A Conversation with Marie HIlls of Kimball Fruit Farm

What Makes a Farmer’s Market Stall Successful?

For the past two years I go two or three times a week to farmers’ markets in our area. Each time I would visit a market where Kimball Fruit Farm was, I noticed that they always had a lot of customers. As I paid more attention I noticed that not only were they busier than other stands but they would often have a line of customers while some stands only had a few, and one had almost no customers. The vegetables at each stand were all similar, so therefore something had to be different at Kimball’s and I wanted to know what it was. The only way to find out was to ask and this is what I did.

Marie Hills and I spoke one evening and it became apparent from our conversation that their success was due to:
1. Good farming practices
2. Good help
3. Personal qualities of both the family and their employees
4. Good business practices

The farm has been fortunate to have been around since the 1920s when Allen & Foster Kimball took over a burned down dairy farm and planted 80 acres of apple and peach trees. They had a small farm stand and a wholesale packing house. At this time they were 80% wholesale and 20% retail. They ran the operation this way until 1969 when Allen Kimball passed away. The land was than sold to developers and they in turn leased the land to Allen Kimball’s brother-in-law Harold Hills who had been working on the farm since 1939. In 1990, Harold sold the business to his son Carl. This was right at the time that the New England apple industry went into decline due to imports from the west coast and other locations around the world. Many apple farms closed and the Hills’ knew that their biggest threat was yet to come from China. With this in mind they decided to rip out half their apple trees and plant strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, plums, melons and a full array of vegetables with the idea that if one crop failed others would come through. At the same time they turned their business on its head by going 80% retail and 20% wholesale.

The Kimball’s have one large and one small greenhouse to get the crops started (primarily lettuce and radishes). When they are ready to transplant the produce they lay plastic down on the soil to heat it up and lay a hoop house over it. It is very labor intensive but this allows them to get their produce to market early when they can get a better price for it. If they were to do everything from seed it would delay the availability of produce, and the name of the game at farmers’ markets is having produce available both early in the season and late.

They have also been blessed with excellent soil. I am just one of many customers who tell them that their arugula is incredible but so too are their tomatoes that have been voted the best in the area for past two years in a row and their apples are fast approaching the same status.

Kimball’s is an IPM farm and customers accept this process because they know that some things are just plain difficult to grow in New England. Kimball’s is very responsive to their customers’ requests and their low spray farm policy is just one case in point. Kimball’s puts up a sign at the market reminding their customers that they asked for low spray and so the corn may have worms in it and their customers’ don’t seem to mind because it always sells out. It was their customers who asked them for arugula and mesclun mix before they knew what it was. Later Carl Hills started reading about heirloom tomatoes and they have now been growing them successfully for over twelve years.

Based on customer demand for a certain kind of vegetable or fruit they will spend lots of time in the winter doing research. Carl Hills is currently starting to graft antique apples. They are playing around with them, not in big quantities yet because they have to feel out which ones are going to yield, which will taste good, and which are worth doing because they are always looking for that niche.

New England has been suffering from a lot less rain and more heat lately as a result of global warming. For Kimball’s this has been a double edged sword, as this year their peaches were wonderful because of the lack of rain but lack of rain stresses the trees. So they are spending more time and money moving the irrigation around to keep the trees growing. This year their corn tips were dry too. They put up signs for their customers explaining that there had been no rain for 45 days so the tips were dry but the corn was wonderful. They did this so their customers would understand that it was not old corn. They are always educating their customers.

Marie Hills feel that many things are important at a market but in particular the display and the personnel. People today are looking for that personal connection and this is what they get at a farmers’ market. All of Kimball’s staff is friendly and helpful and recognize their regular customers. Many customers will ask them how to cook so and so vegetable and Marie feels that if you say “gee, I don’t know” that will turn them off but if you say “gee, we have just started growing it so I don’t know that much about it but I tried it cooked this way and it was great, customers will really appreciate that.” More than once Marie Kimball told me that they were not just selling a product but that they believed in their products. They are passionate in what they do and take great pride in it and they believe that this comes across when they are communicating with their customers. They also put a tremendous amount of time into training their help. Marie told me that ‘when they start working for us they may not know what banana fingerlings are, or heirloom tomatoes, or what IPM is but by the time I have finished training them they do. I give them brochures to read and learn and then they have things they have to answer appropriately before I let them go to a farmers market.”

