Bringing Good Cheer on a Winter's Night
A Christmas tree bonfire at Langwater Farm in North Easton, MA on January 27, 2024 was a welcome light in the darkness. (Video courtesy Langwater Farm.)
Langwater Farm in North Easton, MA is turning a Christmas tree bonfire into a cherished community event. The farm, which sells Christmas trees during the holidays, brought in the local fire department to supervise their staging of this ritual on the evening of January 27, 2024.
“Our customers are incredibly loyal,” says Kevin O’Dwyer, co-owner of the farm with his wife, Kate. “We’re always looking for ways to surprise and thank them. We invited them to drop off their bare Christmas trees and come back for our winter bonfire festival.”
The bonfire attracted hundreds of local residents and will become an annual event.
Building a Loyal Customer Base
A wall in the new store at Langwater Farm thanks the people who built it.
Langwater Farm is an 80-acre certified organic family farm and farm store. Advantageously located on a major road in greater Boston, it has attracted a strong base of local customers, while also attracting agritourism visitors from all over eastern Massachusetts.
Only open since 2010, when the O’Dwyer family was chosen to start a community farm in this historic spot, Langwater Farm regularly adds new products, services, and experiences to give customers even more reasons to make this a weekly destination.
When the farm spots a community need, it looks for ways to meet it. “We started out with a seasonal farm store, but we realized that there was sufficient demand to operate it year-round,” O’Dwyer says. “We opened our new store in 2022.”
The store features Langwater’s organic produce, pastries, and prepared foods, as well as other locally sourced products.
Adding More to the Roster
Langwater hosts a weekly market in the store. In addition to other farmers, vendors include family and women-owned businesses. It also runs additional events, such as arts & craft markets and a local food festival.
Other agritourism activities include PYO strawberries (that’s me, Myrna Greenfield, in the photo, eager to taste those ripe berries), flowers, apples, and pumpkins and public events (such as monthly wood-fired pizza nights and farm to table dinners); and private rentals.
O’Dwyer believes that their prepared food offerings and Lunch Corner are major growth opportunities.
“We just offered a vegetarian BBQ Pulled Mushroom Sandwich special with our house coleslaw, and it was a big hit!” he says. “Our sandwich menu features our farm’s produce and reflects the season’s harvests.”
(Note to self: Must go back to get that sandwich.)