Old Tioga Farm is owned and operated by husband/wife team Justin and Dillon Naylor.
For Justin, growing food and cooking have always been intertwined. After a conventional upbringing in Wilmington, Delaware, Justin discovered cooking during a year off from college while working on an organic vegetable farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. Wanting to cook in a way that honored the quality and integrity of the vegetables he was helping to raise, he began a serious study of the writings of Marcella Hazan, and her classic work The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking became the foundation of his own philosophy of cooking.
Dillon grew up in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and was a serious student of the violin. She and Justin met at St. John’s College in Annapolis. They were married in 2004 and traveled to Emilia Romagna and Lombardy in 2005, spending a summer working on farms and cooking with host families.
After several years of teaching Latin in private schools, Justin staged at Osteria Pane e Salute in Woodstock, Vermont, an experience that convinced him to recommit to agriculture and cooking.
In 2007, Justin and Dillon purchased a house on four acres in northeastern Pennsylvania and started their family. They decided to recreate a model they had seen in Italy: a restaurant as an outgrowth of a working farm. The vegetable farm, restaurant, and cooking classes began as a part-time effort, becoming a full-time commitment in 2014.
Today the Naylors raise vegetables on about an acre for their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) membership and operate a small on-farm restaurant, seating 18 guests on Friday and Saturday evenings. Justin’s approach to both farming and cooking is the same: to produce the most nourishing and delicious food possible, food which is elegant but straightforward and lacking pretension. Dillon manages the front of the house at the restaurant and is responsible for the ambiance and elegance of the dining rooms, including a carefully curated musical playlist.
Justin teaches cooking both at the farm and also in Italy. He offers small-group, week-long culinary adventures in Rome, Bologna, Venice, Barolo, and Sicily with daily cooking classes, restaurant meals, and cultural excursions.
Justin also keeps alive his interest in teaching through speaking engagements on topics such as agriculture and ancient Greece/Rome. Dillon works as church administrator of First Presbyterian Church of Bloomsburg and as a violinist with the Williamsport Symphony Orchestra. The Naylors have three children and are happy to be raising them in close proximity to Dillon’s mother, who is an invaluable presence in their lives.