Labor Day weekend in the village of Saranac Lake features family-friendly events with the Farm 2 Fork Festival held on Saturday, Aug. 31, and a new daylong music festival Northern Current on Sunday, Sept 1. Both events will be located in Riverside Park.
Farm 2 Fork is celebrating its 10th year as a community-led festival that highlights the region’s local bounty. Held at the Saranac Lake Farmers’ Market, it gives attendees a chance to taste dishes created with local ingredients. Tickets are $15; $12 for vegetarians. Vendors open at 9 a.m. and lunch will be served at 11 a.m.
The low-waste event will feature a robust local tasting menu to include pulled pork sandwiches, pesto noodles, a baked potato bar, cucumber salad, local cheese tastings and a surprise dessert. This year’s theme will be “Victory Gardens” and will feature family-friendly activities as well as live music. Festival goers will come away with recipe cards to make many of the dishes in their own kitchens.
The Farm to Fork Festival will use the proceeds of this event to give back to the community through the Adirondack North Country Association’s (ANCA) FarmShare Fund. This grant program supports a vibrant regional food system that is healthy for our communities, our farms and our environment.
The following day, Northern Current welcomes the community for a free, family-friendly music festival featuring an eclectic mix of music and fun, including an activity area for kids complete with a bouncy house.
Music starts at 11:30 a.m. and runs through the day until 10 p.m. The lineup is headlined by Kat Wright, a soul singer from Burlington, and includes a variety of local bands and visiting national acts. New additions to the lineup include Steve Langdon and Useless Cans.
Steve Langdon, of Saranac Lake, comes by his odd strain of guitar/harmonica American roots music honestly. One set of grandparents were eminent scholars and collectors of cowboy and western songs and worked with folks like John and Alan Lomax to archive and study Western American music. As a teenager, this led to opportunities to play music around campfires with musicians like fiddler Alan Jabbour, old cowboy poets, and college professors. The other side of the family is from the North Country for several generations and passed down many old tunes and half-forgotten songs. Steve's education in acoustic blues music began in Plattsburgh in the early 1990s where he cut his teeth in North Country bars and on visits to octogenarian inmate musicians at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman where his father was a chaplain for nearly three decades.
Born in New York's Capital Region, the Useless Cans have been bringing a mix of original and standard old-time jazz, folk and traditional Russian tunes to their audiences since 2016. Guitarist Bobby Davis and upright bassist Dylan Perrillo met several years prior to the formation of the band through mutual friends in Albany. One fateful night, while playing an old Russian song, they caught the ear of Julia Posin, who is of Ukrainian heritage. Knowing the words of the tune from her childhood, she began singing along and without knowing, they had performed for the very first of what would become many times together. The Useless Cans have just finished their third E.P. entitled “Breezy Point,” which features mostly tunes that are inspired by today's political and social climate.
For more information about Northern Current, go to NorthernCurrentADK.org or join the flow on social media: @NorthernCurrentADK on Facebook and Instagram, and @NorthernCrntADK on Twitter.
Northern Current is a nonprofit festival under the umbrella of Saranac Lake Rotary. Northern Current is made possible in part with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts. It’s also supported by generous sponsors: North Country Community College, Adirondack Health, Little Italy Pizzeria, the Waterhole, Cloudsplitter Foundation, the Saranac Lake Area Chamber of Commerce, Tell Media, High Peak Concepts LLC, Long Run Wealth Advisors, Coakley Home and Hardware, Stewart’s Shops, Taylor Rental, the Hotel Saranac, Fiddlehead Bistro, Stewart’s Shops, Cape Air and Adirondack Foundation’s Adirondack Gives program. Additional sponsors can be found at northerncurrentadk.org.