Learning the best way to display their products was a process of trail and error. Today Marie Hills says that she will watch someone at a new stand and say “gosh, if only they would display their products this way or that they would do much better”.

Here in Massachusetts the Dept. of Agriculture runs three coupon programs for women with children, elders, and low income. It is a federal program that trickles down to the states. The farmers’ love these programs because it brings people to the markets’ that would not normally come, it encourages them to eat fresh produce, it doesn’t cost them anything, and it gives the farmers’ new customers. A lot of ethnic groups are use to fresh produce in their home country so when the come to the markets with their coupons they are hooked and will come back again even when their coupons are gone.

Kimball’s have an incredibly loyal customer base and they see the same customers at two or three farmers’ markets including myself.

They hand out brochures to their customers telling them to come and visit them at the farm. They let them know that they have mountain views, lots of beautiful orchards, no animals and that they can come and bring a picnic and watch the beautiful sunsets. Through this connection they have gained a lot of additional pick your own customers.

Although they always had a farm stand it was not doing well and for this reason they concentrated most of their efforts on the farmers’ markets which accounts for 60% of their income. Once they felt secure with this side of the business they again looked at the farm stand and wondered how to promote it. They did a business plan and weighed out options on how to increase their business. Last winter they decided to invest half a million dollars to gut their old stand and rebuild in the same location.

They knew that customers had been coming into the stand and finding little to buy in the wintertime. So from the moment they opened that had a full array of everything not just their produce which meant they had to install milk coolers. Because they have a lot of customers that want their produce they labeled everything accordingly.

Marie told me that they knew they needed a bigger back room to wash and process all the produce that goes to market. With their new stand the pickups back up to the sliding door, off load the produce into the stainless steel sinks were it is washed and then it goes out right into the trucks and off to the markets’

Marie feels that with all the recalls on hamburger, lettuce, and spinach, etc. there will be stricter regulations coming down the pike which is why they built a stainless steel room. They hope that when this time comes, they will be ahead of the game and not behind. She believes there will be stricter regulations on how you pick and bag and everything. Although she believes the government will start out with the big farms in California she says it will trickle down to the smaller guy too. Marie said that “small growers always have their ears open to what is going on with the big growers in case it trickles down to us”. The farm stand accounts for 20% of their income.

In Boston they have both a tomato and an apple broker. Over the years they have developed a small niche for their heirloom tomatoes and so they are shipped out in boxes with their name emblazoned on the outside. If they have an over abundance of apples or tomatoes it is a good place to send them but they will not get the same price for it as they do at the farmers’ markets but it saves it going to waste. The wholesale business accounts for 20% of their income.

One continual problem is the shortage of labor. Marie says that Americans just don’t want to work on a farm or do any manual labor at all. For the past twenty odd years she has used the same Jamaican labor force. Without them she would be doomed.

They use QuickBooks for their accounting and they keep records of production from one block to another. A lot of that is for insurance purposes in case of a disaster. They also keep track of what they sell at each market by counting manually what goes on the truck and what comes back. This way they know what to grow and what to put on the truck for any particular month.

A happy ending or a happy beginning! In 2000, they bought all 178 acres of the family farm land from the developers. To make sure the land is never developed in the future they sold the development rights to the State of Massachusetts through the agricultural preservation program.

