It’s been a Busy Fall
We’ve had a whirlwind season at Pete’s Stand- we’re even now still catching our breath and trying to decompress from the highs and lows of a complicated and busy season. We are beyond grateful for the love and support we have been shown this season, and we wanted to share with you all some of the wonderful things that have kept us going this season, as well as a look back at some of the challenges. Please enjoy the following articles.
CCCD Honors Pete's Stand in Walpole as 2023 Cooperator of the Year | Morning Ag Clips
Pete's Stand in Walpole named 2023 Cooperator of the Year | Community News | sentinelsource.com
Conservancy: Easement to keep Pete's Stand land for farming | Local News | sentinelsource.com
Fall at Pete’s
We are now harvesting much more of our own produce, thanks to successive plantings and the extra replanting we did following the July flooding. We are now picking our own: beets, carrots, radishes, tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, kale, chard, lettuce, basil, dill, flowers, peppers, beans, melons, eggplant… and probably a few other things I’m forgetting.
We are still buying in some items (potatoes, winter squash, cabbage), and some items we normally have in bulk (beets, carrots, basil, winter squash) are limited in supply and will likely remain so the rest of this season. This is in part due to the crops lost directly to flooding, and due to the overall wet/excessive rainy conditions which caused/spread disease or washed away nutrients the plants needed to be vigorous and healthy.
Our fall crops remain uncertain- some crops were flooded, but are not for human consumption so are okay if they don’t succumb to diseases spread by the flood (diseases such as phytophthora (Vegetable: Phytophthora Blight | Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment at UMass Amherst). We are hearing from other farmers, and seeing in our own fields, that this has been widespread already this season, and will likely worsen and continue to spread. Winter squash is likely going to be in limited supply this fall for this reason, and pumpkins as well.
We have already purchased some early winter squash from FOUR REX FARM in Hadley (CISA – Community Involved In Sustaining Agriculture | Valley Bounty: Four Rex Farm (buylocalfood.org) and will continue to purchase potatoes (and later sweet potatoes) from them throughout the fall. We will start to get storage onions from the Ziomek’s down in Amherst in the next few weeks.
Apples, as most of you know, are in short-supply in NH & VT this season. Especially hard hit were the orchards we have relied on for many years to supply us with apples- Allyson’s Orchard & Harlow’s Sugarhouse, as well as Green Mountain Orchard. We are currently sourcing apples from Champlain Orchards and Green Mountain Orchard, but naturally the price is higher this season due to the very limited supply. Peaches, while they last, have been Amish-grown & purchased through Upper Valley Produce.
We will continue to do our best to keep the shelves stocked, support our other local/regional small producers. Even produce which we do not grow helps keep our small farm afloat and going into the next season (and we hope, for many years to come), and it helps other farms like ourselves who may have also lost some crops.
As I’ve said many times this summer, we all lost “something”, but few of us lost “everything” so the best thing we can do is keep buying local and take the little ‘hiccups’ that come with a season like this, in stride and with kindness, compassion, and thankful hearts.
Climate events locally like the May freeze & July flooding, the fires out West and in Canada, and the extreme, record-setting temperatures in the US and across the globe should serve as a solemn reminder that a decentralized food supply is vital, and that our limited regional farmland and natural resources must be preserved and protected.
“Pete’s Stand offers more than vegetables”
“Pete’s Stand offers more than vegetables” By Dorothy Nadeau
A bean is good if you snap it and the bean jumps out and hits you right in the eye.
This according to Peter Janiszyn, 70, a man who knows about beans and just about anything else that grows. Pete, as he is known to all who pass by his simple, vegetable stand, has farmed these valleys for 40 years, and he said he never wanted to do anything else.
It is harvest time and a steady stream of traffic stops daily at Pete’s Stand on the Turnpike Road. The customers come for fresh vegetables, predictable bargains and a little entertainment as well, in the form of Pete’s stories and comments on life in general and, of course, farming.
“I still planted 20 acres this year, in Louis Ballam’s old field,” Pete said. “I used to do 15 acres, but now that I’m retired, I do 20”.
The stand is located on Pete’s front lawn at present, but it has been in several spots from Westminster, VT to Walpole over the years. It all began as Jake’s Stand, a joint venture with his brother, in 1946, by a section of Route 5 in Westminster which is still dotted with farmstands.
“We built it ourselves. There were no Allens or no Harlows in those days,” Pete said. “ We sold Chinese lanterns and vegetables.”
He was born to a family of farmers, and raised in the fertile Deerfield, Mass., area. After 12 years of service in the 1940s, Pete came home and went to agriculture school to “see what he had missed.”
He worked at many jobs in the Walpole and Bellows Falls area, including the paper mills and at Hubbard Farms, a large chicken hatchery in Walpole. But he put conditions on his employment there so he could have time for his crops.
