When is Pete’s Open?
Pete’s is open daily 9am-6pm. We expect to be open until mid-December for Christmas tree and wreath sales. Evening hours may be extended for tree sales. We will announce our closing date on Facebook, but it will be shortly after we sell out of trees. Pete’s opens mid-May, beginning with hanging baskets, potted herbs, vegetable plants, and non-seasonal local products (bread, milk, cheese).
Would you call yourself “sustainable” agriculture?
We take the responsibility of caring for the land very seriously; some of the fields we currently farm we have been farming for fifty years. We have adopted farm practices which maintain and build soil health, reduce our need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and limit our use of plastics.
Cover Crops: we practice a strong and diversified cover crop program. Each field gets a minimum of two species of cover crop, with some mixes having up to eight species. We select our cover crops to meet the needs of each particular field, whether it be adding organic matter, breaking up compaction, or fixing nitrogen.
Manure: we purchase composted manure from local dairy farms. The amount and timing of these applications is meant to meet the nutrition needs of our crops and the field itself. We test soil every year to determine what each field needs.
Pesticide Use: John is a licensed pesticide applicator, which means he attends many workshops and events to keep up to date on best practices and consumer safety. We don’t like the idea of ‘spraying’ any more than you do- after all, we are exposed to any chemicals we use much more than the consumer (and we eat our produce too, of course!) We have methods to limit our use of pesticides, including hand/mechanical weeding (not herbicides!), plasticulture/use of weed mats, scouting for diseases/pests, use of disease resistant varieties, and use of OMRI (organic) chemicals first before using conventional, and careful timing of applications. We also have to balance “organic” sprays with conventional, as pesticide resistance is becoming a widespread issue. Alternating between pesticides is a proven way to help prevent creating pesticide-resistant generations of pests. This benefits us as well as our neighboring farms.
Don’t you use a lot of plastic?
The black plastic you see in our fields is biodegradable- but it is NOT approved for use by organic certified farms. We found using the non-biodegradable plastic to be a huge hassle to pull up each fall, and bulky/difficult to dispose of. We also reuse our weed mats and floating row covers for as long as possible (waste not, want not!), and we return any reusable plastics from transplants to our greenhouse growers. We do, unfortunately, use new plastic bags at our farmstand- but encourage customers to bring their own bags, and we do offer used plastic bags for those wishing to reuse. (UPDATE: not using used bags 2020-2021 due to covid concerns; also pre-packaging more produce than we would like to due to customer concerns about public handling of produce. Update to the update! We’ve also noticed some produce keeps MUCH better (meaning less labor/waste for us and higher quality for YOU!) so some items will remain pre-bagged to improve overall quality and efficiency. Examples? Brussels sprouts, green beans, peas, spinach, lettuce- they don’t get spilled/dropped on floor by customers selecting produce, they don’t dry out as quickly so they’re fresher and crisper.
Do you grow all this?
For the most part, yeah. Obviously, we don’t grow the coffee beans or the bread. Almost all of the vegetables, herbs and flowers are grown by us- we will buy produce from other nearby farms if we run out of a crop, or if they have an “in demand” item before ours is ready. We try to label all items that are not grown by as with the name of the farm it’s from and their location. We don’t grow any fruit, so that will always be from other local growers. We don’t buy produce from distributors, and never sell anything we can’t confirm the source of. *we did pivot in 2023 due to the May freeze that ruined the peaches, plums, and many apples in the area- peaches came from Pennsylvania. We will always choose NH & VT growers over more regional sources, but we also want to meet the needs of our customers.
Check out our “Producers” page for some of the growers we purchase from.
Where’s Pete?
We get asked this all the time; partly it’s because John (Pete’s grandson) will cheerfully answer to Pete. The answer is, unfortunately, he’s not here; Peter Janiszyn passed away in the fall of 1997. He was an amazing, one of a kind man, and his personality is still very present on the farm. His son, Michael, and grandson, John, have continued to carry on Pete’s legacy. We encourage you to read some of Michael’s writing about his father, which you will find in the “News, Updates” section of this site. We’d also like to encourage you to send us your memories of Pete, and pictures if you have them.