Breakfast with Jodi Adams of the Rialto

In 2007 I had the opportunity sit down over breakfast and interview Jody Adams of the famed Rialto restaurant. Jody graduated from Brown University with a degree in anthropology. Her first culinary position was as a part-time helper to Nancy Verde Barr, a food writer and teacher. She assisted in the classroom and helped test recipes for Nancy’s first cook book of Italian Immigrant cooking, “We Called It Macaroni”. When Jody decided she wanted to be a chef she worked her way through some of the best restaurants in Boston starting as a line cook at Seasons in 1983. Three years later she worked at Hamersley’s Bistro with Gordon Hamersley as his sous chef. Today her restaurant is ranked with this elite group of Boston restaurants.

CV: I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your degree in anthropology influenced how you perceived the relationship between culture and food and how it comes to play at Rialto.

JA: Food came first; it was always a central part of my life growing up. My mother was a good cook, not a fancy one, but pretty adventurous and she would schlep over to another part of town to shop at the Italian markets where she would buy chickens, pasta, cheese, and vegetables instead of going to the local supermarket. Before I graduated from high school we lived for a while in England and traveled to Europe often. We would eat at many great little bistros and buy really good local food. Then I went to visit my uncle who was a Latin American anthropologist living in Guatemala. I spent the summer there with him and again became very interested in the food and spent a lot of time in the kitchen learning to cook Guatemalan food. It was during this period of my life that I began to appreciate the many different cuisines and cultures and saw first hand how importance of food to culture. So it was during this time of my life that I really developed an appreciation for food and where it came from. I guess you could say this was beginning of my life long love of food. So before I even graduated from high school my life was focused on food in a natural kind of way.

When I returned to the United States, I entered high school as a senior and I was trying to figure out what I would offer up as my potential minor. As with many young people entering college, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. However, based on the time I had spent with my uncle I thought anthropology looked like an interesting discipline. So I looked into it and found it was pretty much all encompassing; such as why people eat what they eat, what they wear, how they speak, and the music and all that; all those things interested me. It turned out that it worked very well because of my interest in food; it definitely filled my need to know the whys and the wherefores. For example, why did cuisines evolve the way they did, why do certain foods work so well together and why do they so naturally occur over and over again in different cuisines?

Ultimately, I decided I wasn’t going to be an anthropologist but wanted to cook in a restaurant and that was 25 years ago. But as time has passed and I have evolved, I’m now in a position where I am a chef/owner of a restaurant. I approach my menus with an evolutionary process like we were talking about earlier. What I do does not come out of thin air but rather from the history of my life; building blocks that influence the final result. Anthropology has therefore both directed me to cooking and continues to inform the way I cook.

CV: What do you think influences what people eat? For example, over the past two years I have had two young Chinese students living with me; one from southern and one from northern China. Both of them were quite adamant in letting me know that they were not vegetarians and needed to eat lots of meat. This is a very new in their culture and I wondered if it was a status symbol driven by their economic success. So, I wondered what you found in your investigations.

JA: Yes, if you look at a country like Italy which is they one I focused on, you will see that geographical boundaries determined how the cuisine evolved and that people ate what was available and this was local food, and so tradition grows out of those ingredients. In the case of China it is economic development; In the case of Italy, it was the availability of transportation which made it easy to move food from one region to the other which blurred the boundaries; when this happens there has to be a re-definition of what exactly the cuisine is.

Italy is made up of many regions each with a different cuisine. At Rialto we do a different region each month which makes it very interesting for me and my staff. I look at what local ingredients are here, do some magic, and then I interpret the region through my menus. I use a very broad stroke when it comes to culinary food. Some customers have not happy when they order a meal that they have had in Italy and mine is not the same. And it’s true that mine is not an authentic representation of a dish that you get in the Venetian but it would have ingredients and techniques that you would find from those dishes. As I mentioned earlier, food boundaries are constantly shifting.

CV: What is your relationship with our local farmers’?
JA: We use many, many local farmers’ for our produce. A tiny few are Eva’s Garden and Verrill Farms. We buy our clams from a clam farmer in Wellfleet and we buy micro greens from a gardener in Rhode Island; we have lots of different farmers we purchase from. (*Ilene, do you want me to get the list?)

