The Liar’s Table farm and market occupies what was once an iconic greasy spoon in Avery County, North Carolina. The restaurant was home to the “Liar’s Table,” an open table where anyone could pull up a chair, order a cup of coffee, and be sure to hear some tall tales. Learn how farmers Amos and Kaci Nidiffer started their farm as a hobby and how it grew to support their community.
My name is Kaci Nidiffer and this is The Liar’s Table farm and shop. We are in Elk Park, North Carolina in Avery County. The shop when we bought it used to be an old greasy spoon diner. They had a big long table when you walked in where just anybody could sit down. Kind of a communal table. And they had a big sign over it that said, “The Liar’s Table” because a lot of the old-timers would sit there and tell stories and exaggeration was very common in these stories. So that was the origins of The Liar’s Table.
When we were both in college we both got interested in growing our own food. The farm is just something that we kind of started doing as a hobby, as something we want to do for ourselves, and it kind of grew into this bigger thing, wider thing to share with the community. We’re really really happy it turned out that way. We love it.
The best part of being a farmer is eating! I think I feel spoiled, you know, just all the good stuff we get to eat. I feel like a lot of people set aside times to go be in nature and get refreshed by that and we get to do that all the time.
It’s incredible the skills that we have acquired over the years, number one being just taking care of the soil. That’s like our main thing that we do as farmers. Distribution and marketing and sales and knowing what your customers want, knowing what they don’t want. That’s just a lot of trial and error and of being in your own community and listening to people and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. Just being flexible is a really big part of being a farmer.
We chose to grow broccoli because number one I love it. It’s one of my favorite veggies. A big part of it was it’s just hard to find around here. There’s not a lot of growers growing broccoli in Avery County. The variety we grow is a sprouting broccoli. It’s a spring and fall crop. It is extremely flavorful, extremely tender. You can use the whole plant. None of it goes to waste, from the stock to the leaves. It’s just one of our favorite things to grow. We love it, chefs love it, our CSA members love it, and people that shop at our store love it. It’s kind of a treat. The ideal condition for the variety we grow are cool evenings, so that’s why we can only really grow it in the spring and in the fall. In the summer it just gets too hot. One of the most interesting things about this broccoli that we grow is even when it flowers it’s still edible, and so it’s a really beautiful food. We use the broccoli leaves as well. You can use them like collards.
We grow a lot of cherry tomatoes. In our high tunnels we grow a ton of greens all year round. We’ve got lots of different types of kale, chard. We grow a lot of cabbages. We grow a lot of squash and zucchini, a lot of winter squash, pumpkins. We do asparagus. We do rhubarb.
There’s a Food Pantry located in Newland which is just up the road from us and they offer food to anybody who is in need of it We supply fresh vegetables for them to offer. We sell our produce at our farm shop which is just down the road from our farm, The Liars table, and then we also sell through our CSA members. We sell to lots of local restaurants in the area our community Elk Park here. We’ve really been able to be more visible in in our little small village from opening our shop. It’s just a lot more convenient for people and I really feel like that’s opened up a lot more conversations and more collaborations with people in the community. So it’s been great.
We sell through the High Country Food Hub out of Boone. They do a lot of marketing and a lot of things on the behalf of the farmers, so we can actually focus on farming They worry about the distribution and we worry about the growing, and it works out great. We also work with a couple of food pantries here in Avery County and also in Watauga County.
We work with the ag instructors and educators at Avery High. We work with their kids in the FFA (Future Farmers of America), and we also work with local elementary school. They come and do tours of the farm and then they also get to do pizza making classes with us over at our shop. We hope that people will be able to access some fresh food here. Especially in Elk Park we don’t have a grocery store. A lot of people that come into the shop are interested in growing their own food and that’s amazing. We’re all about empowering people to do that for themselves as well.
One of our visions is to definitely expand upon our shop that we opened. It’s just been one of those things that has opened up a lot of doors that we never even thought of. We’ve had a lot more interaction with people than in the past and that’s been great.
This video was created as part of ASAP’s Growing Minds Farm to School program. Resources for including these as part of a classroom curriculum are available on the Growing Minds website.