There is a nice street fair and farmers’ market held on Friday nights during the summer. A lot of the local restaurants have booths set up and you can find out about all kinds of local activities, buy flowers, buy organically prepared bath products, and all kinds of other stuff. There is also live music. The band the night we went was a decidedly second-rate metal wanna-be band. Not our style at all. Of course, we were there for the vegetables! Various booths had cabbages, carrots, rutabagas, swiss chard, tomatoes, collard greens, lavender, peaches and strawberries. The strawberries were the best. You could smell them from several booths away! They were an incredible red and so ripe and ready to eat that they were irresistible. Of course we got some. Just $5 for a couple pounds. Can’t beat that price anywhere!In the area are a few wineries. We have tired out just two. The wine we liked the best at Salisbury Vineyards was called Pinot Naturale. It’s made from the pinot noir grape but is made as a white wine instead (fermented without the skins). It was super-good. It was strongly fruity and had a nice dry firmness behind the sweetness. Very drinkable. The office and tasting room is in an old 1907 school house. Half is the wine-tasting area and the other half is an art gallery. Interesting.
The other winery we have been to is Kelsey See Canyon Vineyards. This winery may have the best collection of wines we have ever tried! The tasting included something like 11 different wines. Nobody else has that kind of variety (at least, not that we’ve tried). Every singe one was wonderful. Their “Black Box” Zinfandel (a varietal becoming a Matt favorite of late) was good and their port was really good. Maya describes it as drinking chocolate-covered cherries. The wines we came to taste were their apple-infused wines. We had read about them in a handy little book on San Luis Obisbo County’s wineries that we picked up somewhere. The apple wines were great! The Estate Apple Chardonnay is made with apples grown right there on the property. Even better was the Apple Merlot. It was a rosé, instead of a red. Like the Pinot Naturale from Salisbury it seemed to combine the best of both red and white wines. When we told the lady running the tasting (Mrs. Kelsey herself) that we were reminded of the Pinot Naturale she smiled and told us that the wine-making master they hire to make all their wines is the same guy Salisbury hires to make their Pinot Naturale. So it was that at the end of the day we went home with two bottles of similar wine crafted by the same guy, one Harold Osborne, from two different wineries.
The place in Avila Beach we visit most often is the Avila Valley Barn. It’s a fairly unique combination of a Cracker Barrel, a grocery store, a farmers’ market and a petting zoo. Really! The store is surrounded by a bunch of farmland where they grow corn, broccoli, peppers and a lot of other stuff. This is all sold in the market area along with all kinds of other produce not gown by them. Fruits, potatoes, garlic, onions and squash are all on display. Then they have the section of prepared foods: loaves of bread, pies, cakes, pickles, dried fruit and soup mixes. 
Cookbooks, kitchen utensils and various crockery are all also for sale. All of this and goats, chickens, ponies, a cow, more goats, ducks and even more chickens too! We are more convinced than ever that we must have goats of our own someday. It’s a really fun place to go to get fresh produce. We are not the only ones who like it, either. It’s always packed! It’s so crowded we have yet to park in the actual parking lot. We always end up in the back-forty with the rest of the overflow parking.
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