CV: Isn’t this a lot of work when you could buy everything from one place?
JA: It is more work but the farmers come to us. But is it harder? Well what is hard? Is it time?

CV: Well the managing of it, knowing what is coming, and planning your menus.
JA: It is more work, but there is a texture to it, there are people involved it’s more creative, it’s more alive. Does that make it easier or harder? If it’s just a case of sitting in a cold room with a computer and checking off what you need, and it’s going to come to you in packages with no dirt on it and no human connection, that would be harder for us because of that lack of human connection but for some yes it would be harder for them to work with independent farmers.

CV: Based on the individual shopping you do with local farmers there must be times when you have to do a quick turnaround with your menu because of unpredictable weather?
JA: Yes, that does happen. To be perfectly honest the expectation for spring food starts before produce is available here in Massachusetts, so I buy from California to begin with. If I was to wait for our local asparagus and peas I would lose part of the spring and we would still be serving winter food. Once our farmers start producing their Flatfru of ingredients we start using them and we no longer buy from the west cost. We have just got in our peas from Verrill Farms but I have been serving them for a month now and they were beautiful but they were not local.

CV: Is the produce your purchase all organic or a combination?
JA: My preference is buy local.

CV: This is a hot topic. There appears to be a definite line drawn between those who buy local and those who buy organic. When I interviewed Francis Moore Lappe for the summer issue of edibleBoston she said that if she had to pick between local or organic than local would win out each time.
JA: That’s because local food, just picked tastes better.

CV: So there must be times when you have to juggle around your menu at the last moment?
JA: Yes, this is why I chose to use menu paper that was not expensive so that I could reprint it at short notice. There are all sorts of factors to consider when you change a menu such as training the staff, physically changing the menu, and reprinting the menu

CV: Training the staff in what respect?
Letting them know that we are not serving asparagus with the sole but peas. If we don’t remember to tell them that and they talk to the customer about asparagus the customer is going to think they don’t know what they are doing. So there is a lot of education and there is physical work too.

CV: Do you require your staff to participate at all in the process?
JA: Yes, absolutely. We talk to them at three levels: (1) Why the dish we are serving is Italian, where the ideas come from and what makes it Venetian, for example; (2) the techniques and the ingredients. It’s very important that the staff has this information as a customer may have an allegory. (3) Lastly, we talk about where the food comes from and if it’s local.

CV: You are between the farmer, the producer, and the consumer what do you think your responsibility is to both?

JA: I have a responsibility to run my business responsibly because that’s who I am. I don’t think I have a responsibility to broadcast to customers what it is we are doing. My job is to provide the most hospitable, enjoyable and soul satisfying dining experience for people. We are here to provide food, service, wine, and hospitality. Within that there is a certain way that I am interested in doing it like working with the local farmers. Personally I think we have a responsibility as a community to support local farmers and to buy responsibly raised animals and to be aware of what fish stocks are for particular fish and not buy those that are endangered. Just as a community we should be aware of how much gas we are using and our effects on the ozone layer. I conduct myself in the restaurant and at home in a way that I think is responsible.

CV: I still don’t understand the complaint that I read somewhere that some restaurant chefs won’t serve endangered fish and thus this is dictating to customers what they can eat. To me it does not seem necessary when there are many other types of fish to eat.
JA Yes, One of the biggest selling fish is tuna. I have it on my menu in small pieces. I also have sole (which is pretty plentiful) and swordfish which isn’t but again I do that in small pieces. The biggest problem with tuna is not the Americans but the Japanese. We can do our part but there is a reasonable side to things. I serve lobster but again in small pieces.

