We’re so excited to have reached our goal for CSA shares in 2010! Right now we are full for the season and are taking names of people who would like to be on our waiting list. We’ve been so overwhelmed by all the support and interest in the CSA. It’s great to see that so many people are as excited as we are for next season!
Langwater Farm is in the news! Many thanks to Paula Vogler for the very nice writeup in the Easton Journal and the Brockton Enterprise. If you haven’t already, read the story below.
Easton – While the winter weather outside may be frightful, spring and summer in Easton are looking quite delightful for those who prefer locally grown, pesticide free, fresh tasting produce.
Langwater Farm, an 80-acre farm located beside Langwater Pond on Main Street stretching behind the North Easton post office through fields and forests all the way to Elm Street, will be open for business in the spring.
Part of the property was originally designed by landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmsted, the creator of Central Park, according to the farm’s web site, www.langwaterfarm.com. Years ago, the original farm famous for its Guernsey cows and Clydesdale horses.
Now a group of area residents are leasing the land from the Ames family and returning it to its agricultural roots.
Former Sharon resident and principal farmer Rory O’Dwyer, 29, said 40 acres will be dedicated crop land while the other 40 acres would remain forest. The farm will be run using organic farming practices.
While three to four acres of fields have been tilled, one to two of those acres will grow mixed vegetables with other acres growing flowers. O’Dwyer said those vegetables and flowers will be sold through a farm stand, farmers markets and hopefully to local restaurants that want to use locally grown foods in their meals.
Eggs from chickens raised on the farm will also be sold.
O’Dwyer said a few examples of what farm patrons can expect would be lettuce, carrots and scallions in the spring, beets and swiss chard in July, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant in August, and winter squash and pumpkins into September and the fall.
The farm will offer pick your own pumpkins and strawberries to customers and will plant fruit trees in 2011 which will take five to six years to bear fruit.
Crop rotations in the various fields, a good soil management practice, will be used when planting each year.
The property also has a forestry plan attached that will allow the farmers to removed standing dead wood but not take down the trees.
While she does not have forestry experience O’Dwyer said there are things to do with forests like innoculating oak stumps to grow shitake mushrooms or planting nut trees.
O’Dwyer said watering the large property will not be a problem since a pump will pump water from Langwater Pond up to a holding tank on the farm.
“Farmers can take up to 100,000 gallons per day without getting permits and that’s way more than we need,” O’Dwyer said. “We’ll be using drip irrigation since it’s the most effective way to get water to the roots.”
O’Dwyer said the farm will offer Community Supported Agricaulture (CSA) to those in the area where for a membership fee of $525 and a few hours of community service work on the farm, participants will receive of box of fresh vegetables each week from June into the fall.
“We think our vegetables will be pretty competitive with organic produce at Shaw’s,” O’Dwyer said. “CSA members will get a pretty good deal, a 10-15 percent discount on farmers market prices.”
A CSA is advantageous to farmers because they receive some upfront capital during winter months when money is needed for seeds and equpiment while also giving them an idea of how much they need to plant for the upcoming season.
For this coming harvest O’Dwyer said the farm is capping the membership at 50 and there are already 35 people who have expressed an interest in joining.
“We definitely want to expand but we don’t want to get too big the first year,” O’Dwyer said. “We want to see what the land will support. If we have a wait list and more produce, we’ll offer it to more people.”
O’Dwyer said her decision to spend a summer working outside before entering graduate school at Boston University as a political science major seven years ago led to a startling revelation and a career path change.
“I fell in love with it,” O’Dwyer said. “I thought, ‘this is what I want to do.’ I dropped out of grad school after one month.”
After apprenticing on various farms O’Dwyer moved to Davis, California where she will be leaving her job as operations manager for the Growers Collaborative, a nonprofit that buys produce from local family farms and distributes it to schools, restaurants and hospitals.
The desire to run a farm never left her and when O’Dwyer found out the Ames family wanted to return some of their land to agricultural production, she called her brother, Kevin, 28, last March. Kevin lives in Norton and has worked on Ward’s Berry Farm in Sharon since he was young.
