What's cooking on the farm

It is an enchanting spread, Blue Elephant Farm, 75 sloping acres, dappled with stone stables, a barn-red barn or two, the occasional sculpted elephant rising in the fields.

This is where - on the outskirts of Newtown Square, Delaware County - the urban-farmhouse restaurant called Supper, at 10th and South, procures its "daily [vegetarian] harvest menu."

What Supper's chef Mitch Prensky picks that morning (well, he may skip a day or two), is what you get that night: See those waxy Romanian peppers? Seven hours from now they'll be on your plate, stuffed and braised in paprika-spiced tomato confit.

So it's not exactly farm-to-table. More like chef-to-farm-to-kitchen-to-table. Prensky, who grew up delivering his mother's quiches to Zabar's in Manhattan, claws red bliss potatoes out of the loose, compost-rich earth - down on his knees, hands gloved, a city kid on a scavenger hunt.

A learning curve was involved: "We had to teach him to thin," says Mary Butler, the British expat who manages the impeccable horse farm and vegetable gardens (now accounting for more than an acre of the spread): The object, she says, is to pluck beets or radishes randomly down a row, creating space for the others to grow and flourish.

This could all seem merely trendy; Jose Garces, of Amada, et al., recently bought a small farm in Bucks County; Nectar's Patrick Fuery has herbs and squash sprouting on the flanks of his Berwyn dining room. Chefs stalk the weekly farm markets. They get summer berries at the back door, fresh from Lancaster County.

But the Blue Elephant-Supper link may be the deepest connection yet. It's literally hands-on, for one thing. It's also a formal partnership between Blue Elephant's gentleman-farmer owner, Calvin Schmidt, and Prensky. (The imposing stone elephant statues are mementos from Schmidt's time in Thailand.)

Finally, it is far more than seasonally ambitious. Raised-bed greenhouses will soon yield winter lettuce. A tiny breeding herd of Lowline cattle (the smaller, less-grain-inflated genetic forebears of Black Angus) is in the barn, heralding grass-fed beef. Chicken coops are rising alongside the robust gardens.

It's organic, too: The Guinea hens are pest control.

Days from now, a line of canning equipment is due in the South Philadelphia commissary for Global Dish, the catering outfit Prensky also runs with his wife, Jennifer.