CV:: I see that you donate a lot of time to the Greater Boston Food Bank and now with Partners in Health who do a lot of work in Haiti. How does this fit into your life as a chef or does this go back to your work in Guatemala? What got you involved given your limited free time?
JA: Chefs are asked on a daily basis to make contributions to non profit organizations one way or another; I am not the only one. About 20 years ago someone hit on the idea that if you’re going to have a party and your needed food why not get a “named” chef to provide the food. It was a good idea because it was beneficial to the industry and it meant that chefs were getting attention in different kinds of ways. We are in the hospitality industry, if we are asked to provide food for someone in need, it’s very hard to say no. I probably participate in 50-60 different events a year where I am giving away food or my time. One kind of events that I have been asked to do is to cook a dinner at someone’s house for a certain amount of money. For example if Mt. Auburn Hospital is going to have a fundraiser they can auction Jody Adams for $20,000 and I provide the dinner for ten folks in their home. It’s has been very successful. The experience that people have bringing ten people together in their homes for a dinner cooked by me and where they have made this wonderful contribution to the hospital is just amazing for them.

The organization however, that I feel the most passionate about, and that is the most compelling to me, is Partners in Health. The work that Ophelia Dahl, Paul Farmer, and Jim Kim have done in building that organization is remarkable. It is a community based care giving system where people are trained on the ground and sent out into the community to deliver care. Paul Farmer works in the hospital in Haiti, Cecile is their building the organization. Their people without question believe that the work they are doing are not only important, and that it can change the world, but that it has to change the world. I don’t find that with all the non profits that I work with. I don’t find that I am making the connection with the people that are doing the work and who are so convinced about the work that they doing in that kind of way. They are so committed. It’s going back to the source which is a pattern with me. It’s to do with authenticity at the core. There is a direct connection with the work I do and where the money goes. I can see it happen I know they take the money I help them raise and it goes to make a difference in people’s lives and lives that they specifically touch themselves.

The Greater Boston Food Bank and Share our Strength it is the same. I know the people and the work they do is unbelievable. I have chosen to work directly with organizations that are focused on hunger, poverty and children. The work has to touch you; I think that is where authenticity comes from. The dollars that I raise can be done in a variety of ways and it can go to a variety of places that need the money but there is more than the dollar value in what I do and that is important to me.

The work that I do here at Rialto I am passionate about. There is easier ways to make money in terms of time but not for my heart and soul. The reality of the work that I do at Rialto is that I see people who have a certain ability to afford to come here, which is not the majority of the people in the world. People have a great time, it is always full and great work is being done around the tables by the folks from Harvard and the Kennedy school but personally I need a balance and they way I can to this is to work directly and very internationally with organizations that I believe in. There is more than a dollar value to what I do for them.
.
CV: What cookbook could you not live without?
JA: The 1977 Joy of Cooking;

CV: Is there anything that you would like to add that is important to you and that I have not asked you?
JA: To go back to one of your points in terms of costs. I know that people come to restaurants like Rialto because of the quality of the food, and the quality of the food, particularly in the growing season, is dependent upon the ingredients that we use, it is as simple as that. These ingredients come from our local farmers, so people need to recognize that in order for restaurants such as mine to continue to serve the kind of food that we do, we need the community to support the local farmers

To learn more about the organizations that Jody Adams supports and is so passionate about please visit their websites. Visit Partners in Health at http://www.pih.org/home.html.
Share our Strength at http://www.strength.org/.
The Greater Boston Food Bank at http://www.gbfb.org/content/main.cfm?sca_id=18

Published in edibleBoston Fall 2007

My writings can be found at http://www.edibleboston.org/, http://www.farmersmarkettoday.com/, and www.belmontfarmersmarket.org/newsletters/2007/newsletter-2007-05.pdf.

Interview with Frances Moore Lappe

Interview with Frances Moore Lappé
March 30, 2007

Frances Moore Lappé shot to fame in 1971 with her book Diet for a Small Planet. Her latest book is Democracy’s Edge, which completes a trilogy begun in 2002 with Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (co-written with her daughter Anna Lappé). In 1975, with Joseph Collins, Lappé co-founded the California-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First). In 2001, Frances and Anna Lappé founded the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, a collaborative network for research and popular education to bring democracy to life. Frances is a resident of Belmont, MA.