Keeping the farm all in the family, Kevin’s wife, Kate, and O’Dwyer’s partner, Alida Cantor, are on the farm staff. Even mom, Mary O’Dwyer who still lives in Sharon, will be lending a hand since she has been an avid gardener for years.
While growing anything may be far from the minds of most Easton residents at the moment the farmers are spending the winter months going over spread sheets and marketing stragegies, attending equipment auctions, and pouring through seed catalogs.
“I’m up through raddishes in the catalogs,” O’Dwyer said with a laugh.
The farm stand and entrance to the farm will be located at the intersection near the Washington Street cemetary and Elm Street. For more information on the farm or for an application to join the CSA visit www.langwaterfarm.com or call 508-205-9665.
Paula Vogler can be reached at 508-967-3510 or by email at writedesk84@comcast.net.
(A few very minor corrections: Rory and Kevin will share the responsibilities of primary farmer, and most of the 3-4 acres will be dedicated to veggies with less land in flowers.)
Easton Journal: Langwater Farm opening this spring
Brockton Enterprise: Easton’s first CSA farm to open this spring
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alida, CSA, Kate, Kevin, news, Rory | 1 Comment »
Great news! We are now accepting 2010 CSA registration forms!
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) allows farmers and members to develop strong, mutually supportive relationships. We consider our CSA program the real heart of Langwater Farm.
You probably know the benefits of CSA for customers, or members. CSA members get great local, fresh, seasonal food. They have a fun place to visit or bring the kids every week. Members get recipes to help prepare foods that might be new. And CSA members get to know the farm and the farmer directly.
So why do we like CSA as farmers?
For us farmers, a CSA means we have some money flowing in during the winter and spring in order to cover the costs of seeds and other inputs. It means we have a better idea of how much food to plant, based on how many members we have. A CSA means that every week when we go to harvest, we know that the food we pick is going to members rather than going to waste.
But most importantly, it gives us a chance to get to know the people who are eating our food. I don’t have much interest in growing food that will be sent off on a truck to be processed into junk food and never seen again. I want to be proud that the food we grow is nourishing the people around us, and I want to know those people. With a CSA, we’ll get to plant seeds, pull weeds, and swap recipes with the people who eat the food we grow.
We are really looking forward to the 2010 CSA season, our first at Langwater Farm. We hope you will join us!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged CSA | 1 Comment »
Langwater Farm just got featured over at the Farm Stories blog. They wrote about our business name, Stone Soup LLC, and the paradox of combining the Stone Soup story (which speaks to the power of community working together) with the LLC business entity (which is meant to protect us farmers legally). Farm Stories writes:
“The name of their business entity, however, was what was most intriguing. Stone Soup, LLC was the name that caught my eye. Their story speaks to several issues facing those who want to begin farming: namely, the high cost of acquiring land for those with farming dreams, and the legal and liability aspects of farm related businesses that most people don’t really consider.
Stone Soup, LLC as a name is a paradox. We do live in an age where Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farming is increasing all over the country as people want to know where their food comes from as they support their local farmers. The very way that CSA’s operate show an increased willingness of people to support each other, even financially, so that they can achieve mutual goals. This coincides with our increased awareness that we need to protect ourselves from those out there that would be all too happy to sue us if they thought they could take something from us.”
Interesting- I hadn’t thought of that before, though it is a very good point. The article emphasized that farming is a business, not just a lifestyle, and must be carefully thought through. The story ends:
“If you want to farm, there are plenty of customers out there who want to support you in your goal. Just don’t forget to do your business planning along the way.”
Agreed! We’ve been lucky enough to have good friends and advisors who have helped us in our business planning. It’s not the sexy part of farming, but it sure is important, and we think that getting the business squared away– the lease, the LLC, the accounting, all that stuff– will make the farming aspect go more smoothly over the long run. Anyways, thanks to Farm Stories!
