Farm to Fork: Harvesting the organic produce in the village

Hello, my name is Arman. My parents live in Teghut village near Dilijan, where we have our family farm. I have been involved in many fields, but neither me, nor my parents had experience in agriculture before. My parents – Yurik and Maya, used to live in the city of Vanadzor, they are engineers, but for the last thirty years, they have been living in this cozy village and cultivating their land. My mother started doing beekeeping and then I learned it from her. That’s why our honey is called “Mayan”, after my mom. I have been doing beekeeping for the last 4 years as a hobby. We make our honey without sugar, we even have customers, who are doctors and take our honey for special treatments. 

In front of our beehives, there are huge linden trees growing, so you can taste that specific flavor of linden flower in our honey. It is not common to find linden honey in Armenia these days. When guests are coming over, they are interested to learn about bees: how they make honey and how people cooperate with them. We give them special uniforms and we open the beehives, take the hive frames out, and in the end of summer we do the harvesting process. 

The food we have on our table is coming from our farm – eggs, butter, cheese, honey, nuts and berries, vegetables and fruits. We decided to sustain ourselves living in the village, this happened after the crisis in Armenia in 1990’s. Now we do not imagine our life without this lifestyle. My daughter comes here after school, she likes helping her grandparents, plant and water trees, feed the animals. People who visit us somehow get involved in this process either. It is like a therapy, both for them and for us.