Grown by Marsh Hen Mill, NC.
 
For primarily climatic reasons, the major lentil producing regions in the western hemisphere are in parts of Canada, Montana, and the Palouse region, which spans across northern Idaho and southeastern Washington. Hanna and Peter Martens are the generation following in the iconic footsteps of Mary Howell and Klaus Martens of Lakeview Organic Grains in Penn Yan NY. They grow an impressive variety of legumes and grains interspersed with cover crops and have a world - class seed cleaning operation that gets utilized by other farms in the region. Their family has been at the crest of the wave of organic grains and cover cropping for over thirty years now, and with recent investments they’ve made they are set up to be one of the cornerstones of organic agriculture in the Northeast for another thirty years at least. While there are very likely some folks who have grown smaller plots of edible lentils in smaller plots or home gardens, these are the folks that have brought the first commercially available crop of lentils to the Northeast. We hope you enjoy them, as they almost instantly sold out the first year they grew them
.
They have since scaled up their planting and hopefully Northeast - grown lentils will be more regularly available from here on out. It would be well worth your while to cook these simply with water and salt and do a comparison to other lentils you may have in your pantry. If you are game for a project however, you could also take some and try tossing them in as the protein (in place of tofu) in the Indonesian speciality Gado Gado, which has countless variations once you start digging into it.