At The Village Bakery, we are fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful local resources.

The oldest continuously operating mill in Kentucky, Weisenberger Mill offers a variety of freshly-milled flours and grains. Perched on the banks of Elkhorn Creek, Weisenberger looks like something right out of a Currier & Ives lithograph.

Just down the road and across a tiny, one-lane bridge, old mill stones are worked into a curving stone wall.
 

And everywhere along the way, fields of hay, horses lazily grazing in the rolling Kentucky hills, tobacco barns holding rows of tobacco leaves hung high in rafters, a lovely juxtaposition of past and present.

The Old Mill at Spring Hill State Park offers an even more thorough immersion in history. Located in the hills of southern Indiana, the park includes an inn and a pioneer village featuring a blacksmith shop, tavern, schoolhouse, apothecary, gardens, and a still-working grist mill where we buy our corn meal, milled and bagged as we watch.

Louisville's Creation Gardens specializes in providing Louisville chefs with the best seasonal produce and gourmet products they can find. We love their fresh herbs, particularly the Genovese basil, their gorgeous, fragrant rosemary, their consistently good quality garlic, and a host of cheeses that are a bread baker's dream.

But our community extends even as far as California, one of the only handful of states in this country who grow durum wheat, and where Australian-born Alan Scott of Ovencrafters, our oven designer, has devoted his life and his career to reviving the art and craft of naturally-leavened breads baked in a wood-fired oven. Without Alan Scott's work and encouragement, many of us would not be doing what we're doing today.

Small things, but significant to us, finding a ready source of wood is a never-ending challenge for artisan bakers with wood-fired ovens. We are lucky in our location, surrounded by timber mills whom we engage with in what we like to think of as a mutually-beneficial exchange of efforts. They produce scrap, we need wood. It's a wonderful resource for us, in addition to our own judicious harvesting of timber on our property.