Is that today’s corn?
Generally, YES! Mike Janiszyn likes to pick the corn first thing in the morning, so we’ve usually got plenty of fresh sweet corn by 7am- sometimes, all that gets snatched up by wholesale customers so you might have to wait until we pick MORE corn. Since nobody wants “yesterday’s” corn, we often have to go and re-pick throughout the day to keep up. Corn takes up a lot of our acreage, so we try not too have too much ‘waste’. Our sweet corn is all non-gmo, hybrid corn. John scouts for pests and sprays only in response to insect pressure.
Where are your fields?
All around you! We grow on many small, rented fields, most situated right along Rt. 12 in Walpole. We also have a field on South River Road in Walpole, and two fields in Westminster, VT. Land as good as you find in the Connecticut River is hard to come by, so we’re always on the lookout for more land. The tricky part of course is transporting equipment to fields not in our immediate vicinity, so we try to keep it as close to the “Stand” as possible. In 2020 we purchased our first field- 7.4 acres, that field was put into permanent conservation through a partnership with the Monadnock Conservancy beginning in 2023. The Monadnock Conservancy purchased the development rights to that field, meaning that it can never be developed or used for non-agricultural/forestry purposes.
Is this GMO?
Nope. No GMO.
But, are you Organic?
Nope. Not organic. Does that mean we use chemicals to solve all our problems? Nope. There are some pretty complicated nuances to organic versus non-organic/non-certified farming.
First, our first priority is to grow food that is fresh, healthy, sustainable—-and affordable. Sometimes that means that, given the choice between losing a crop and using a less expensive spray (or an organic spray and adding a non-organic adjuvant to make it more effective), we’re going to use the spray. It’s a choice we haven’t made lightly, and while we respect our certified organic neighbors, it just isn’t something we are ready for (yet).
We also like the wider choices of seed available to conventional (non-organic) growers because of things like selective breeding for disease resistance or cold tolerance. We don’t use any GMO seeds, and that includes our sweet corn.
We also choose not to be organic because (and we know this is a generalization), large scale organic growers often rely heavily on plastics- they transplant their sweet corn out of plastic trays, they use plastic mulch that is not biodegradable, they make extensive use of plastic tunnels, etc. We prefer to minimize that usage/waste. We do transplant lots of starts, but we grow acres of sweet corn and pumpkins by direct-seed.
Is that Silver Queen?
No, but I might tell you it is if it’s a white corn- “Silver Queen” is an old-standby corn that rose to fame over 30 years ago as the BEST corn, especially in the mid-Atlantic (Maryland). There is heavy competition among seed companies to have the sweetest corn with the best texture and best field holding ability. While “Silver Queen” might have been the best back in her heyday, her crown has long since passed to other varieties we hold near and dear. A lot of our research in the off season involves looking into seed trials to see what promising new varieties are on the market. Ten years ago “Mirai” was all the rage, five years ago “Montauk” become a customer favorite. The past two seasons two sweet ladies, “Kate” and “Rosie” stole the show.
What happens to all the produce you don’t sell?
Well, a couple different things: 1) Our first priority is that it gets donated. Volunteers from “Our Place”, “Willing Hands”, “Community Kitchen”, and “Fall Mountain Food Shelf” stop by weekly, and several of these organizations offer a gleaning program as well. You can help by donating your time to pick/pick-up produce for these organizations!! 2) Some produce is too perishable to survive the donation process or the timing of us disposing of the product doesn’t match up with a pick-up day (and let’s be honest, even the food shelf gets overrun with XL zucchinis sometimes!) All of this produce is picked up daily by Tom Hasselman of Iron Kettle Farm. He feeds his pigs, goats, chicken, turkeys, & cattle all the leftover goodies we can’t sell or donate. The meat (and eggs) from his critters circles back to us, so you can buy healthy, locally (humanely!) raised meat that’s been fed a varied and full diet. 3) We eat it! Our employees get to bring home free veggies for their families, and we always try to pack our freezers full- there’s just something rewarding about making meals with 100% local ingredients!