Utah farmers have adequately prepared their soil, they only have a short time to plant, grow and harvest food — the growing season in the Park City area only lasts around 65 days, from Father’s Day to Labor Day.
Focusing on growing crops that work with Utah’s climate and environment has helped Gracie’s Farm address both of those issues.
“We’ve created a very prolific farm over the past several years, doing it all regeneratively and organically, mostly by hand, with a team of all women farmers,” Gammon said. “We’ve prepped the land, enriched the soil and planted climate-appropriate crops so that we can maximize our production but also have respect for the earth.”
Before they began planting, Gammon and her team added “tons of organic matter to the soil,” which gave it the nutrients it desperately needed. Improving the soil’s health also helps with moisture retention, which means the farmers don’t waste water — a necessity in Utah’s dry climate.
As for the short growing season, Gracie’s Farm is able to extend that time a bit with tunnels and greenhouses, but Gammon says the best thing they can do is focus on climate-appropriate crops. Growing produce suited to Utah’s climate means they don’t need to use excess water, and the farmers are able to focus their energy on select crops.
The benefits of seasonal eating
The short growing season is actually part of the inspiration for the farm dinner series. Because the farm’s produce is grown in its prime season and picked at the peak of freshness, the flavors are stronger than what you can expect from mass-produced produce that is picked early and forced to ripen off the vine.
“The season on our farm, because it’s so short, we really have these highlighted times of ingredients,” Gammon said.
Gammon earned a master’s degree in public health before she started working in agriculture, and she said she’s seen some overlap in her two fields as she focuses on nutrient density in food.
“When we’re selling our food, it’s the best food that you can eat. We’re providing people with a quality diet, and that’s the key to so many other health factors,” she said. “The accessibility to healthy food is always on my mind. We try to involve the community as much as possible, and so the broader the reach, the better.”
Seasonal eating can introduce people to produce they might not normally try. For the first course of the “baby spring veggies” dinner, head chef Guillermo Tellez served a chilled corn and sweet kale soup garnished with macha sauce and corn shoots. While the guests enjoyed the soup, the corn shoots were the star of the show — surprisingly sweet and tender, and an ingredient few had tried before.
Focusing on seasonal ingredients also means you might use those ingredients in unorthodox ways. Tellez said one of the best dishes he’s crafted for the dinner series was a candied tomato with vanilla ice cream. And the upcoming garlic dinner on July 10 will include the farm’s garlic in every course — yes, including dessert.
“Why change and mask flavors when the vegetables can speak for themselves?” Tellez said. “You manipulate it the least amount, and you end up with great products.”
Celebrating seasonal produce in Utah
Gammon and Tellez work together to coordinate the farm’s growing schedule with plans for the dinner series. Tellez presents ideas of ingredients he’d like to use in the next season’s menu, and Gammon addresses what is feasible given the growing conditions and helps design a theme.
Any ingredients that Gracie’s Farm is unable to produce come from local farms and ranches or other small producers that Tellez has worked with previously. Tellez’s career has taken him around the world, from Charlie Trotters in Chicago to The One and Only Palmilla Resort in Los Cabos, and he has always focused on fresh, organic produce and meats for what he calls their “pristine flavors.”
“I’ve been doing that throughout my career, searching for small producers, small farms, and that’s my quest here in Utah,” he said.
Tellez says the timing of the harvest is the hardest part about the farm dinner series, so he and Gammon stay in constant communication regarding the harvest.
“We don’t want to ripen (produce) in the cooler or in a room for three weeks, four weeks, we want to make sure that they’re ripe from the get go,” he said. “As soon as you harvest it, they’re ready to eat.”
This timing pays off, rewarding the farmers, chefs and dinner guests with especially flavorful produce.
“People overlook spring vegetables, but baby lettuces are some of the sweetest things that you’re gonna have. Baby root vegetables have more crispness than you would find later in the summer,” Gammon told guests at the first dinner. “So really, really enjoy those vegetables and understand that we harvested them this week and they’re fresh to you from the fields out there.”
Impact on the community
Nicole Salinas, a Wanship resident who attended the baby spring vegetables dinner, said she and her husband appreciate the farm’s sustainability.
“It’s amazing, it’s very fresh. It feels local,” Salinas said of the dinner. “I think that’s what they try and do here at Blue Sky and Gracie’s Farm, is make you feel part of the community.”
The farm’s outreach extends beyond the dinners. Gracie’s Farm has grown enough over the years that it now serves not only Blue Sky but also a few other local restaurants. And every Friday afternoon, the farmers set up a stand to sell produce to locals. A food truck often joins the site, and customers are encouraged to take a tour of the farm.
“We really invite the local community to come up here for our farm stand and get engaged and see what we’re doing,” Gammon said.
The farm’s commitment to that community is palpable at the dinner series. By seating guests at one long table in the heart of the farm, attendees are encouraged to interact with each other and with the farm itself. In a world where people are often so removed from their food and from each other, it’s encouraging to see seasonal ingredients bring people together.
“We’d love to have more of a broad community at these dinners,” Gammon said. “Everybody gets to interact with each other. Everybody’s welcome.”
