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Merrimack Valley Magazine

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Weeding, Sowing, Growing

September 24, 2021 by Dean Johnson

A Look Inside Horne Family Farms

Here’s something rarely heard from a person who just graduated with a degree in economics: “I’m going to become a farmer.”

But that’s exactly what Lowell native Christopher Horne decided when he graduated from UMass Lowell in 2014.

The result is Londonderry-based Horne Family Farms, a half-acre property that maintains only organic practices and last year grew nearly 20,000 pounds of produce that ended up in several local restaurants — including Cobblestones/Moonstones, the Keep, and the Old Court — and dozens of local homes.

The feel-good story is a prime example of how someone can turn a near disaster into an unexpected dream come true. “During college,” Horne, 29, says, “my mom had a heart attack and my dad had a stroke, all in a year.”

 

Both survived, but Horne knew their lifestyles and diet contributed to those health scares. “So at a younger age,” he says, “I started thinking about the food we are eating.”

Horne began shopping at the Lowell Farmers Market and got the itch to grow his own healthy food. Knowing that he was out of his league, he picked up a copy of the book “Urban Gardening for Dummies.”

He volunteered for the nonprofit Mill City Grows, did his research, and even attended The Farm School in Athol. Along the way, he really got bitten by the gardening bug.

During his time at The Farm School, a friend offered to lease him a half acre of farmland in Londonderry.

Horne knew he wanted to use a technique known as SPIN-Gardening, which is “small-plot intensive,” he says. “It’s utilizing every square inch of space with intercropping — tomatoes, for example, with basil and lettuce — all different techniques to maximize every square inch of the plot.”

He believes in “all organic practices,” and that includes no herbicides and no machine tilling. When asked, as a joke, if that means handpicking insect pests from his plants … well … yes … that’s exactly what he does when necessary.

It’s a family operation. His wife, Michaela, is a Lowell school teacher, but once school is out for the summer, she spends much of her time gardening. Christopher’s brother, Marc, is a behind-the-scenes presence and responsible for many of the recipes the brothers have contributed to the pages of Merrimack Valley Magazine. Their sister Jessica and parents, Paula and Mark, also help.

Michaela and Chris (left) of Horne Family Farms prepare for the fall season. They are helped by Barry Francoeur (top right). The farm hosts a successful CSA program and supplies fresh produce to several notable local restaurants, including Moonstones and the Old Court.

“There is a lot of labor up front,” Horne says. “Weed management can be a ton of hard work, and it really can only work on this [small] scale.

“But the plants are doing phenomenally. I really think that I am not even there yet for maximizing our space because I’m still learning as a grower. I think the sky’s the limit. We are so ingrained [that] big-time farms are the only way to grow food. But you can grow an amazing amount of food on a small scale.”

This season, dozens of families paid $650 for a weekly bag of fresh vegetables. Horne’s CSA program is expected to run 18-20 weeks, and the operation has been such a success that he is already lining up a waiting list for next year.

It’s not yet a full-time job for Horne; he picks up the odd weekend bartending gigs at the Old Court, and his wife still teaches. But ask him about his goals, and there is no hesitation.

He is looking forward to a “lifetime of learning” how to farm. “I can’t tell you how special it is to feed people good food that I’m really proud of,” he says. “What’s next, though, is to crush it on this scale and grow as much food as possible.” 

HorneFarms.com

Filed Under: Food & Drink Tagged With: familyfarm, Farm, farming, horne family farms, NH, Organic, Produce

Gardening Essentials – The Language of Berries

September 7, 2019 by Sarah Courchesne Leave a Comment

I had a student a few years ago who joined me on my annual field research trip. Soft-spoken and kind, she also possessed an almost Germanic economy with words, electing to concoct her own, remarkably apt compound phrases rather than adopt whatever English word existed for a thing. The muskrats that scuttled across the trails were, in her parlance, “beaver-mice,” and the serviceberries we plucked from the bushes between tasks were “blueberry-pears.” If you have ever tried a serviceberry, you will recognize this as the perfect representation of their taste and granular texture. 

My student wasn’t unusual in giving serviceberries a new name; they are known by different names wherever you go. Like many plants, they get named by whatever was most important to the namer. When the serviceberry blossoms were most useful to indicate when the shad would be running up river in spring, they were “shadbush,” “shadwood” or “shadblow.” When it was most critical to know when they would ripen in some particular place, evidently, “Juneberry” (though they are decidedly July ripening here in New England). And if you wanted to call out what sets their taste apart from other summer berries, “chuckley pear.” 

