Vernon Street Farm
Our good friends Do-Hee and Josh up and left the San Francisco city life in 2022 and moved to upstate New York to start a farm! This was our second year in a row visiting them at Vernon Street Farm. This time we flew in for a stay in Manhattan for the week before and after the farm visit, so we took the Metro-North to Poughkeepsie, and Josh was kind enough to drive us the last hour back to Athens.
Giant Levain cookie as our breakfast snack on the train!
Welcome to farmland.
Cassie arrived ahead of us since she was in town to photograph a wedding nearby. Love our family meals!
Harvest time! This was Vernon Street Farm’s second year in operation. Very impressive, since Josh really started with no experience and mostly just learned from Youtube. This year they had three different market days: Wednesdays in Coxsackie, Saturdays in their own town of Athens, and Sundays in Catskill. It was a lot! This means they’re constantly working.
Cassie is always the first to volunteer herself for farm labor. She harvested a bunch of beautiful cherry tomatoes!
Do-Hee added a lot more flowers to her crop this year, and now she mostly just does the flowers while Josh does everything else.
Alex and I are less useful on the farm, but we are happy to be here!
Dinner feast, with local beef grilled by Josh and all the veggies grown by him too. We are converts to putting shiso on our burgers!
Instagram and reality, haha. Both beautiful, to be honest.
Time to get ready for the Athens market day.
Vernon Street Farm has their own table in town every Saturday. It’s very lovely to see their regulars come by for their weekly produce and flowers.
It also happened to be the town-wide yard sale day, so houses and shops alike had their sales spread out all over Athens.
Alex and I grabbed a breakfast pizza from The Athens Rooster for lunch.
And we were second in line, ready to pounce as soon as Dan opened up his Catskill Bread Co. They only open two days of the week, and they always sell out. Olive foccacia!
The whole Hudson River Valley is a hub for art. We decided to go visit this new installation/exhibition that took over an abandoned high school in Hudson. It’s called The Campus.
Definitely some haunted high school vibes.
Lots of creepy things, and lots of very cool art pieces. But no context at all. None of the pieces came with artist statements, and there wasn’t much of an overarching explanation of the whole installation either. But we still found it very interesting to walk around. And it was free!
Afterwards, stopping by the fancy grocery shop for Do-Hee’s favorite carrot cake.
And their egg person for eggs– of course they have an egg person. Last year when we visited they had one cat that they fed (Jake). This time there was Jake and three more cats, and apparently in the months since they’ve multiplied again so now there are nine cats/kittens. Wow.
Family dinner with tomato sauce made from farm tomatoes!
Sunday is Catskill Farmers Market day!
Friends at the market.
Walking around Catskill. There’s already been a lot of turnover and new shops since last year.
Colorful new shop The Little Art Shop.
Yun Hai dried fruits spotted inside the Made X Hudson shop.
Back to the market, with our dry curry sandwich from the little Japanese-owned shop Toko Provisions.
My little haul: a guide book for Do-Hee and Josh to keep, and a veggie brush to take home.
Dinner in Hudson: Issan Thai Star.
Final day, Alex and I made one more art outing, to Art Omi.
It’s a huge outdoor sculpture garden spread over many acres. We could’ve spent much longer exploring the grounds, but it was very hot outside.
So, a stop by Bartlett House for reinforcements in the form of carbs. Very good!
And the final family dinner, Do-Hee’s famous shrimp tacos. And pistachio Van Leeuwen’s ice cream.
And just like that, our farm stay was over! We had to wave goodbye to Do-Hee & Josh, and Cassie drove Alex and me back to the city.
We had a funny stop by Scarsdale for The Formsa Coffee’s new cafe. And then we were off to the Bronx to ride the subway back down, while Cassie was off to JFK to fly home to California.
Always such a joy to watch our friends live their best lives. Thank you so much for hosting us, Do-Hee & Josh!
Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. She embraces any excuse to travel. Follow her on instagram and view more of her professional work at annawu.com.
