This Year's U-Pick Garden Plans!

One of the fun things we plan out in the winter is the U-Pick garden. It's frankly a bit of a break from the big complicated field planning to get to look at flowers and herbs and all the fun odds and ends that we enjoy growing but that we can't really grow on anything other than a smaller U-Pick scale!

This year we plan to expand the U-Pick garden a bit from last year since we had to cut our plantings short for August due to coming close to running out of water in the drought! We'll be planting more of the crops we missed in 2016 and also be adding a few new flower and herb varieties.

This is how the first draft of the veggies and herbs looks like:

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And this is the first draft of the flowers:

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The other big addition we have this year is a new Instagram account just for the U-Pick garden. It's @hartwoodupick and is sparse right now. However, once we get into the season, we'll be photographing *everything* in the U-Pick garden and putting up descriptions of what it is to help in your identification when you are out harvesting and cooking!

We did have a few requests that we can't make work quite yet in the U-Pick garden for one reason or another, generally either labor (crops like lettuce that need to be replanted every 5 to 7 days), pests (things like broccoli that need their row covers), or space hogs (we'd love to plant pumpkins, but they just sprawl over too much space).

We may also have a few other surprises to add--and as always, please let us know if there's something you want to see in this (or future) years!

Our Vegetable Nemesis… (Or: why we are giving up on sweet corn!)

When folks ask what we grow, we say, “Pretty much everything that can grow in upstate NY!” That encompasses more than 60 unique crops, 15 types of UPick herbs, and about 25 varieties (and growing) of flowers. All told, we generally plant 300 different cultivars, which seems totally manageable at this time of the year, where they are all lined up in their neat spreadsheet columns, but rapidly becomes insane when we start the serious planting of May.

Every one of those varieties has a slightly different treatment, ranging from how big of pots it goes in (1/2”, 1”, 3”, or more), to how many days it grows in the greenhouse (14 to 84), to what soil temperature it germinates at, to how much weekly water it needs, how much added compost fertility, trellising, covers, mulch, weeding, and blah, blah, blah… You get the picture, there is an infinite permutation of yearly variables!

And for the most part, we are pretty good at balancing these variables. Sure, each year a few things get missed and a couple crops fail, but with 60 vegetables and 40 more herbs and flowers, there is generally still an overflowing bounty from the fields to fill the CSA boxes and market stand.

This general bounty means that we feel a little less guilty that after five years of trying here, we are throwing in one towel on growing the one crop that has become our full-time vegetable nemesis: SWEET CORN. We love to eat sweet corn as much as anyone, but we’ve grown to hate growing sweet corn with a deep and unrelenting passion.

Sweet corn is tempting and delectable nemesis. Each winter, it parades across pages of glossy seed catalogs in all its multicolored vegetative sexiness. Each winter, it seduces us to try again—for maybe this year will be THE year, when miracles happen and we get a bumper crop of shiny, gem-like sweetness. But this year, we steeled ourselves, glued those catalog pages together to remove any temptation, and stand resolute that we will help you all find other farms for whom sweet corn is a less temperamental mistress.

Up in Fenner, there aren’t a lot of vegetable growers, so we had high hopes for low numbers of surrounding native pest loads when we started our farm.

Unfortunately, we didn’t entirely account for the more generalist pests that survive on wild native plants (like the aster leafhopper that lives on every roadside chicory and vectors aster yellows to our poor head lettuce in July), the ravening hordes of brassica flea beetles that thrive on the weeds that blanket the soil under the neighboring organic farms’ grain and corn crops (those little buggers are responsible for our miles of undulating white row covers), or in this case, the wide range of disgusting little corn worm species that find our organic sweet corn seed, stalks, and ears so much more fabulous than that bland old field corn that surrounds us.

Our first year we did a corn trial and grew some tasty, shiny corn in a few beds. Since then, we’ve battled with seed corn worms that eat all the seeds right at planting, army worms that eat all the insides out of the stalks before they grow ears, and some superlatively nasty ear worms that I don’t even want to think about let alone describe them to you in case the image fuels your summer nightmares. To add insult to injury, our average cost of production per bed on the farm is $800, but sweet corn with a perfect yield at $.50/ear grosses only $400 per bed, which means we need to PAY $400 per bed to grow corn (or $800 per bed for all those years we planted and yielded nothing!).

So we are bidding our tempting sweet corn mistress a permanent good-bye., We hope our farm neighbors who have the equipment, the soil, and most importantly, the lower pest loads to grow sweet corn not at a loss, have fun with our nemesis—may she not treat them as fickle-y as she did us!