I have multiple sorts of berries growing in my yard, most of which turned up without being planted by me. Raspberry canes arch themselves into the grass, making constant incursions, and some strawberries showed up one year inexplicably. We have a few highbush blueberries languishing among the pine-oak woods, along with several berry types of little interest to human palates. The plants that make berries that humans do not find tasty get named for things other than their fruits. The Virginia creeper vine is named for its behavior rather than the berries it makes, which are toxic to us. Same for pokeweed, bittersweet and deadly nightshade. Their names call out what matters to us, but the birds who can eat the berries without any harm likely call them by different names in their tongues. 

 

Photos by Kevin Harkins. Food styling by Lysa Pelletier.

The botanical definition of a berry is a bit technical and is about what part of the plant’s ovary grows into the fleshy, edible bits, and about just how many flowers and ovaries are involved. These technical points mean that some fruits we call berries really aren’t (blackberries), and some fruits we don’t think of as berries actually are (eggplant). Our expansive use of the term includes some very un-berry things, like the modified seed cones of juniper trees and yew shrubs, these last being the bright red “bird berries” about which many a nervous grandmother warned many a heedless child. Certainly mine did. 

What, then, is the essential character that makes us call something a berry? Partly it’s color, often deep red or purple, or nearly black. The barely contained juice in a taut bundle just this side of rot. The tendency, compared with more durable and resilient fruits like apples, to bruise and smash. They draw attention, bright red or dark as an ink spot against the green foliage. Most of the time, plants are busily trying not to be eaten. Thorns, spikes, stinging hairs, unpalatable chemicals circulated through the leaves and stems. But berries are deliberate seekers of their own destruction. The seeds are bound up in a packet bright as a gem seeking passage through an animal’s digestive tract and deposit in far-flung parts. The fruit ripens, goes from pallid to blushing, and bruises deep. They run a double transit: in the darkness from end to end through someone’s gut, and to wherever the owner of that gut can get to in that span. Their time passes quickly, and they don’t keep.   

Filed Under: Home & Garden Tagged With: berries, berry, fruit, Garden, home, Organic

Fungal Matters – Cultivating Mushrooms in Coffee Grounds

June 30, 2019 by Sarah Courchesne Leave a Comment

The comings and goings of mushrooms are inscrutable. At least to the untrained eye, which mine is. There was the tuft of alcohol inkies that appeared overnight in the middle of the yard one year and then melted away and never came back; the batch of cheery yellow parasol mushrooms in the pot of a houseplant I was nursing back to health; the elfin toadstools that sprouted out of the sill of my shower in a rented apartment one time. Mushrooms make plain how humans got the idea of spontaneous generation — that rotting meat generates flies of its own accord, or that swamps produce clouds of mosquitoes out of miasma. Mushrooms appear to come out of nowhere, from no source, and suddenly. 

Being visual creatures, humans see a mushroom and equate it with the fungus itself. This is a backward view, though an understandable one given that they are conspicuous and, in the case of Pleurotus ostreatus (the species usually meant when we say oyster mushroom), delicious. But mushrooms are simply an appendage of a much larger organism, a temporary reproductive organ employed to deploy spores and then dismantled by rot. Just as you have to tend a tree to get the apples, you have to tend the whole fungus to get the mushrooms. Mushrooms seem to pop up out of nowhere because the body they belong to is usually underground or inconspicuous — a mat of tendrils nosing through the dark. For those hoping to grow their own mushrooms at home, understanding the nature of Pleurotus holistically will make the work much easier. 

If you read a bit about cultivating your own oyster mushrooms, you will see a great deal of optimistic cheerleading. “Easy to grow!” “So simple!” “Enjoy fresh mushrooms with literally zero effort!” Like most such claims, it would be better to approach them with a skeptical attitude. I have taken in many a houseplant billed as “easy care!” or “impossible to kill!” and promptly killed it. It’s true that oyster mushrooms are willing to grow on a wide range of substrates and do not require extensive daily attention, but, as with impossible to kill houseplants, there are always ways to go wrong. Learning some basics about oyster mushrooms can help you avoid the particular pitfalls involved in growing them at home. 

