Black Sheep Festival at Farmers Market to Feature Produce Contest and Goat Demonstrations THIS Thursday

Goats will be visiting Manchester on Thursday! Photo courtesy of FireSign Farm.

This Thursday, the Manchester Farmers Market will host the second annual Black Sheep Festival: Goat Edition. The Black Sheep Festival brings the farm to the village and is a Farm Adventure for all ages. While last year focused on sheep, this year’s theme is goats. FireSign Farm from Whitmore Lake will be bringing several goats. Ruth Ehman will demonstrate goat milking, goat cheese making, hoof trimming, and how to make goat milk soap. Attendees will be able to pet and feed the goats and try their hand at milking. Also present will be a herding German shepherd and an orange farm cat named Oakley. Both are great with children!

For the second year in a row, the Black Sheep Festival will feature a produce and flower contest. Anyone can enter whether you are a vendor or home gardener, a child or adult! All entries must be presented between 3 and 4 pm on September 10th at the Chi Bro Park pavilion. The awards will be announced at 6:45 pm.

Contest Categories:

• Tomato – biggest & unusual
• Pepper – biggest, unusual
• Zucchini – biggest
• Melon – biggest
• Squash (non-zucchini) – biggest
• Carrot – biggest, unusual
• Bouquet – most beautiful, unusual

The Black Sheep Festival began last year as a product of the 2014 tourism grant that also brought us the new signs on the corner, the new website and tourism brochures. At that time agritourism was identified as a potentially successful area of tourism for Manchester to focus on and the Black Sheep Festival was born.

1st place winning carrots (largest and most unusual) at the 2014 Black Sheep Festival Produce and Flower Contest.

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by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and founder of the Manchester Mirror.