More than peaches:
Celebrating Georgia products

BY JANE F. GARVEY

Georgians are busy as ever producing myriad things to eat, objects to look at and items that make life easier. Small business moves forward despite a troubled economy, sometimes providing jobs for others and sometimes employment only for the producer and his or her family—but still contributing to the state's economic well-being and making money. Let's have a look at some products we found this year.

Foods and agricultural products
We’re an agricultural state from top to bottom.

This year, there’s more Georgia cheese news. Flat Creek Lodge, a resort near Swainsboro, is Georgia’s second licensed artisenal cheese producer after Sweet Grass Dairy, near Thomasville. Flat Creek took a blue ribbon this year at the American Cheese Society competition for its “Caraway Cotija” in the “Hispanic & Portuguese Flavored” category. A drier style cheese similar to Parmesan, it has a nice saltiness and picante character. Hormone-free, Flat Creek’s raw cow’s-milk-based cheeses have made the grade with Atlanta restaurateurs. The feta (made from pasteurized milk) and the farmstead blue are our faves.

Licensed this April, Decimal Place Farm in Conley has 23 milk goats and makes three types of cheeses—feta; traditional chevre, which is very mild and not at all strongly “goat-y”; a mozarella-style cheese; and a cream cheese. The cheeses are available at Rainbow Natural Foods in Decatur, and Sevananda and Alon’s, both in Atlanta. The mozzarella-style can be made without salt, a real boon for heart patients, and the cream cheese is salt-free.

Coming in soon with a cheese-making operation and a Canadian cheese maker at the helm is Sparkman’s Cream Valley, with its all-Jersey, hormone-free herd near Moultrie. This year, the company launched a line of ice creams and drinkable yogurts.

Pasture-based Jubilee Organic Creamery also is in the works, starting with a spreadable butter, available now. Soon, says owner Sandra Duncan, they will have land and Jersey cows in Reynolds, where they will do organic pasture-based milk production and, eventually, cheeses.

Fifth-generation Georgian Susan “Summer” Cordell produces Goodness Gracious Granola, which comes in small, snack-sized (four-ounce) sealed packages as well as larger packages. “Going Nutless” is a good choice for anyone allergic to nuts. Try the “Maple Ginger Fix.” The handmade, small-batch granolas contain no flour, sugar or salt. Just great flavor.

Specializing in lamb, John Davis, a retired Piedmont College English professor, has opened Hemlock Hill Farm in Sautee, where he has 20 acres and 60 animals. He likes the Katahdin breed, developed in Maine. “You can get six sheep on an acre,” he says to answer the question, “Why sheep?” The lambs are pastured with some grain supplement from Godfrey’s Warehouse Inc., an animal feed producer in Madison. The animals are raised without drugs or antibiotics, so Davis plans to pursue organic certification. The meat is available chiefly through a private client list.

Stanley Farms, in Vidalia, is one of those success stories that has enough material to make a movie: R.T. began farming as a sharecropper in 1964, and grew his first acres of the sweet onions in 1975 on just 5 acres. Now more than 1,000 acres of Vidalia onions, among other crops and vegetables, form the foundation of this family enterprise. Not only are the onions certified Vidalias—there are a lot of wannabes out there—they also grow certified organic Vidalia onions, available only in May and June. Besides fresh product, the company does a line of relishes, dressings, salsas and sauces that are made at the farm.

Other products made by small Georgia producers won big awards in the “Flavors of Georgia” competition. Atlanta-based Sue Sullivan’s “Hot Squeeze” is a spicy-sweet chipotle hot sauce that won in the “Barbecue or Hot Sauce” category. We liked it for its balance of heat and sweet; we favor it as a dip for meatballs.

Winning for “Jams, Jellies and Sauces” was Dr. Pete’s, a longtime Savannah operation run by Jan and Joel Coffee. The couple began to bottle her dad’s famous pecan mustard glaze in 1985, so while many people may be familiar with the original sauce, the newly formulated Lemon Pear and Orange Sesame dressings are most delectable.

Not all sauces are for condiment purposes. The “Southern Secret Sauce” made by Southern Way Gourmet in Douglasville is a basting sauce. It’s very thin in body, as is typical of basting or soppin’ sauces. They’re to be brushed onto meat as it slowly cooks over indirect heat. The producers say this is great on chicken, quail, and maybe even shrimp and oysters.