 

Oyster mushrooms are fairly easy to find in the woods in just about any season, and, like many wild foraged or hunted foods, they tend to have a richer taste than domestically raised stock. At least, thus sayeth the foragers I listen to; my palate is never sensitive enough to detect such differences. I am pleased when I can tell that leftovers have gone bad, and sometimes I fail at that and eat them anyway. In any case, there are other substantial benefits to home growing mushrooms: no potential to fatally confuse an edible species with a toxic one, plus the convenience of countertop freshness and accessibility, rather than an uncertain walk in the woodlands or the disappointment of a grocery store-bought carton of mushrooms found slimy and moldering in the fridge drawer on a frazzled work night. 

Oyster mushrooms can grow on many things — straw, sawdust, an old hardwood log — but it turns out that used coffee grounds are particularly well suited to the task of hosting them. The reason lies mainly in the suppression of competition. The thin filaments of the fungal body, called hyphae, and referred to as “spawn” by fungus farmers, can be outcompeted by common molds in the environment. Substrates like straw have to be pasteurized before adding the spawn. The beauty of using used coffee grounds is that the high heat of brewing effectively pasteurizes the grounds, killing off any competitor organisms and offering a clean bed for the hyphae to grow through. The setup is time sensitive, and the grounds will be swiftly colonized by undesirable molds if not inoculated with mushroom spawn within 24 hours of brewing. You can put your grounds into a purpose-built bag from a kit online, or you can make your own out of a bucket or other plastic container with holes drilled into the sides.

Oyster mushrooms have preferred moisture and light levels, optimal spawn-to-substrate ratios, ideal air circulation patterns. Their “easy to grow” nature depends on these requirements being met, but a careful reading of the instructions provided by the more reputable online mushroom spawn purveyors should keep you on the right side of things. Growing mushrooms in coffee grounds is a bit like having an ant farm. The hyphae burrow through the earthy grounds, and the mushrooms, once they appear, grow fast enough to almost watch. Less mobile than ants, true, but hovering where fungi do, somewhere between animal and vegetable, not less animate, and certainly as captivating.  

Elizabeth Almeida, (above) farmer and owner of Fat Moon Mushrooms, is a grower of gourmet, organic mushrooms for restaurants and boutique grocery stores in the Merrimack Valley region of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She shared five tips for The Bean Magazine’s readers on growing oyster mushrooms. 

1. Humidity is critical. Spritz growing mushrooms with water several times a day.

2. Fresh air is also important. Keep your grow kit in a place where the mushrooms can breathe.

3. Mushrooms double in size daily. Harvest when they stop growing and the edges uncurl.

4. Double your yield! After harvesting the first batch, let your block rest for a week. Soak it in cold water for 4 to 6 hours and start the process over. 

5. It’s best to eat oyster mushrooms immediately after harvesting, but if you need to store them in the refrigerator, put them in a brown paper bag so they can get the oxygen they need to stay fresh. 

Find out more at TheFatMoon.com.

Filed Under: Food & Drink Tagged With: coffee, Farm, gourmet, Harvest, Mushrooms, Organic

CSA: Merrimack Valley – Swiss Chard Baby Rolls

June 4, 2018 by Doug Sparks Leave a Comment

Welcome to CSA: Merrimack Valley, where area chefs offer recipes that will help you make the most of your CSA farm share. We’ll introduce you to some of the less common items in your basket and hope that you’ll be inspired to eat fresh, healthy and local.

Maria Natera shares her recipe for Swiss chard baby rolls. Natera is the healthy living programs manager at Groundwork Lawrence, a nonprofit organization that promotes urban environmental and social well-being. ( Editor’s note: The article was originally published in the May/June ’18 issue of MVM. ) She teaches cooking classes on how to eat healthy on a budget and manages three summer farmers markets and one winter market.               

At Groundwork Lawrence, Chef Maria Natera teaches healthy living workshops and strives to strengthen the growing community gardener network. She is also a volunteer at Lawrence CommunityWorks and serves on its board. Her Swiss chard recipe is colorful, kid-friendly and great to make when you’re tired of the same old salads. Photos by Adrien Bisson.

Swiss Chard Baby Rolls
Servings: 8 to 10

Ingredients:
2 bunches Swiss chard, stems trimmed
4 differently colored peppers (green, red, yellow and orange), julienned
2 carrots, julienned 1 small zucchini, julienned
1 small summer squash, julienned 1 cup cilantro, chopped
1 cup spinach, chopped 1 cup scallions, chopped
1 white onion, diced 2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons olive oil 2 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons butter 3 cups cream
2 cups Romano cheese 2 cups Parmesan cheese
4 cups mozzarella cheese
2 cups rice, or preferred grain, cooked


Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 F.

