Lettuce show you what grew from an organic soap operation in Glocester

09:14 AM EDT on Wednesday, September 1, 2004

BY GAIL CIAMPA
Journal Food Editor

Journal photo / Bill Murphy One of the first bars of moisturizing milk soap produced by the mini-Nubian goats at Glocester Greens and Goats.

GLOCESTER -- Five years ago Carolyn LaPointe called her husband, Ray, and said, "I'm quitting my job. I'm going to raise goats."

Now, many of us have made this threat -- spouse to spouse -- at one time or another but Mrs. LaPointe, with a master's degree and a career in healthcare, actually meant it.

Luckily, her husband, a Pawtucket businessman, was ready for a life in the country. So they found the perfect spot on Snake Hill Road, a former horse farm, and Carolyn bought a couple of mini Nubian female goats. She bred them with male goats from another farm. Now she has five baby goats and plenty of goats' milk with which she makes and sells moisturizing soap.

Now if that sounds like a food story, it isn't.

That's because Carolyn wasn't content with goats alone. She needed a garden to grow, too. So she started planting, and planting and planting some more.

Journal photo / Bill Murphy Greens of such fascinating flavors and textures as this broad-leaf thyme make salads so tasty they don't need salad dressing.

Now, every Friday and Saturday, she sets up shop under a tent at the end of her driveway and sells bags of her most special mesclun greens, and vegetables to passers-by.

These aren't just any greens, with baby lettuce, arugula and radicchio. No, she grows salad greens that create a party in your mouth. Take one bite and taste the root beer greens. Another forkful might remind you of celery, from parcel, a green that looks like parsley and has the flavor of celery. Sorrel puckers you up with tangy lemony leaves. There are crunchy greens like minutina and aromatic ones like Shungiku.

Bitter, sweet and tangy -- it's all there on one forkful.

Carolyn began her quest for flavorful greens because she doesn't like to use dressing on her salad.

"I wanted the greens to provide the flavor," she said.

So on those cold country days in January, she began reading seed catalogs in her cozy ranch house.

Journal photo / Bill Murphy This plant's leaves taste just like root beer. Each forkful of the farm's foliage delivers a little party to the mouth.

Ray built her dozens of planting beds and on the land well fertilized from all those years that horses roamed around, she planted her amazing garden.

She just started her farm stand this summer and stocks it with her homegrown vegetables: squashes, eggplants, peppers and plenty of tomatoes, ground husk tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and tomatillos. But there is no doubt that her salad mix -- $2 for small bag, $6 for large -- is her signature item.

It hasn't been a good year for her regular tomatoes, with all the rain. And she loses a lot of produce to bugs because she keeps away from pesticides.

But stroll in her garden and through her two greenhouses and you'll find all sorts of basils, mints, parsleys, spinach, tastoi, garlic chives, beet greens, Swiss chards and arugula. Different leaves and textures make her greens as attractive visually as they are flavorful.

Journal photo / Bill Murphy Red malabar spinach grows at Glocester Greens and Goats, a former horse farm that grows organic greens for human grazing.

There are Welch onions, lemon cucumbers, papaya pear squash and Gadzukes zucchinis (a striped variety). She's also got gold raspberries, alpine strawberries and strazberries (half strawberry, half raspberry and sweeter, like a raspberry).

By the time you come back around to the barn, you realize her gardening fanaticism almost makes the goat-raising part of her life sound downright tame.

Details: Glocester Greens and Goats, 1535 Snake Hill Rd., Glocester (401) 567-8872 www.greensandgoats.com.