CV: Does sustainable agriculture play a large part in your research on the economics of food, and if so, how?
FML: Very much! 37 years ago, when I began, my wake-up call was the realization that human beings are actually creating scarcity out of plenty! Today’s industrial, extractive food system generates both enormous waste and pollution. And it is heating the planet. Agriculture contributes over a fifth of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock outstrip transport as a contributor to harm from greenhouse gas emissions. Starting with food we can see what is wrong with our world economic and political systems today.

I have just completed a chapter on world hunger for a sociology textbook to be published by Oxford University Press where I dispel the myth that sustainable production yields less food. In the research, I found new evidence for what I’d intuited and written about years ago: that working with nature we realize its abundance. In organic farming, carbon emissions per acre are from one-half to two-thirds less than industrial, chemical agriculture. And one recent interdisciplinary study from the University of Michigan concludes that if we converted the entire world’s agriculture to organic methods, output could increase by over 50 percent.

CV: Is it better to buy organic food that has come from long distances or should we buy conventional food grown by our local farmers?
FML: This is not an easy question at all. The problem of pesticides is not just for eaters and producers but is a broader ecological problem. I try to buy local organic food whenever I possibly can. From the point of view of fossil fuels heating the planet, it’s more important to buy local produce even if it’s not organic. From the point of view of helping the lives of farm workers and saving the environment from pesticide pollution, then buying organic has an extremely high value. Overall, we need to create a demand in the market for organic produce and local availability.

CV: In New England, most farmers use the Integrated Pest Management system, and a lot of people reject IPM out of hand because it is not organic. What are your feelings on this?

FML: If I had to buy either organic from the West Coast or IPM local I would definitely buy IPM local. The goal is to put greater and greater demand on pesticide reduction.

CV: Food in America is the cheapest in the world; what are the issues and costs that you see inherent in consumers always buying the cheapest food that they can find?

FML: That American food is the cheapest in the world is a myth. The reason our food appears cheap is that it does not include the true health and environmental costs of its production. We are paying roughly $20 billion in tax subsidies to commodity producers who are heavy users of chemicals.

I think that people forget how expensive processed food is per pound. Certainly junk food; certainly processed. Organic oatmeal is about 1/3 the cost of boxed cereals. I try to counter the whole notion that eating well is more expensive. If you shift your diet from a meat-centered one to a plant-centered one you can use this saved money to buy local organic produce. While produce at a farmers’ market may seem more expensive than produce bought at Costco, actual cost is not a simple calculation. Americans have always valued community and so when you shop at a farmers’ market instead of an anonymous giant supermarket you are strengthening the community; you cannot put a price tag on that because it cannot be denominated in dollars.

CV: Under the current rules of the World Trade Organization, it would seem almost impossible to have food democracy. Can the general public through their purchasing power indeed influence a change?

FLM: I agree with you on the obstacles. It will be very interesting to see what happens in Mali (West Africa), where they have just declared food sovereignty – a determination to be food self-sufficient and not dependent on the world market for basic foods. Let’s see if the WTO is going to try and block them. Hopefully with the upsurge in understanding of the importance of healthy food, the costs of long distance travel, and the urgency of global heating, people will recognize that food is different from other trade goods. There is a new book called Food is Different where the author, Peter Rossett, points out that food is not like any other commodity. To emphasize local provisioning is the only realistic long-term strategy, whether you are concerned about terrorism or about food quality or global heating. My hope is that there will be an awakening globally to buy local food as it is the only sane future for our planet. Then the WTO will have to change its approach that says that you cannot favor one type of producer over another.

CV: What can the average Belmont citizen can do to improve and sustain the world that we live in?
FML: It’s in the choices that we make, whether it’s eating low on the food chain or being more responsible in the way we live: reducing our own purchases, our own consumption, and our own carbon emissions. Those are all things that we as individuals can do. They are limited but they are extremely important.

