May has about worn us out!  the Dill Pickles complete their 2009 Philadelphia Metropolitan Tour with a grand finale at Fergie's Pub, 1214 Sansom Street in Philadelphia.

Okay, to be honest, the grand finale won't really have anything that grand. I pushed for naked dancing girls, but no one wanted to get naked for free. No one but the bass player anyway, and who wants to see that?

But there will be beer, and fiddles, and old time music. also bluegrass with our friends the Setting Sons, who also played Narberth this weekend. Who knew the sleepy little suburb was a hotbed of old timey bluegrassy action?

Speaking of old-timey action, the Dill Pickles host an open old-time jam at McShea's in (where else?) narberth every Monday evening.

hello again everyone!
the lettuces are growing, the arugula is tasty, and the beets and turnips are doing well! also sunflowers and tomatoes on the way, and squashy sprouting too.

but best of all, the dill pickles will play the narberth music festival on Haverford Ave in Narberth, this Saturday at about 2:00. 

see you there, we hope!

Spring has sprung at the Dill Pickles country estate (for what are the Dill Pickles but fine country gentlemen)!  The hops vines are nearly 7 feet tall (the Pickles enjoy beer), the beets and the turnips are poking through, the potatoes have sprouted, and we've been enjoying fresh lettuce for the past two weeks. Meanwhile, Nikolai the chicken farmer has been gobbling eggs as fast as the hens can lay 'em, while simultaneously fighting off an attack from Mr. Fox!

With spring comes celebration, and we invite you all to join us at the Spruce Hill May Fair, this Saturday May 9, with us and many other fine performers. All for FREE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUN8cTxktVA

Last week while playing the NarbEarth Day Festival in (where else) Narberth PA, I spoke at length about the farm where the Dill Pickles live and cultivate the land, 20 acres in southwest Philadelphia.

Now there are some people, among them the other Dill Pickles, who will tell you this story of bucolic bliss is just that: a story, a fiction, a fraud meant to entice impressionable minds into a life of growing mutant crops in southwest Philly's polluted brownfields.  "There's no farm," they say. "and there aren't 20 acres either."

Well, that may or may not be true, but as for the 250 year old farm house?  That's real all right, and located exactly where I said it was, out on Woodland avenue, and can be seen here (warning pdf). The house is like a ghost, tucked between rowhouses build in the early 1900s.

From the article:

This circa 1764 stone farmhouse in Philadelphia is a rare survivor of the days when most of what is now Philadelphia was farmland.

“It provides an opportunity for us to look at what the neighborhood once was, when there were only a couple of roads through Southwest Philadelphia and all around were fields,” says Donna Henry, executive director of the Southwest Community Development Corporation. In its simple vernacular style, small size (less than 900 square feet), and walls of local stone, this farmhouse is not unlike
scores that survive as well-kept residences throughout the Philadelphia suburbs. But squeezed as it is between early-20th century rowhouses in the city’s Kingsessing neighborhood, the farmhouse now appears decidedly out of time and
out of place.

The farmhouse was probably built when James Coultas owned the 25 acres of farmland upon which the structure originally sat. Coultas was a prominent Philadelphian who served as High Sheriff of Philadelphia County for a time. Since
his primary residence is known to have been elsewhere, it is likely that this farmhouse was used by tenant farmers. It is listed on the Philadelphia
 egister of Historic Places.

It is also, sadly, sealed off because it was used as a drug house (not by us) in recent years.

Philadelphia is a strange place...