“I had to tell them I would not feed any chickens on Saturday or Sunday, and that was when I worked in the field,” he said.
Forty years later, he still seems to have unending energy for his lifework; Pete farms the entire 20 acres himself with only part-time help from his son, Michael, and English teacher.
The work is not hard, he said. It is what he loves to do.
“You work seven months a year, and you have five off. That’s not bad,” he said. “You’re your own boss. They can’t fire you if they don’t hire you.”
This year’s crop included 2,000 tomato plants, 1,000 peppers, 12 tons of beet greens which he distributes wholesale, an acre of carrots, 50 tons each of winter squash and pumpkins, 12 plantings of corn, and 10,000 head of cabbages.
“I’ll have 10,000 head of cabbage if the woodchucks don’t get them before I do,” he said.
On a recent afternoon, Pete was concerned about the weather. He had heard on the television weather reports that I was due to rain for four days, and he told all his customers they should stock up on their vegetables before the rains.
“I had to turn the television off, I got so tired of hearing it. And I’ve got tomatoes in the field. They won’t last long. They will just fall apart,” he said.
He talks with his hands. He seems to run from one spot to another. His ice-blue eyes sparkle when customers stop for a moment to chat, (“You know, the First Lady stopped here once,”) to be direct to the best pumpkins, (“Don’t pick that one, it won’t stand up straight,”) or to hear stories about his adventures in World War II serving under General Patton.
“Everyone likes my prices,” he said, grinning. “They should. They’ve been the same for seven years.”
Squash and cabbages- big, fat cabbages- sell for 50 cents each. Tomatoes are 50 cents a pound, and cucumbers are 10 cents each. He said he could not believe that a local supermarket was selling cucumbers at almost 50 cents each recently.
“That’s terrible. And they probably weren’t fresh,” he said.
Corn is $1 a dozen.
Pete has his own theory about pricing and profits. He said he will keep his prices the same as long as he can make a profit, however modest, on the sale of his vegetables.
The secret to success in his type of business is volume, and Pete said he has customers from Claremont to Ludlow, VT. As he was saying this, a woman stopped from a neighboring town and explained that she always comes to Walpole to buy her vegetables even though Keene is much closer.
“I come from the mid-West” Judy Kunz said. “I know all about traveling to the country to buy vegetables.”
“I don’t go up on my prices,” Pete said. “That’s why they all come here. They get corn at my place for a dollar, and I sell an awful lot of corn in a day.”
Pete said he loves to just look at his crops and watch them grow. A farmer, especially someone who works primarily by himself, must find little games to play to pass the time. For example, one day he counted the number of string beans in a bushel basket, 5,994, and they weighed 28 pounds.
“You’re working at it, and you’re picking alone, and the thought occurs to you, ‘what if someone asks how many beans in a bushel?’ It’s handy to know that, even if no one asks,” he said. “But people do ask those kinds of questions all the time.”
He explained that once he decided that he wanted to know how much peas weighed before and after they were removed from their pods. The next time he saw peas for sale in a grocery store for $1 a pound he knew he would pay $2 a pound for what he actually ate.
Pete said he learns something new every year he works the farm. A few years ago, he discovered a way to combat cucumber beetles that saved him money and rid the patch of pesticide. He had trouble with the beetles, and he explained that these pests can ruin a crop in two-hours’ time. One day when he was dusting with a pesticide, he noticed how closely it resembled flour.
“Well, I thought, maybe I’ll just try it,” he said, and he bought 25 pounds of flour for $4.75 at the local market. He sprinkled it on the cucumber plants, and when it combined with the morning’s dew, it formed a paste that the beetles neither liked nor were able to chew through.
The pesticide had cost $70 for 10 pounds.
He went back to the store and bought more bags of flour, and everyone asked him if he was making bread to sell at his stand. He said he just shook his head, smiled, and kept his secret to himself.
“That was four years ago, and it still works,” he said. “The beetles just don’t like it. You see you learn something every year. This year I made a mistake in planting cauliflower and cabbage, and I’ll never do that again.”
A man from Claremont, Ernest Nolin, made a delivery to R.N. Johnson’s farm supplies next door and stopped to buy some vegetables. He could not resist buying some of the succulent tomatoes which are lined up by the dozens on plywood planking propped over crates, a familiar sight in Walpole every August and September- the tomato invasion.
“It’s so nice in the summertime to be able to buy this wonderful food,” Nolin said as he took his bag of tomatoes and squash and headed back to Claremont.
“It’s going to start raining, better stock up,” Pete said, turning his attention to a young mother with two small children who came to the stand to buy 11 pumpkins.