The more we align our own life choices and values, the stronger and more effective we become as a people. We must change the logic of this one-rule economics — by that I mean the single driver of highest return to shareholders and executive ——that’s driving the concentration of power and destroying our planet; in order to do this, we have to join with others. This is why getting involved is very important. Everyone should look deeply inside themselves, listen to their own questions — that’s what changed my life forever -- and connect with other people, whether this is through purchasing a CSA, buying local produce or getting money out of our political system. The key is to connect with other people. Alone we cannot turn the spiral of destruction to the spiral of health; alone it will be very difficult for us to do the work that we need to do to get to the root of the problem.

CV: Are there any final comments that you would like to make to Belmont citizens that I have not addressed?
FML: We are all educators; we are all teachers; we all face the world and with every choice we make we send out direct ripples and someone else is watching us. If we are embodying the enjoyment we get from these choices, then we become more aligned with the flourishing of our planet and people will want to be part of that. It is about helping people see the underlying causes and living in the world in a way that other people will say “I want that” because it is really a rich life. Often people think that the only way to affect the world is by making conscious choices, as if our unconscious choices have no impact. But I want to remind people that all the choices we make have an impact. You don’t have a choice not to change the world; you can only choose how you will change the world. That is very empowering. Every choice we make ripples out, and we cannot avoid that even if we want to. It’s the nature of things.

The motto of our Institute sums up our learning for all the energized people we’re meeting all over the planet: Hope is not what we find it evidence. It is what we become in action.

Published in edibleBoston Summer 2007

http://www.smallplanet.org/
http://www.foodfirst.org/

A converstaion with Marian and Russ Morash

In spring of 2007 I caught up with Marian (or Chef Marian to her TV fans) and Russ Morash, creator of The Victory Garden on PBS, in their home in suburban Boston for a conversation about the pleasures of growing your own food.

CV: How much of your own food are you able to grow in season in Lexington and on how much land?
Russ: Our garden is 75 x 75 feet and, when it was producing at maximum capacity, we grew all our own vegetables.
Marian: At our garden in Nantucket we grow half of our vegetables for a family of eleven.

CV: Is your garden organic or do you use Integrated Pest Management methods?
Russ. Both! We believe that you have to know what the problem is in order to fight the problem. The Colorado potato beetle will affect potatoes if you don’t do something about it. So we treat that organically by using an organic biological agent to control the caterpillar that lays the eggs that causes the beetle to form and devastate the crop. It is rare that we would use any insecticide. When we had fruit trees we used a few hard pesticides because frankly we didn’t know how you could raise fruit without them, particularly if you wanted to grow perfect apples. Back then we rationalized that a perfect apple was an apple without worms now we would argue that a perfect apple is one raised without pesticides.

CV: Does fruit need to be perfect?
Russ: That’s my point exactly. We love bananas. They used to be heavily sprayed but today, once they are pollinated, each staulk is covered by a polythene bag which keeps the bugs from getting in. That’s a strategy that is used by the commercial grower but similar non lethal methods can be used in backyard gardens. For example, Chard or beets cannot be grown here without protection because the leaf miner will attack it and destroy the leaf and thus the potential to grow a good crop. But it is simple to grow the crops under floating row covers, thus keeping the fly from her destiny to lay eggs. Another strategy is to observe and eliminate bugs by hand picking them. The key to bug control is a clean garden: no weeds allowed lots of good compost, and high soil fertility. Healthy plants discourage the bugs.

CV: What does it mean to step out to your garden and pick something fresh for your dinner?
Marian. Well it is wonderful, but my husband is dangerous. He goes out into the garden and picks a lot. He comes in at 5:00 pm with 19 tomatoes, a basket of Swiss chard, , a half peck of new potatoes and 12 zucchinis and expects me to cook them all. He gets carried away.
Russ: The life of a hunter gather is not an easy one. At the moment I have some of the most glorious parsnips. Parsnips are one of the great triumphs over garden misery. They take a long time to get out of the soil. When you sow them, you really need to know where you planted them or they will fool you and come up weeks later.

