Today's Farm

Today the farm is owned  by me , Dennis Busa, my brother Francis and my sister Trudy McGarvie. We inherited the farm from my mother Rosina who died  in 1996 .  My  father John., who bought the land with his four brothers  in 1920 and started this farm, died in 1979. Trudy, my mother and I took over running the farm in 1971 when my father became ill and Francis joined full time in  1985.We farm 9 acres including greenhouses at the original farm on Lowell street and rent 15 acres of conservation and private land in other parts of the town. We  are all involved in production and do much of the  work in the fields and greenhouses. I manage the  farm  and grow the plants and flowers in the  greenhouses and the corn on the conservation lands. Fran runs  the Farmers Markets works on the farm and buys the fruit and grocery items for the  stand. Trudy works mainly in and around the greenhouses and stand but  is also responsible for keeping the family recipes and traditions  going. My daughter Emily helps in the fields and greenhouses and has learned to operate the seed machine that produces transplants for the farm and greenhouses.  Trudy's husband Doug McGarvie stocks  the produce and items inside the stand.

    As the  grower and manager of the farm for the past thirty-four years, I have tried to continue the family tradition of offering greens, herbs and vegetables of the highest quality for sale directly to the public. We are always testing and sampling what we grow to ensure that our customers get the best tasting and freshest vegetables. While corn , tomatoes and lettuce are our main crops, our specialty is diversity. It is a philosophy my father developed years ago. He planted a succession of different crops along with his mainstays of celery and tomatoes so he  had something to sell at all times of the growing season and the land was fully utilized. This technique also minimizes the need for chemical pest control by avoiding the problems of mono culture and factory farming which enable certain pest and diseases to reach epidemic proportions . We and our customers have learned to tolerate minor insect damage and blemishes rather than risk the dangers and uncertainties of a chemical spray program. This is a main component of organic farming and ironically one we have employed years before the term became popular and commercialized .Our cultural methods are also not much different from those of the past. We do a lot of hand planting and hand weeding. Plastic mulches , drip tube irrigation and seed starting in plug trays are the main differences. Some of our tractors ,seeders and cultivators have been in use since the nineteen-forties.

 Since we now retail most of what we sell we actually grow more kinds of vegetables  than my father did . As new varieties come along  we update our list , but  often we stay with types we have grown for years. The strain of Sicilian eggplant we have is from the same seed my uncle Joe Romano brought from Italy fifty years ago and the Pascal celery we grow is similar to the kind grown in the nineteen twenties. We also try to reintroduce vegetables that were popular in the past like Italian pole beans, salad bowl lettuce and heirloom tomatoes.