Every year as the seasons shift toward autumn, the North Alabama Agriplex sets a community table filled with local agricultural bounty. Held each September, the nonprofit’s annual Harvest to Home Dinner serves as a haute-cuisine showcase; one that highlights the quality, variety and abundance offered by growers both big and small all across Cullman County and beyond.

Curated by chef Aaron Nichols, who heads the Culinary Arts program at Wallace State Community College, the menu for Harvest to Home sets diners’ expectations far higher than that of your typically southern staple dish. But the food that supplies the raw ingredients for the dinner’s high-concept items — menu bits like savory watermelon gazpacho, or blue corn grits with country fritta squash — is up to the task and then some. Better still, it’s all grown by local and regional farmers, most of whom live no further than an hour’s drive from Cullman.

“Our watermelon gazpacho turned out to be one of our big highlights of the evening,” said Agriplex director Rachel Dawsey, who coordinates each year’s dinner and accompanying fundraising activities.

“Clark Haynes donated all of the watermelons to us — he won’t let us pay him — and those kind of ended up being the star of the show! And, because of the drought we’ve had this year, it was hard to get some of the veggies that we had expected to be able to get. So Chambers Farm really helped us out by stepping up with squash, cucumbers, jalapeño, tomatoes and most of our zucchini. Thanks to our farmers, it all came together.”

The Harvest to Home Dinner serves as the Agriplex’s signature annual fundraising event, and the nonprofit makes a point each year of using the occasion to make local people aware of all the locally sourced food that’s available right in their own community backyard. With the fundraising effort mounting toward the Agriplex’s planned construction of a new Community Hub building, the success of this year’s dinner couldn’t have come at a better time, said Dawsey.

“In terms of fundraising, this was our best year yet,” she said. “We raised more money than we’ve ever raised before — more than $28,000 — which is really exciting and certainly could not have happened without all the Alabama farmers who supplied our food.”

Sweet Grown Alabama, the state nonprofit that promotes local farming by raising the marketing profile for home-grown foods, also played a big hand in helping this year’s dinner take flight. “A lot of the farms that provided our meal are ‘Sweet Grown’ farms,” said Dawsey, “and Ellie Watson — the executive director for Sweet Grown Alabama — did a wonderful job as our emcee this year.”

The list of local farmers and growers who pitch in for the Harvest to Home Dinner is a long one, bringing to light the hidden ties that link local food’s final destination at the dinner table with the unseen, everyday agricultural effort that plays out to make it all possible in north Alabama’s poultry houses, hatcheries, pastures, orchards, forests and produce fields.

Below is a listing of all the farmers and makers from Cullman and nearby counties who supplied the Alabama-raised food that helped make this year’s Harvest to Home Dinner a hone-grown winner:

Beef

— Idlewild Farm

— Sullivan Creek Ranch

— God Fearing Farm

— Blue Ridge Cattle Company

— Mulberry Bend

— Center Square Farm

Shrimp

— D&Y Farms

Zucchini

— Chambers Farm

— White Farms

Squash, cucumber, jalapeño

— Chambers Farm

— Bella Rosa

Tomatoes

— Chambers Farm

Eggs

— Nature’s Best

Fish batter & blue grits

— McEwen and Sons

Goat cheese

— Humble Heart Farm

Micro greens

— Fortenberry Farms

Peaches

— Spradlin Farms

— Reeves Peach Orchard

Frozen peaches

— J. Calvert Farms

Watermelons

— Clark Haynes Farm

Sourdough bread

— Cullman Bakery

Blackberries

— The Old Home Place (David & Renee Chambers)

Basil

— The North Alabama Agriplex