2. In a pan heated to medium-high, add the oil and half of the minced garlic. Cook for 1 minute, then add the peppers, zucchini and squash.

3. Mix cilantro, scallions and spinach with the rice or grain of preference. Fold in the cooked vegetables.

4. Fill a cooking pot with water and bring to a boil. Turn off the heat and soak the Swiss chard in the hot water for 5 to 10 minutes. This will soften the leaves and make them easier to roll. 

5. Put a scoop of the vegetable and rice mixture into each Swiss chard leaf and roll them up. Fold in the edges and place the rolls into a baking or casserole dish. Set aside.

6. In a hot skillet, add butter, onion and the remaining minced garlic. Cook for 5 minutes. Add the cream, Romano and Parmesan cheese and stir. When the sauce is thick, it is ready. Top the Swiss chard rolls with the sauce and leftover cheese.

7. Cook at 375 F for 15 to 20 minutes or until done. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Filed Under: Community, Food & Drink Tagged With: chard, CSA, Farm, Organic, Recipe, swiss

Humbled by Humus – Misadventures in Composting

September 2, 2017 by Sarah Courchesne Leave a Comment

It is difficult to imagine what an adventure in composting would look like, but when it comes to misadventures in composting, I speak from copious experience. On farms and fields, I have appreciated the windrows of good compost steaming in the cool mornings like well-worked horses. I have admired the fistfuls of rich, dark humus tumbling from the compost bins on Saturday morning garden TV shows. I have envied the tidy, gleaming countertop compost containers in my garden supply catalogs, but my own composting efforts are my secret shame.

Our bin for kitchen scraps is kept out of sight under the sink, its outside streaked in brown runnels, and its inside lined in creeping mats of mold with a fetid puddle at the bottom. I know balance is critical to good composting; brown, dry, carbon-rich ingredients must predominate the wet, green nitrogen-rich scraps 2-to-1. For a little while, I kept torn up newspaper under the sink ready to toss in with the food waste in just the right ratio. But while I do the gardening, my husband does the cooking, and my 7-year-old takes the scraps out to the pile, so I abdicated responsibility for the compost bin under the sink.

The pile itself is still my job. Over the years I have tried many iterations of the compost heap: a pit in the ground, a wire-sided pen, a big green plastic barrel that rotated on a metal spit. Our current pile is behind the shed, next to strata of brown Christmas trees and a moldering canoe. Beside these, a wicker chair left out to weather has finally, this spring, staggered onto its knees. Thorn bushes are always encroaching, and there are piles of rebar and plastic conduit and rusted metal. It’s the backstage, the untidy prop room of the garden.

 

© coulanges – Fotolia

The compost bin itself is wood-framed with wire walls on three sides so air can get into the pile so, ostensibly, it won’t ferment. But the open front means creatures can also get in. We have raccoons and skunks, and squirrels, and rats. This morning, when I walked back there, I found vegetable matter strewn all over as on most mornings. Streamers of zucchini skin fluttered in the breeze; a rubbery carrot was half pulled into a small burrow under a pallet; a massive woody turnip had rolled under the canoe. A cardboard container that once held strawberries was hanging from a corner of the bin like a lampshade askew. This setup is not ideal, drawing all these animals to a small open landfill in my yard, though the woods create their own balance; one day I watched a fisher standing in the trees just past the pile raise its grizzled head and stare back at me. No doubt he feasts upon those who feast at our pile.

The progress of our compost is slow. Without the right carbon-nitrogen balance, and because I neglect the pile and fail to turn it often enough, the material ferments and doesn’t heat up enough to kill any weed seeds in the mix. Using my finished compost means submitting to dandelions, and curly dock, and volunteer tomato plants wherever I spread it. Still, I get an inordinate satisfaction from this wheelbarrow and a half of fertilizer I make per year, and from the waste kept out of the trash. But above any other reward, the greatest gift the compost pile gives is the humbling that comes from knowing I routinely fail in even this most basic of aims: to just let vegetables rot right.

Filed Under: Home & Garden Tagged With: composte, Composting, fertilizer, Garden, Gardening, Organic, recycling, Vegetables

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