Photo: Courtesy of Powisset Farm

The following is the first ever post submitted by Meryl LaTronica, farm manager at Powisset Farm in Dover, MA. Meryl will check in with PRK once a month, at the end of each month, with news, musings and anecdotes about her work running a 250-member, 10-acre CSA outside Boston.

Greetings from Powisset Farm! My name is Meryl LaTronica, and I am the farm manager of this small farm in Dover, MA, owned by The Trustees of Reservations, a state-wide conservation organization. At Powisset we run a 250 person-community supported agriculture (CSA) program, now finishing its third season. I often describe a CSA as essentially a subscription to vegetables, but it is more than that. By joining our farm, Powisset members are pledging their commitment to land preservation, their support of a local economy and their trust in local farmers. In exchange, they receive a wide variety of fresh, delicious, organically-grown food for the entire growing season. Together we build a relationship between farmer and consumer, communicating about the joys and challenges of a farm season from the grower’s perspective as well as from the eater’s point of view.

I am thrilled to have been asked to share my experiences as a farmer with the Public Radio Kitchen community. I invite you to join me on the journey that is a farm season in New England. Life on a farm is full of beautiful moments caring for plants that bring you closer to people. At the same time, it is a constant reckoning with forces outside your control, like weather, plant diseases, and mechanical failures. This past season, for example, our entire tomato crop was hit with late blight (the same fungal disease that caused the Irish Potato famine), causing all the beautiful plants to become infected and die within one heartbreaking week. Simultaneously, one of our cultivating tractors lost its steering system just when we needed it the most. It took me two weeks of searching all over the country to find the parts we needed and get the machine up and running. But, even despite these challenges, there is joy in making things work through all of the chaos, and in taking a step back to look at the farm as one beautiful picture of a living, changing creation—one that takes a lot of care and attention!

Since this is my first posting for PRK, I thought I would share with you one of my early connections to the power of growing food, and its impact on my life. During one of my very first days in Boston, over ten years ago, feeling overwhelmed by a new city and my new life at college, I wandered down to the Victory Gardens—a large collection of nearly 500 community garden plots along Park Street near Fenway Park. I meandered through plot after plot of gardens exploding with vegetables, flowers, herbs, and plenty of plants I had never seen before. Each space was unique, some for quiet reflection, some obviously feeding large families! That day, in those gardens, I was filled with a kind of hope and encouragement that I had not felt before. Seeing so much growing in the middle of the bustle of the city reassured me that I, too, was going to grow here, and I left the gardens filled with excitement for my new adventures. Each time that I begin a new farm season, I feel that same excitement and joyful anticipation when I look at the blank fields before me, ready to be filled with long days, hard work, and beautiful produce.

Those Victory Gardens that I wandered into that day were established in 1942, created during World War II, when President Roosevelt urged Americans to grow their own vegetables. Currently, we are seeing the same kind of encouragement happening across our nation. People are getting excited about growing their own vegetables, supporting their small, local farms to grow more produce for more people, and preserving land (and lawns) for agricultural use. I am privileged to grow food on one of those farms, and I am looking forward to sharing my experiences with you here on Public Radio Kitchen.

Link back to our first post introducing Meryl.

Meet Meryl at the next Public Radio Kitchen Meet-Up: Thursday, Dec. 3, 6-8pm. RSVP to prk@wbur.org