To top off burgers, we suggest Sam’s Jams mild (or hot) chow chow. Charlie Chambers of Rydal grows all his own vegetables unless the drought gets in his way. “I had to buy cabbage this time,” he says, “but still all ingredients are Georgia-grown vegetables.” There are no preservatives or high-fructose corn syrup in his relishes, either. Get them retail exclusively at Ray’s Butcher Shop on W. Main St. in Cartersville.

We found a good barbecue sauce this year for folks who like the sweeter style: Johnny’s Pride, by Johnny Whitworth of Toccoa. He also makes a hot style, but this one has a depth of flavor and richness that doesn’t require heat. If you want some heat though, try J&J’s “Private Reserve” carrot-based habanero sauce. It’s zingy, so go easy, but perks up greens nicely.

Arts and crafts
Georgia is full of artists and artisans doing some of the loveliest work seen anywhere.

If you enjoy the work of self-taught naïve artists, consider Lincolnton’s Leonard Jones. Born in 1955, Jones paints classic memory paintings typically with single-word titles on found materials. He uses house paints on sheets of roofing tin he’s rescued from old structures, and instead of brushes, uses his fingers and sticks to apply the paint. Frequently faceless figures, almost always wearing hats, populate his works. The images exhibit such compelling dignity and authenticity, they’re hard to resist.

An alumna of the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio, Loretta Eby studied printmaking and drawing as well as glassmaking, her major field. She works in hot glass, blowing each piece by mouth until either a Christmas tree ornament or perfume bottle appears. She and her husband, Jeff Jackson, a sculptor, occupy the former chicken coop at Happy Valley near Watkinsville, where both have worked since 1987.

In Tallapoosa, sculptor Susan C. Clayton captures stories and personalities in her amazing three-dimensional figures. Are they dolls? Puppets? Icons? They’re some of all of that—and more. These one-of-a-kind pieces are not cast, but ceramic, which in her deft hands acquires the plasticity of living flesh. Faces exhibit a full range of emotions, enhanced by body language.

Weaver Bonnie Montgomery, who holds a master’s degree in textile art from the University of Georgia, specializes in patterned rag rugs, but also designs placemats, handbags, fringed rivets and coasters. The rugs also make lovely wall art. Montgomery plays with pattern and color, emphasizing different tones and color values, so that color becomes pattern. The Georgia native’s work is sold at numerous galleries, but always at Genuine Georgia in Greensboro. 

The craft of woodturning is often applied to bowls and pieces that are designed as pure art, as sculpture, rather than as functional objects. But wood turner Christopher Higdon of Marietta, a landscape architect by education and first career, has created a company devoted entirely to the use of hand-turned wood to make fine writing implements. Higdon, a Georgia native, uses distinctive materials, even dried cactus, and exotic woods to make these pens, many of which are trimmed in 22-carat gold.

Specialty products
Small businesses are vital to Georgia’s economic well-being, and it’s amazing how many small companies add to the Georgia product list with their ingenuity and creativity. Here are a few.

About five years ago, Ainsworth Zeagler, of Sylvania, had retired from hog raising and wanted to do some very nice floors for his home. He’s always owned a one-man sawmill, so custom cutting the boards wasn’t too much trouble. Once installed, the floor amazed everyone who saw it, from neighbors and friends to decorators who dropped by to look. Encouraged to make a business of it, Zeagler today has installed floors from Virginia to Colorado. Crafted in four different designs that are finished either in oil or polyurethene, the Southern yellow pine he uses is hand-selected, hand-cut, and hand-finished, right down to the distressing on the edges and ends. Boards come in widths from 6 to 16 inches and from 8 to 10 feet in length. Zeagler Farms Handcrafted Flooring has two full-time employees as well as seasonal help.

As a specialist in fine antiques, John Tribble began to observe that people were adapting antiques for use in kitchens and baths. He got an idea, and established a division of J. Tribble Antiques that manufactures kitchen and bath cabinetry that looks like furniture. “It’s a trend in design today,” he observes. The manufacturing is done in Atlanta. The rich finishes and fine production qualities of these pieces provide the aesthetic of antiques but the functionality required in a modern kitchen or bath.

Zelosport is a small Columbus-based outfit that makes games. Based on the pastime of paper football, where players flick a piece of paper across a tabletop, Zelosport invented “finger sports,” for which you simply roll out a vinyl playing surface on a table and start to play. Pieces, playing surface and rulebook all slip back into a tube for storage. Besides football, you can play golf, soccer and baseball at the kitchen table.

