make sure it’s local and not just bottled with

make sure it’s local and not just bottled with a local label.

When buying honey in the comb, look for a clean, well-shaped comb. Don’t be surprised if the honey looks a little darker than that you see in stores — it’s a mixed honey and very flavorful.

You might find sorghum and local apple butter where you find honey. Both make good gifts. Sorghum is a grain, not a sugar product, grown from a very peculiar plant that looks like midget com, and boiled out locally by dozens of ingenious family contraptions, some using mules running in circles. Apple butter, of course, needs no introduction, but if the fruit stand can’t tell you where or how it was made, don’t bother buying it.

If you wish to give a country ham for Christmas, try to find one that was salted and smoked last year by a local farmer. There are fine commercial country hams, but nothing can compare to the ham raised “by hand” on leftovers from the garden and orchard as well as grain.

Some farmers still have smokehouses and will hang their hams :¥hfeVe*'for the winter after salting them hea?Byto prevent spoilage.

A good place to start to track down a real ham is in your general store, where the storekeeper may be selling a home-cured ham by the slice and will know the farmer who raised it. It’s not cold enough yet to hang meat, so the ham you find will be last year’s — that’s fine.

Once you find a ham, you may be surprised at the price. Depending on size, the ham may cost $20 to $40. But remember that the ham represents about a quarter of what the farmer can expect to get from the sale of an animal that took the better part of a year to raise — an animal that needed literally hundreds of gallons of water to be comfortable in the summer, that was a very hardto-handle several hundred-pounder by late fall.

The Piedmont farmer simply cannot hope to compete with the MidWestern or Tidewater pork farmer with a mechanized large scale feed