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After 5 days of work we are making steady progress on the construction of the greenhouse. I think it’s starting to look like a greenhouse! The frame is complete, with exception of the endwalls. On this week’s agenda is another run to the hardware store to buy materials (2×4, L-braces, doors) to start endwall construction. We also need to finish up attaching the hardware that will eventually hold the plastic in place on the frame. However we won’t actually be attaching the plastic to the frame until early spring. This will save a winter’s wear and tear on the relatively delicate plastic and maybe allow us another year’s use of it. The type of plastic we bought usually holds for 4 years but we’ll be crossing our fingers for 5.
As some of you may have already noticed, I’ve started a Twitter account that displays in the sidebar here on the blog. I’ve been posting mini-updates on the greenhouse progress as well as some pictures. Here’s a pictorial recap of the week’s work (although some pictures are repeats from Twitter).
We started by stringing out the footprint so that we would know where to drive the foundation posts. Hours obsessing over fractions of an inch and perfectly proportioned triangles made us all a little cranky.
Mel, Rory and Kevin obsessing over fractions and angles
cranky Mel
Then we pounded each of the 26 posts 2 feet into the ground.
Rory pounding posts
Pounding in one of the last posts we hit a large boulder, which slowed work for the day as we tried various workarounds.
the boulder
Once we had solved that problem, we began setting in the rafters. It was exciting to see our painstaking work of the previous few days unfold into a series of dramatic archways.
Kevin, Kate and Mel setting in rafters
We finished the framing by setting in and fixing baseboards to the rafters, then started attaching the hardware components that will secure the plastic.
Kevin setting baseboard
Ours will look something like this when it’s finally finished in the spring.
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I made it to Massachusetts! It took me about nine days to get across the country and I’m so glad to be home! I brought my friend, Mel, back with me as well. She’s here to help us get the greenhouse up, which we are currently working away on. Mel and I met about 6 years ago when we were both apprenticing at Indian Line Farm, a CSA and market farm in the Berkshires. For the past 5 years she’s been managing her own CSA outside Minneapolis at Gale Woods Farm. Before we left on the final leg of the trip to Massachusetts, we took a tour of her farm.
Gale Woods Farm is part of a large park district in the region and is home to the district’s educational farm programs. The newly-expanded education center/barn houses all the farm animals–chickens, pigs, turkeys, cattle, sheep–as well as teaching space and a small farm store, where they sell farm-raised vegetables, eggs and meat. Thousands of school kids come through each year to learn about how farms produce food, as well as basic kitchen skills and wool crafts with wool from Gale Woods’ sheep.
Mel’s part of the farm–the vegetable growing operation–works with a group of 14- and 15-year old Youth Farmers from the Minneapolis metro area. The Youth Farmers spend 22 hours a week for 10 weeks over the summer learning how to grow vegetables and receiving leadership training.
While we were there Mel showed me her large chicken tractor, the Henabago. A chicken tractor is not a tractor per se, but a mobile chicken coop that allows the hens to be moved across pasture over the span of many weeks.
As they move through each patch of pasture they fertilize, eat bugs and lightly till the surface of the soil. The Henabago is out of commission for the winter, but usually houses about 50 chickens.
Nearby is the Gale Woods turkey pen, holding about 35 Bronze-Breasted and Eastern White turkeys. As we were watching them, we noticed a smaller bird on the far side of the pen, but outside of it. Looking more closely we realized that this was a wild turkey, not a farm-raised turkey. 
Although stymied by the electric fence, this turkey wasn’t trying escape from the pen, but trying to get into it–not a wise move for a turkey a few weeks before Thanksgiving.
Back in Mel’s vegetable fields I admired her brilliantly-shaded Red Russian kale and enjoyed some of her amazingly sweet spinach.
Cold weather brings out sugars in greens like spinach as the plants try to protect themselves. Minnesota-grown spinach is an experience unto itself–I’ve never tasted spinach this deliciously sweet!
