Farming 101 Is A Lesson In Sustainable Gardening

By Nancy K. Crevier

In and around an antique home on Brushy Hill Road, Farming 101 is taking root. The low-impact, sustainable farm is completing its second growing season under the tender care of Richard “Trout” and Jennifer Gaskins. The name of their business is a play on both the farm’s address and the fact that this is the first venture into farming for the couple, who are learning as they go.

The 2,500 heirloom tomato plants, and a few hybrid varieties selected for their superior quality and flavor, that are the focus of their business, begin life in the propagation room off of the living room, each one grown from certified organic seed. Four racks of seedlings grow beneath lights on each side of the room in winter, until they are strong enough to go into the hillside hoop house to be hardened off in late spring, and then into the one-acre garden.

Mr Gaskins, a fine artist specializing in camera obscura art to create mural-sized photographs, met his wife at the Atlanta, Ga., gallery and studio he owned in that southern city. Ms Gaskins, an accountant for PepsiCo, was from Westchester County. They moved north, settling first in New York, and started gardening again, something both of them had been involved with in some form their whole lives. When they expressed interest, a friend who owned an organic farm encouraged the young couple to delve into the lifestyle.

“I realized that a farm would be a nice balance to my art work,” said Mr Gaskins. “I like working outside, and I was becoming more and more aware of environmental issues,” he said.

“Farming is going back to the way it used to be,” said Ms Gaskins. “I’ve noticed a lot of people are looking toward organic, and in the past two years, it is even more about locally grown food than organic.”

Where tomatoes and beans clamber up trellises now, and peppers, corn, eggplant, cabbage, leeks, carrots, and other produce fill the spaces between, was just a horse pasture, overgrown with weeds and brush when they purchased the Newtown property in 2007, after searching all over the region. The first summer was spent clearing the land.

That fall, the couple began planning the spring’s crops, and setting up the propagation room for the seedlings.

The Gaskinses decided to focus on heirloom tomato plants, reasoning that “Everyone loves a good summer tomato,” said Ms Gaskins. Plus, the couple liked the idea of the history behind the beautiful heirloom varieties, and the fact that seed from heirloom plants can be saved to grow future crops, unlike hybrid varieties.

“I like to cook and I like to eat,” Mr Gaskins added, “and I decided I wanted to grow things I can’t buy in a big box store.”

Unlike the hybrid tomatoes grown for packing and shipping qualities, the Gaskinses wanted to grow for flavor, texture, and beauty. Heirloom tomatoes come in hundreds of colors and sizes they said, and they are still feeling their way through this year, experimenting with different kinds. Among their favorites are the black cherry tomatoes, the white cherry tomatoes, the orange banana paste tomato, and the speckled Roman paste tomato that glistens with gold streaks in the sunlight. “The Garden Peach is gorgeous,” said Mr Gaskins, showing off the small, matte finish yellow tomato blushed with pink.

Sustainable Gardening

It would be possible and certainly easier to farm in what has become the “traditional” method, using pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides to create a visually aesthetically pleasing garden and be pretty much guaranteed a crop each summer, said Mr Gaskins, but the couple knew that low-impact, sustainable gardening was more in keeping with the lifestyle they see as crucial to a balanced society.

“The idea behind sustainable gardening,” explained Mr Gaskins, “is that you’re leaving the land better than you found it. You develop an ongoing relationship with it.”

“You’re not stripping the soil of nutrients and you are thinking of the ecology and environment in everything you do,” Ms Gaskins said.

Mr Gaskins refers to the style of gardening that they do as “artisan gardening,” meaning that they do all of the work by hand. From seeding, to planting, to weeding, to harvesting, it is only the two of them putting in the hours. The only piece of equipment that they own is a 1957 David Bradley walk-behind tractor.

“We squash the bugs by hand, and we use companion plants like marigolds and basil to keep down the pests,” Ms Gaskins said. Other practices include using newspaper and straw between rows to discourage weed growth, and fabric covers to keep pests off of the young plants. Crop rotation is also an important practice in sustainable gardening, they said, and cut flowers provide not only beauty and another source of income, but are selected to attract beneficial insects to the garden.

When cutting back the garden last fall, Mr Gaskin harvested the remaining marigold blossoms, which emit a scent unpleasant to bugs and deer, and brewed them into a natural repellent that he used in the spring before this year’s crop of flowers began to bloom. The intense and frequent rains this spring and summer made it difficult, he admitted, to keep up with the amount of spraying he needed to do. The deer did jump the eight-foot fence and managed to devour a good amount of the bean crops.

A Challenging Year

The weather this year was also discouraging, they said, in that a normal harvest of 10 to 15 pounds per plant was reduced to nearly a quarter of that, and other crops failed to flourish, as well. Even so, they believe that the fact that they grew their own tomato plants put them in a better situation than other farmers who did not, and whose crops succumbed to late blight. “It wasn’t a good year, but we did better than some who lost everything,” Ms Gaskins said.

The rain was also good for growing weeds, and with the decision to not use harmful sprays, the two struggled this year to keep up with weeding. Because local beekeeper Dick Morran houses beehives on their property, the Gaskinses choose to not use even the few organic pesticides that are available, as they can be deadly to bees and other beneficial insects.

Farming 101 is a work in progress for them, they said, with challenges that they are learning to meet as they go. The success they had the previous summer was enough encouragement to keep them going through the less encouraging year this past summer, though, they said. “Sustainable farming is complicated. But the harvest is the reward. Last winter we stored enough produce that we hardly had to buy anything until late winter,” Mr Gaskins said. Excess crops last summer provided them with enough tomatoes to put up nearly 200 quarts of homemade sauce and juice.

“Picking something from the garden and knowing you can eat it right there is amazing,” he said.

Both Jennifer and Trout Gaskins also get a kick out of introducing children to the fresh harvest. “I love to see the impact on kids when they try one of our tomatoes, or a neighbor kid picks a leaf of arugula from our garden,” said Ms Gaskins. “They’re learning where food comes from, and that’s important. There is such a gap between what people eat and where it comes from,” she said.

Presently, the Gaskinses sell their tomatoes to various restaurants in Westchester County. “That works out for us, and keeps with our lifestyle,” explained Ms Gaskins. “I work there already, so we don’t need to use extra fuel delivering all over. I can just make the deliveries when I go to work,” she said.

This summer they also attended the Greenwich Farmers’ Market on Saturdays, the Monroe Farmers’ Market on Fridays, and the Scott’s Corner Farmers’ Market in Pound Ridge, N.Y., on Sundays. They would like in the future to have a permanent farm stand on their property, and to have more interaction with the Newtown community, they said.

“It takes effort to grow food, and a commitment,” Ms Gaskins said, “but it’s worth it. You have to decide what’s important.”