Manufactured in The Rock in West Central Georgia, Rockwood Premium Fuel Pellets may be just the ticket for anyone who relies on wood-burning stoves or fireplace inserts for home heating purposes. The low-ash pellets are made from hardwood waste products and byproducts and biomass matter, which CEO Phillip Fallin explains is anything fibrous. The company claims the pellets emit almost no smoke when burning, making them also environmentally friendly as they would not, then, produce CO2 emissions. The pellets, which may also be used in outdoor grilling, cost about one-third that of fuel oil, propane or natural gas, according to company estimates. Designed by Fallin in 2005, the facility came into full production just two years ago.

The inventiveness of Georgians knows no bounds. Adam Nelson of Atlanta got tired of his young sons waking up early, so he invented the Good Nite Lite to train them to sleep another hour and let him and his wife get an extra few ZZZs. It works based on behavior modification. When the child goes to bed, he sees a sun face by day switch to a moon face at night, telling him it’s time for bed. The moon face changes back to a sun face at a pre-set time, so the child knows when it’s OK to get up and start the day.

And finally, what is Georgia if not the ideal place for fishing? In Martinez near Augusta, Roy Altman began Buckeye Lures by developing a lure for his own purposes—he’s a weekend angler—that met his requirements. He started winning tournaments, and friends and acquaintances began pestering him about his lures, so he started making them in his garage. From that small beginning, Buckeye Lures has gone to producing some 80,000 handmade lures a week at an enterprise that employs four people in addition to his son, Jeremy.

Creative Georgians have generated innovative ideas and put into production thousands of products from foodstuffs to art to crafts and a host of intriguing items. Georgia has much to offer anyone looking for distinctive fine things to own or to share as gifts.

—Jane F. Garvey is a freelance travel and food writer from Decatur.

Georgia products

Foods and agricultural products

•  Decimal Place Farm, Conley, (404) 363-0356

•  Dr. Pete’s, J. C. Specialty Foods, Savannah, (912) 233-3035, dr-petes.com

•  Flat Creek Lodge Dairy, Swainsboro, (478) 237-8273, www.flatcreeklodge.com

•  Goodness Gracious Granola, Atlanta, (404) 625-9001, www.goodnessgraciousgranola.com

•  Hemlock Hill Farm, Sautee, (706) 878-1944, jcfarm@woodstream.net

•  Hot Squeeze, c/o Global Specialty Foods, Chamblee, (770) 399-0414, www.globalspecialtyfoods.com, www.thehotsqueeze.com

•  J&J’s “Private Reserve” Habanero Sauce, Douglasville, (800) 461-4699, www.jjhotsauce.com

•  Johnny’s Pride, Toccoa, (706) 886-9198, whitworthfoods@hotmail.com

•  Jubilee Organic Creamery, Griffin, (678) 544-9503

•  Sam’s Jams, Rydal, (770) 382-8029

•  Stanley Farms/Vidalia Valley, Vidalia (912) 526-3575, www.vidaliavalley.com

•  Southern Way Gourmet, Douglasville, (888) 732-7381, southernwaygourmet.com

•  Sparkman’s Cream Valley, Moultrie, (229) 941-4082, www.sparkmanscreamvalley.com

• • •

Arts and crafts

•  Susan C. Clayton, Tallapoosa, (770) 574-2794, susanclaytonsculpture@yahoo.com, scsculpture.homestead.com

•  Loretta Eby, Watkinsville, (706) 769-9703

•  Higdon Writing Instruments, Marietta, (770) 783-1551, www.higdonwritinginstruments.com

•  Leonard Jones, Lincolnton, (706) 401-4325

•  Montgomery Crafts, Watkinsville, (706) 769-8573

• • •

Specialty products

•  Buckeye Lures, Martinez, (706) 863-5468, www.buckeyelures.com

•  Good Nite Lite, Atlanta, www.goodnitelite.com

•  J. Tribble Antiques, Atlanta, (404) 846-1156, www.jtribbleantiques.com

•  Rockwood Premium Fuel Pellets, The Rock, (706) 646-5052, www.rockwoodpellets.com

•  Zeagler Farms Handcrafted Flooring, Sylvania, (912) 863-7785

•  Zelosport, Columbus, www.zelosport.com