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.
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