Farm-to-table dining—featuring the freshest of organic, locally produced foods—is too often limited to urban "white tablecloth" restaurants, while small mom-and-pop places out in farm country tend to rely on anonymous food service ingredients. But Soup'R Natural, up north in Hereford (a convenient stop during Gunpowder Falls State Park or NCR bike trail jaunts), does it right: The owners grow their own herbs and vegetables and source other ingredients from nearby farms, selling the tasty, scratch-made results in their affordable, rustic cafe.

Nell Heneghan had been selling homemade soups and salads from her Monkton home for years when Hereford's venerable Wagon Wheel restaurant went on the auction block in 2009. She and husband Dan, who are Mennonite, bought it and replaced the cramped building with an open and airy timber-frame, Amish-built structure. They opened for business in February, offering a roster of seasonal, homemade soups, salads, sandwiches, and entrees.

Soups are made daily according to what's ripe in the restaurant's garden as well as the whim of the chef; cool weather brings concoctions like butternut squash soup. Impeccable ingredients establish this simple soup's credentials, but clever twists—a sectioned orange slice floated atop the rich and savory puree, a West Indies accent in the spice—elevate it to sheer genius. (For those unable to choose, the Soup'R Sampler supplies tasting portions of all three soups du jour.

Even the plainest side dish, the house salad, gets star treatment: home-grown lettuces, carrots, and cucumbers are drizzled with a buttermilk dressing that dazzles with highlights of citrus, then topped with buttery, rough-cut croutons. Composed salads are equally well executed and invariably interesting: the Portachoke Salad is a dun-colored but delicious mélange of artichoke hearts, portobello mushrooms, and green beans in a smooth, tarragon-scented vinaigrette.