If you’re someone like me who follows sustainable-foodie blogs and farmers market bounty with equal eagerness and zeal, this last week has been a great one all around.  Peaches, tomatoes, and corn are stunningly delicious, and great stories featuring partnerships between farmers and chefs have been popping up in the news around the nation.

As the NY Times detailed last week, chefs are increasingly going out of their way to find the best, the most interesting, and the tastiest local ingredients possible.

On the west coast, chefs in Los Angeles are not only buying their produce at farmers’ markets, some are now sourcing unique foods like loroco, pineapple guava blossoms, and Surinam cherries from urban backyard gardens.

Meanwhile, up in Sonoma County in Northern California, Sanders Field Farm and Peter Lowell’s Restuarant have brokered a partnership so close that the farm grows exclusively for the restaurant, while the restaurant sends staff out to the fields to work on the farm.

Moving to the east coast, in a similar partnership in Philadelphia, the suburban Blue Elephant Farm has an exclusive partnership with Supper restaurant.

And up in Gloucester, MA, even the tiniest lots are being used to grow food that makes its way to restaurant tables.

As we work to build farmer-chef connections in New England through our RAFT Grow-Out project, we love hearing about innovative partnerships around the country.  Got any more stories about farmer-chef connections to share with us? Let us know!