An amusing interview with Pete published in the 80s. Pete was quite a storyteller. Original article written by Dorothy Nadeau, donated by Dwayne Fairbank, has been typed for format/ease of reading.
“Pete’s Stand offers more than vegetables” By Dorothy Nadeau
A bean is good if you snap it and the bean jumps out and hits you right in the eye.
This according to Peter Janiszyn, 70, a man who knows about beans and just about anything else that grows. Pete, as he is known to all who pass by his simple, vegetable stand, has farmed these valleys for 40 years, and he said he never wanted to do anything else.
It is harvest time and a steady stream of traffic stops daily at Pete’s Stand on the Turnpike Road. The customers come for fresh vegetables, predictable bargains and a little entertainment as well, in the form of Pete’s stories and comments on life in general and, of course, farming.
“I still planted 20 acres this year, in Louis Ballam’s old field,” Pete said. “I used to do 15 acres, but now that I’m retired, I do 20”.
The stand is located on Pete’s front lawn at present, but it has been in several spots from Westminster, VT to Walpole over the years. It all began as Jake’s Stand, a joint venture with his brother, in 1946, by a section of Route 5 in Westminster which is still dotted with farmstands.
“We built it ourselves. There were no Allens or no Harlows in those days,” Pete said. “ We sold Chinese lanterns and vegetables.”
He was born to a family of farmers, and raised in the fertile Deerfield, Mass., area. After 12 years of service in the 1940s, Pete came home and went to agriculture school to “see what he had missed.”
He worked at many jobs in the Walpole and Bellows Falls area, including the paper mills and at Hubbard Farms, a large chicken hatchery in Walpole. But he put conditions on his employment there so he could have time for his crops.
“I had to tell them I would not feed any chickens on Saturday or Sunday, and that was when I worked in the field,” he said.
Forty years later, he still seems to have unending energy for his lifework; Pete farms the entire 20 acres himself with only part-time help from his son, Michael, and English teacher.
The work is not hard, he said. It is what he loves to do.
“You work seven months a year, and you have five off. That’s not bad,” he said. “You’re your own boss. They can’t fire you if they don’t hire you.”
This year’s crop included 2,000 tomato plants, 1,000 peppers, 12 tons of beet greens which he distributes wholesale, an acre of carrots, 50 tons each of winter squash and pumpkins, 12 plantings of corn, and 10,000 head of cabbages.
“I’ll have 10,000 head of cabbage if the woodchucks don’t get them before I do,” he said.
On a recent afternoon, Pete was concerned about the weather. He had heard on the television weather reports that I was due to rain for four days, and he told all his customers they should stock up on their vegetables before the rains.
“I had to turn the television off, I got so tired of hearing it. And I’ve got tomatoes in the field. They won’t last long. They will just fall apart,” he said.
He talks with his hands. He seems to run from one spot to another. His ice-blue eyes sparkle when customers stop for a moment to chat, (“You know, the First Lady stopped here once,”) to be direct to the best pumpkins, (“Don’t pick that one, it won’t stand up straight,”) or to hear stories about his adventures in World War II serving under General Patton.
“Everyone likes my prices,” he said, grinning. “They should. They’ve been the same for seven years.”
Squash and cabbages- big, fat cabbages- sell for 50 cents each. Tomatoes are 50 cents a pound, and cucumbers are 10 cents each. He said he could not believe that a local supermarket was selling cucumbers at almost 50 cents each recently.
“That’s terrible. And they probably weren’t fresh,” he said.
Corn is $1 a dozen.
Pete has his own theory about pricing and profits. He said he will keep his prices the same as long as he can make a profit, however modest, on the sale of his vegetables.
The secret to success in his type of business is volume, and Pete said he has customers from Claremont to Ludlow, VT. As he was saying this, a woman stopped from a neighboring town and explained that she always comes to Walpole to buy her vegetables even though Keene is much closer.
“I come from the mid-West” Judy Kunz said. “I know all about traveling to the country to buy vegetables.”
“I don’t go up on my prices,” Pete said. “That’s why they all come here. They get corn at my place for a dollar, and I sell an awful lot of corn in a day.”
Pete said he loves to just look at his crops and watch them grow. A farmer, especially someone who works primarily by himself, must find little games to play to pass the time. For example, one day he counted the number of stringbeans in a bushel basket, 5,994, and they weighed 28 pounds.
“You’re working at it, and you’re picking alone, and the thought occurs to you, ‘what if someone asks how many beans in a bushel?’ It’s handy to know that, even if no one asks,” he said. “But people do ask those kinds of questions all the time.”
He explained that once he decided that he wanted to know how much peas weighed before and after they were removed from their pods. The next time he saw peas for sale in a grocery store for $1 a pound he knew he would pay $2 a pound for what he actually ate.