They have to be grown lean; if they see any commercial fertilizer the roots will fork yet if you are looking for exhibition parsnips you are well advised to prepare the planting holes with buckets of priceless home made compost. They will love it.

Then you must be patient and let them grow throughout the summer and fall into the winter... They need a lot of cold weather to be truly sweet. They especially favor hard freezes which keep the sugars from changing to starch.

Marian: He brought some in two weeks ago and they were just like sugar. In the market when you buy them they are flavorless. A lot has to do with getting them from your garden; they have to winter over. It is a very good plant to grow.

Russ: We don’t long for them in July or September. We are perfectly happy to wait until April. This is key to the way we think gardening should be done: grow things in season and enjoy them in season.

CV: Do you cook meals on the spur of the moment based on what’s in the garden?
Marian: I certainly cook what’s in the garden but it’s not spur of the moment, because you know what is in your garden. I immediately think of a ratatouille in the summer time because the tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, and zucchini are all ready in the garden. The meals do develop from what’s in the garden at any given time.

Russ: Another big advantage is that you know where the product came from. Today more then ever when it’s not only a matter of how they were grown, but how they were harvested and transported, to say nothing of the cost of transporting them and the difficulty of the lives of the workers who pick them. It’s something that people need to be thinking about. The other reason you grow your own is for the taste. It is extraordinarily different. Marian: That is why a farmers’ market is so valuable. There, you are not getting produce trucked in from across the country. You are getting it from local growers. There is a 100% difference in taste from asparagus harvested from local gardens or getting some picked days or weeks earlier from hundreds of miles away. The same is true with strawberries and fresh-dug potatoes.

CV: Where can the novice gardener get help on how to start?
Russ: One of the reasons we started the Victory Garden TV show was because of this question. My father grew a bit in our victory garden during WWII. I got interested in growing vegetables early on but had no training. What little I learned was by trial and error. Because of my many failures growing the wrong things in the wrong soil and the wrong exposure, I wondered if it was possible to find a great gardener to teach us.

I went out and found books on the subject and then I found a wonderful gentleman in Concord, Jim Crockett, who was willing to join us in a television experiment to see if we could explain and demonstrate how to garden on TV. His mantra was “get the soil right and a lot of things will follow from having the soil right.” Good soil has no unpleasant odors but might have indispensable earth worms living in it and making it even better.


As a first-time gardener one would be well advised to avoid certain vegetables that everyone says are easy to grow but are not…Radishes come to mind.

Although they come up quickly they are soon ravished by the cabbot root maggot, a tough bug to control. Moreover, radishes mature quickly and then go quickly into bitter hot spheres that will disappoint you. I prefer to let the pros grow radishes although Lord only knows what’s on them. Until you’ve had some experience, I would recommend you avoid radishes, spinach, beets, or carrots although each is considered easy to grow.

Lettuce, on the other hand is very easy to grow and that which you raise will beat what you can buy in the store . So, it’s other good gardeners, books, the Internet, and even knowledgeable help at garden centers who can be helpful. Find yourself a mentor.

CV: What do you think of buying salad greens in plastic bags?
Marian: I will never buy them. The thing that bothers me is that folks take it for granted that the washed greens have been washed and they throw the leaves into a salad bowl and eat it. Now after this last spinach scare they are now saying wash it regardless.
Russ: I think there are things that they are doing with produce that is not in the best interest of those who wish to protect the food chain.

CV: And your final word?
Marian: Russell’s family started out in Belmont!
Russ: I have seen that meadow over by McLean hospital and if I didn’t have a garden, I would be growing my food there. Gardening is a terrific way to exercise. Down with dumb gardening and up with smart gardening is my final word!

--a shorter version of the interview was published in the Late Summer 2007, Belmont Farmers Market Roots and Sprouts magazine. http://www.belmontfarmersmarket.org/newsletters/2007/newsletter-2007-0809.pdf