Printer Friendly Version - A Little Peace And Quiet?

Sometimes, quiet is overrated. Farms tend to be quiet, at least in the minds of filmmakers and painters who tend not to tend them. In fact, even on cold and dreary days, farmwork can be a noisy affair. When a tree branch falls on top of the metal roof as the mason jars sanitize in the steamy, boiling water, the sound of the crash startles the barn cat, who leaps from her warm place on the couch near the wood stove. Outside, the wind whips as the row covers are pulled over the last remnants of hardy greens who wish for a modicum of extra warmth and protection from the season’s wrath. The animals still bark, cluck, and bleat from the confines of their shelters, and the wild sounds of crows up above and squirrels rustling in the brush below fill the thin air with an almost tender timbre.

Listen closely, and you can almost hear the bustling activity of life taking place beneath the surface as billions of microorganisms break down and restore organic matter in the soil. This slight ecosystem is more closely akin to a farmer's winter work. Notebooks are filled with thoughts about crops and conditions from the past year, as well as plans and planting schedules for the months to come. Seed orders must be placed and seedlings started, animals need year-round care, and compost must be built up in anticipation of spring. This “quiet time” is essential for a farmer to have any hope of a good yield in the year to come. Amidst all of this hidden labor, there is also an opportunity for reflection. One must tend to the inner world as well, after all.

When growing vegetables, a farmer is required to strike a constant balance between the elements. Make sure there are enough nutrients in the soil, sunlight for your plants to grow, and water to nourish them. In order to avoid the worst insect damage and late frosts, timing is of the essence. Too much or too little of any one thing and the chance for success diminishes rapidly. Nature does most of the heavy lifting if my impatience doesn’t get the best of me, and I can leave well enough alone.

For now, though, I want to try being like the garlic growing humbly in its row. Fed, mulched, and planted by the clove in the fall, it mysteriously splits and multiplies itself over winter, forming an entirely new bulb by replicating the memory contained in its genes. The plants demonstrate that a sense of serenity isn’t achieved through lack of activity or even in the rigidity of absolute silence, but rather in the midst of reflection, remembering where we have come from to push into the future. As I walk, enveloped by this kind of living quiet, I am allowed for a moment to step a little closer to that often elusive feeling of Peace.

Partners Jenny Hill and Joel Smith operate Star Light Gardens, an organic and innovative CSA and market farm located across two lots in Durham and Middlefield. After working alongside founding farmer David Zemelsky for many years, they took on the entire ownership and management of Star Light Gardens beginning in 2021. On a crisp Sunday morning, I visited with

Joel, Jen, their dogs (Syd and Annie), cats, chickens, and sheep to discuss their farming practices and extensive methods for season extension and year-round market farming.

SGM: Thank you for taking the time to show me around today! Can you start off by talking about the special ways you are able to use row covers, Gothic hoop houses, and greenhouses with limited to no heating to essentially grow food in this climate year-round?

JS: Yeah, so we have eight peaked hoop houses or high tunnels at our Middlefield location where we can essentially grow in the ground all year. There’s also a nursery and a large one sitting on a concrete slab. When we began working with David in Durham, he used both unheated greenhouses and traditional exterior in-ground growing. So when this property in Middlefield came on the market, we were very interested. It was owned by a farmer named Toby, who also started CT Greenhouse Company, so the high tunnels were already built on-site for purchasers to visit. The two farm locations are within ten minutes of each other, which makes it possible for us to be in both places in a single day before heading to the markets in the area.

JH: Because we are able to grow this way, it does set us apart at the markets. We’re able to bring such a wide array of produce to customers as close to year-round as we can. I had been helping to build these greenhouses years before we even moved here. So we had a decent idea of the soil health and possibilities of the place as well.

SGM: Tell me about the process you use to keep your vegetables alive and growing all year. The greens are beautiful! Do you cover them every night?

JS: It really depends on the weather outside and inside the tunnels. Humidity can be your biggest enemy in the greenhouses.

JH: When the greens are grown this close together mold is just asking to grow with them! Even spinach can grow a lot of powdery mildew.

JS: Right, it’s a fine line when it comes to covering, uncovering, and finding the time to do it with this many houses.