After a thorough discussion of cover cropping tactics for weed suppression, we went home to feast on kale and half a dozen winter root vegetables that Mel and her band of Youth Farmers had grown.
Mel eating spinach
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged new farmers, Rory | 1 Comment »
Rory here, posting from Minnesota. For the past week I’ve been driving across the country as part of the big move. Right now I’m in Minneapolis, MN visiting my good friend Mel, a CSA farmer here.
Her friend, Red Kirkman, worked with her this season on her farm and also started his own farm this year with his wife Nina.
Fox & Fawn Farm, a 10 acre farm with about 1 acre currently in production, has 16 CSA members and supplies two local restaurants with beautiful produce. Red gave Mel and me the full tour and fed us a delicious lunch while I peppered him with questions about their operation.
I was particularly curious about their packing shed–the design, the plumbing setup, the tables and counters he built, and the cost of the whole thing. As we at Langwater Farm start thinking about the setup and design of our packing area, I want see what works and what doesn’t and get plenty of ideas from other farmers. 
The work tables that Red constructed out of 2×4s and hardware cloth were very functional, easy to build, and excellent for wet harvest bins. He built the counters (some made of finer mesh hardware cloth) around wash sinks that he found used or free and plumbed the sinks so that they can drain back onto the farm and the water can be used again.
Red also turned the basement of the farmhouse into a multi-room root cellar. They grew a ton of potatoes this year and wanted a good place to store them for the winter and for planting again next spring.
In one room of the root cellar they had lots of yellow onions hanging for drying. Some of these onions were amazingly large– I’ve never seen onions this big!
Henry, Red and Nina’s energetic 10-month-old puppy, was great company as we walked through the fields checking out their beautiful kale, leeks and cabbages. Red and Nina are planning to expand their CSA next year and put in more perennial crops (like asparagus and strawberries) and fruit trees as well.
Visiting farms and talking with other small farmers this fall has been fascinating and we are so grateful that small farmers are so generous with their time and their knowledge!
If you are a MN resident and would like to get in contact with Fox & Fawn to join their CSA or ask a question, please call them at 952-353-1762.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged new farmers, Rory | 3 Comments »
Toughen up, Americans!
A vintage ad for vegetables, urging anyone who wants to be strong and tough to make sure and eat plenty of vegetables. We agree- vegetables (especially fresh, local, seasonal ones) build strong bodies, strong minds, and strong hearts. And don’t forget strong communities, too!
Image found here
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This weekend Kate and Kevin, along with their friend Michelle, and Kevin and Rory’s mother Mary, planted next year’s crop of garlic. The ground was a little wet, but it felt like it was drying out a bit by the end of the day–helped by plenty of sunshine and a good breeze.
Because of the climate in Massachusetts, garlic is planted in the fall, overwinters in the ground and then sprouts in the spring. Kevin’s going to mulch the garlic thickly with straw later this week to help insulate it this winter and prevent weeds next spring and summer.
For the bulk of the crop we bought a little over 5o lbs of organic hardneck seed garlic from Still Point Community Farm in Amenia, NY, right on the Connecticut border. We chose a variety called Music, which is known for its excellent, slightly spicy flavor and its big, easy-to-peel cloves. It’s a good keeper and is considered a specialty garlic.
We’re also planting a much smaller quantity of a softneck garlic called Silver Rose. Softneck varieties are good for making garlic braids.
That 50 lbs of hardneck should turn into thousands of fat heads of garlic when we harvest it next summer. Then we’ll cure it in the sun or in the greenhouse for about 6 weeks. After we’ll clean it up a bit, knocking the dirt off and trimming the roots, it will be ready to go into CSA baskets and out to our farmers markets. We’ll hopefully be able to save plenty for planting again next fall.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged garlic, Kate, Kevin, music, planting, varieties | 6 Comments »
Look what Rory found on Google Maps:
This is Charlie MacNamera haying the Main Street Field.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged haying, maps, tractor | 1 Comment »