Where can you get sweet corn this summer then? There’s tons of good corn at the Cazenovia farmers market, including some grown with organic methods, as well as at the farm stands in the area. There are also a number of field crop farmers that run a few passes of sweet corn through their planters and you can see their little corn sheds fill up with it on most roads up to our farm. And who knows, maybe some year we will lose the battle with temptation and try to get back in the game… but until then, we are bidding our nemesis a strong good-bye!

How I Became a Farmer: Matt's Edition

I've been helping with food production since growing up on a family homestead in the woods of New Hampshire, where we raised horses, sheep, and a rotating menagerie of any farm animals you can imagine--chickens, rabbits, pigs, cows, donkeys, as well as an omnipresent flock of dogs and cats. We also had fruit trees, extensive gardens, sugar maples, and amazing berry patches. The majority of our family's food came from our land and animals.

My first vegetable farm work was for the epitome of a cantankerous Yankee farmer at sixteen where I learned more commercial scale planting, weeding, harvesting, and driving my first tractors.

In my late teens, I enjoyed a period of traveling around the country, hiking, and spending time in the woods before moving back to NH and going into carpentry. I enjoy most aspects of working with wood and feeling like you can make tangible things with your hands, from cabinets or rails, all the way up to full house construction.

After meeting Maryellen in NH, I learned more about vegetable production working as her garden conscript, and started taking charge of raising animals for us and our neighbors, including sheep, pigs, turkeys, and chickens. We decided on a change of scenery when Maryellen was offered a farm manager job in the Hudson Valley.

Once there, I started to tire of carpentry and working inside while growing more interested in farming as a profession, so I made the career switch and worked on a small CSA-style orchard in New Paltz, where I learned a lot about marketing and selling farm products. After a season there, I had the opportunity to work for a couple years as the Field Manager at Hearty Roots Farm, a big organic CSA delivering to NYC. That was a great place to learn about large scale CSA harvest and production, use a wide range of heavy and cultivating tractors and implements, and work as part of a knowledgeable farm crew.

In 2011, we were starting to look around at farms in the greater Utica and Syracuse region, and felt like these rolling fields might be a good fit. It's definitely been a climatic change for me from the longer season (and less windy/snowy) Hudson Valley, and the much shorter season, but sunnier winters, of NH!

How I Became a Farmer: Maryellen's Edition

Since it's grey and chilly outside, there isn't much going on in the fields, so we thought we'd do a couple blogs to answer a question we get a lot: how we became farmers!

My parents are actually city folks, but they moved to a small town in rural Virginia before I was born, so I grew up watching and helping my father in his gardens and fields. After we moved to a rural Indiana farmsteadbefore junior high, I helped in the gardens and threw hay bales (unwillingly by this point because I was terrified of bugs, go figure!). My parents tried to soften the blow of teen angst of moving away from my friends by buying me a horse (not a good strategy from a safety standpoint if you know nothing about animals!).

Their plan worked spectacularly to help me learn to ride fast as Johnny was a bargain basement horse that largely entertained himself by galloping and bucking until I fell off. It did keep me out of trouble and working multiple jobs since animal chores are expensive and time consuming.

In college, I debated following my love of horses into the show industry, but started to question the point of putting makeup on animals and riding in circles. My degree was in government, with a focus on Russian and Middle Eastern comparative politics, which is an oddly more useful today than it was twenty years ago, but as the Lewinsky scandal broke my last year in school, I became much less interested in being part of the D.C. scene!

As graduation loomed, I saw a one sentence description in a Catholic volunteer newspaper about a farm in Massachusetts that provided alternative treatment for adults struggling with mental illness that was recruiting volunteers and sight unseen, something felt perfect about the opportunity.

One month later, I got off a Greyhound with a duffle bag and ate my first dinner at Gould Farm. It was amazing—the food was so fresh and so delicious and nearly 100% raised on the farm. I joke now that it was the hockey puck of their butter (yes, I ate the whole thing) that made me decide to become a farmer, but it’s not really a joke. Eating dinner that night is the only time in my life where I’ve had a blinding feeling that this is what I’m going to do forever—be in agriculture so I can eat this good of butter every meal.

Over the next seasons, I learned a lot about farm equipment, haying, non-horse livestock care, and growing a range of vegetable and field crops. I also learned how fun it can be to work with people from all different ages and backgrounds, and how much I appreciate being outside. After two years, I had the opportunity to work on a similar farm in Russian and then run a study abroad program in Jerusalem, but the rise of unrest in the Middle East ended that program and sent me back stateside to agriculture.

My next farm was a CSA in New Hampshire, where after I met Matt, my farming partner and I gradually took over the CSA. After six years on rented land, Matt and I wanted to buy our own farm, but in 2007, farm prices in NH and VT were insane. Discouraged, we switched gears to work on a farm in the Hudson Valley where we could save up money to buy a farm in more rural NY. And here we are!

Next week, we’ll have Matt’s half of the story!