JH: Generally, if it’s below 30 degrees, we’ll make sure to cover the rows. And we always have the vents on the sides of the houses we can open and close to work with temperature as well.

JS: Generally, this time of year, we don’t have too much trouble with temperature variation. Come late February and March, though, if we get an especially warm day after some cold ones, we will make sure to get out here, uncover the plants, and even begin opening the vents a bit while the sun is up.

SGM: And without the windchill, inside these tunnels, it feels about 10 to 15 degrees warmer than outside.

JS: Yeah, they say one layer of cover is the equivalent of a USDA climate zone change. With the greenhouse layer and then a row cover, we’re able to mimic a two-zone change. Then, as we plan for vegetable selection, we’re choosing varieties that have some cold hardiness. So, that's a major factor in allowing us to grow 11 to 12 months a year for markets in the area.

SGM: Each tunnel looks large enough that you could bring a tractor through them. Do you, or do you use any other tilling or soil preparation methods between plantings?

JS: We used to use the tractor at our site in Durham, but it just became so difficult to move through the houses and had a negative effect on the soil. Now, we do use a broadfork to loosen the soil. That’s probably the largest soil disturbance tool we use here in Middlefield. Occasionally, in Durham, we will use a harrower on the tractor to clear the beds and very shallowly flip the layers. Generally, if there isn’t a lot of soil compaction, we’ll let the beds be to maintain the soil health and life network below the soil.

SGM: Are there any other tools you make regular use of here? Soil amendments or fertilizer?

JH: These rows were direct seeded with our seeder. We also do a lot of transplants with tomatoes and other summer crops. I would say it’s 50/50 between the two methods. Then, usually, we get about two truckloads of compost a year from WeCare Denali and spread a layer of that whenever we convert a bed. With a couple nice-sized wheelbarrows of compost, some alfalfa meal, and a blend of ProGrow we cover most of our bases for potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorus.

JS: It’s a similar mix in our soil blocks for transplants, except we tend to emphasize the nitrogen more to compensate for any decomposing plant material that’s been left behind in the soil previously. The soil blocks are also a great thing when we have workers and students here over the summer.

JH: All of our employees are college students or graduates who have heard about us through the market grapevine. We had four employees this year, and one of our workers, Sam, is staying on the whole year. But, we haven’t had to be “bosses” much in this field.

JS: Having good systems in place, like making soil blocks and transplanting, helps a lot. We can’t make any assumptions that the way Jen and I do things, though, is always going to be intuitive for others coming here to work.

SGM: Right; we’ve all probably had experiences of working for good farmers who were good teachers and good farmers who were bad teachers. It’s one of those skills no one really thinks about when they think about farming, but being able to kindly and accurately share how something is done is as important as just doing it all yourself!

JS: I’ve learned how important it is to just show people over and over again how you want something done. Then, experience is the best teacher.

JH: By doing the jobs with our employees, they see our pace, see how we’re doing it, and learn quickly we’re not asking them to do anything we don’t already do every day, as well.

SGM: So, neither of you grew up farming. You both began farming as adults and then met each other while working at the New Haven Farmers Market. Can you tell me a little about how you each came to be farmers? Why do you do it?

JH: Yeah, it was kind of a natural progression of being interested in food systems and being outside. I just love being outside and slowly began working at community gardens while working in Title 1 schools. It wasn’t long before I began seeing what they were eating and feeling really frustrated by that because of how what we eat affects other areas of our lives and well-being. Then, the last job I had before making the leap into farming was at a homeless shelter for women and their children. I was cooking meals for them with the food we were provided and felt so disappointed and knew there was a more just way of ensuring better food access for everyone. Part of that job was searching job postings for others, and I saw a listing for a farm job and did it! While working at that farm, I met Joel, who was working for David at the time, at one of the farmers' markets. He gave me a bulb of “love” garlic from Star Light that first day and the rest is history.

SGM: Is it the freedom to set your own schedule and be outside that draws you to this work? Or is there something else that resonates with you about it?

