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

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

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 2x4s 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.

The first farm, Riverhill Farm, is in Nevada City, CA. Riverhill is a beautiful farm that grows all kinds of vegetables, including some of the most gorgeous kale we’ve ever seen. Alan Haight has been farming there since about 2003 and runs a very successful CSA. He estimates that he’s feeding about 600 people, which is really significant given that the town only has about 3,000 people. So Alan is feeding 1/5 of the town. Who says small farmers can’t feed the world?

The second farm, Yolo Bulb, is right outside Davis and is run by Mike Madison. Mike produces lots of delicious olive oil and has an amazing cut flower operation. Rory’s hoping to grow a lot of cut flowers at Langwater Farm, so it was great to get to ask all kinds of questions about how he does it. He had a lot of helpful suggestions about everything from varieties to tractor implements. Mike even gave us a big bag of books to jump-start our farm library!

All in all it was a very inspiring weekend and made us excited to get started with our own operation!