JH: I definitely do love being outside and would do anything to make sure that happens. There are much easier ways to build one's day around being outside, though. So, at the end of the day, I believe good food is important. It’s important for people, it’s important to communities, and it's important for the Earth. We’re still a long way from where we need to be in our food system, so getting closer to greater food access is what drives me into this work. That’s one of the reasons we also love growing year-round. People still need to eat well in the winter!

JS: I came to farming in a similar way in that I was trying to change my own eating habits and lifestyle, so I started gardening. I started volunteering at City Seed and got turned onto it by meeting the farmers there. I just got more and more into it, even though I was working in accounting at the time. Once I just had it with that environment, I started working at David’s farm and worked at a pizza place in New Haven to pay off my student loans. I actually was a market customer of his before I started working for him, so you never know how those relationships we have with folks will grow over time.

SGM: I’m sure that passion for healthy food comes through for your customers as you’ve taken over the business these last few years.

JH: The interactions with customers are fantastic because we get to learn what they like to eat, what their kids and babies like to eat, and share with them the results of our labor. Seeing transformations in the health of people, like those with diabetes and pre-diabetes, over many years is so special as well. This is hard work, it’s exhausting, sometimes we're not super motivated to get it all done, and then we’ll go to the farmer’s market where people excitedly tell us what they've been making or loved to eat. Knowing it matters to other people is reassuring for us in the work, too.

SGM: How amazing there are still ways that people today still can have a relationship with their farmer, the person or people who are literally helping to bring food to their tables!

Can you tell me about how you offer the vegetables to customers? Is everything sold at the markets, or do you also have a CSA Program?

JS: So, our CSA is actually at the markets themselves. We have a system where customers pre-purchase CSA funds they can then use on anything we bring to their market that week. Instead of distributing shares, people load up their cards with anywhere from $100 to 600 at a time. As members, they get an additional 10% value added to their card, so a member who adds $300 to their card actually receives a $330 balance on their Market Card. Anyone can also order from our website at any time. It’s all a little less pressure on us, as well. With about 100 members, instead of scrambling to pack 100 shares of the same thing for everyone, we can crate items, put them on the truck, and let people choose only what they want.

Because we also rely on non-CSA customers, this method ensures a variety of items for them and allows the members a little relief if they don’t make it to us every week.

SGM: I love it! It seems to add a lot of flexibility for the farmer and the customer.

JH: Right, and there is a lower buy-in for anyone who perhaps can’t afford a more traditional CSA share.

SGM: Tell me about all of the animals that you have here as well. How do they fit into your growing system? Do you let the sheep or chickens into the greenhouses at all?

JH: Depending on the time of year and what's been growing, there are days when we might put the sheep or the chickens into the houses and let them fertilize directly into the beds. They’ll do the hard work of getting a lot of the greens out. There is also a good amount of untamed land behind the greenhouses, and sometimes, the animals will help us clean up areas that are really overgrown.

SGM: It’s a beautifully sunny day, and there are a lot of rows left to uncover, so my last question is just what would you like to tell others about farming in our area, and where can they find you? What should people know?

JS: Good food IS medicine. It’s something we know, and our customers know or are learning as well. It’s a miracle to watch things grow from a tiny seed into a dish people are serving to their families.

JH: If you’re thinking about farming, find a farm! Make it happen. Jump in. There are so many in this area. If you can’t find one you like, get in touch because we’ll hire you. It’s empowering to know your food as a farmer and customer.

“Good food IS medicine. It’s something we know and our customers know or are learning as well. It’s a miracle to watch things grow from a tiny seed into a dish people are serving to their families,” says Joel Smith, who operates Star Light Gardens with Jenny Hill. Photo courtesy of Sean Gargamelli-McCreight

“If you’re thinking about farming, find a farm! Make it happen. Jump in. There are so many in this area. If you can’t find one you like, get in touch because we’ll hire you,” says Jenny Hill, right, who operate Star Light Gardens with Joel Smith, left. “It’s empowering to know your food as a farmer and customer.” Photo courtesy of Sean Gargamelli-McCreight

Star Light Gardens has eight peaked hoop houses or high tunnels at the Middlefield location where food is grown in the ground all year long. Photo courtesy of Sean Gargamelli-McCreight