Pete said he learns something new every year he works the farm. A few years ago, he discovered a way to combat cucumber beetles that saved him money and rid the patch of pesticide. He had trouble with the beetles, and he explained that these pests can ruin a crop in two-hours’ time. One day when he was dusting with a pesticide, he noticed how closely it resembled flour.
“Well, I thought, maybe I’ll just try it,” he said, and he bought 25 pounds of flour for $4.75 at the local market. He sprinkled it on the cucumber plants, and when it combined with the morning’s dew, it formed a paste that the beetles neither liked nor were able to chew through.
The pesticide had cost $70 for 10 pounds.
He went back to the store and bought more bags of flour, and everyone asked him if he was making bread to sell at his stand. He said he just shook his head, smiled, and kept his secret to himself.
“That was four years ago, and it still works,” he said. “The beetles just don’t like it. You see you learn something every year. This year I made a mistake in planting cauliflower and cabbage, and I’ll never do that again.”
A man from Claremont, Ernest Nolin, made a delivery to R.N. Johnson’s farm supplies next door and stopped to buy some vegetables. He could not resist buying some of the succulent tomatoes which are lined up by the dozens on plywood planking propped over crates, a familiar sight in Walpole every August and September- the tomato invasion.
“It’s so nice in the summertime to be able to buy this wonderful food,” Nolin said as he took his bag of tomatoes and squash and headed back to Claremont.
“It’s going to start raining, better stock up,” Pete said, turning his attention to a young mother with two small children who came to the stand to buy 11 pumpkins.
The Flood…
Approximately 50% of our planted fields, totalling about 20 acres, was affected by the flood event which occurred this Monday and Tuesday (July 10th & 11th). Anything left in the flood waters, even if it has survived once the water has fully receded, is unsafe for human consumption. This has affected nearly every crop we grow, since we do multiple plantings/succession plantings of each crop- the effects of this flood event will be apparent for the rest of the season, and beyond. We are working with many other farms in the area to make up for these losses and keep our shelves stocked. Rest assured there is and will continue to be beautiful, fresh, locally grown food available at Pete’s. The varieties may change or be a little unpredictable, and crops (like our own!) might be from either side of the River, but we hope you will continue to shop and support us. By continuing to purchase from us you will help us carry on through a very economically challenging season. You’ll still be supporting local agriculture, and you even get to “share the love” as we purchase from other small family farms like our own. We will be able to keep our staff employed, and work to rebuild the soils as we assess and recover from the damage. Thank you for your continued support, we know this has been a challenging time for many of you. We’ll cry, we’ll laugh, there will be corn next week- it will all be okay.
A Walk down memory lane
Special thanks to longtime customer Dwayne Fairbank who brought us this wonderful piece of Pete’s story.
“It’s A Good Year For Peppers, A Bad Year For Tomatoes” by Sally Anderson
Area gardeners and the traditional farm market producers are finding this year’s tomato crop to be living up to less than expected. Many have been admiring their good looking green tomatoes that are growing nicely but are refusing to turn red.
Veteran vegetable grower, Pete Janiszyn, owner of Pete’s Stand between Walpole and North Walpole in the “Cold River area” says, “It’s a bad year for tomatoes, and a good year for peppers”. According to Pete, the early hot humid spell coupled with the now early cool nights have created problems for the tomato plants.
But- the pepper plants have really been producing. “We had one plant that had 19 big peppers ready for picking all at once. These weren’t counting any little tiny peppers, they were all big, and the plant was only this tall,” Pete said, indicating a height of about 1- 1 ½ feet tall.
Pete and his brother, Jake, started a roadside stand 35 years ago in Westminster. Before that they were raised gardening- developing the primary “green thumb,” in South Deerfield, Mass. When his brother, Jake, retired, they sold the stand in Westminster and Pete opened his own stand in front of his house in Walpole, across from the Homestead, then down the road a little further, then last year down the road a little further to its present location.
In the intervening years, Pete Janiszyn served his country in the army for 11 years, studied agriculture for two years, and worked for Hubbard Farms for 10 years. During the latter, he worked nights and weekends to produce vegetables for area residents, with seeming unending energy.
His army years were from 1934-1945. As his sister noted, “We could write a book about where you’ve been and what you’ve done!” Pete’s armed forces duty began with an assignment to Panama during peacetime in 1934. He then served in Ft. Amadore in Balboa, and Fort Toten in Bayside, N.Y.
He was there when World War II was declared. At that junction of time in Pete’s service, he was two weeks from his second discharge- he had no alternative but to fight for his country. He was one of those men included in the “first load to go over to Europe.”
Seeing the world through the armed services for Pete meant participating in various theatres of war, 42 months of E.T.O. (European Theatres of Operation) that took him to Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. He participated in four invasions and survived, bringing home five Battle Stars, and a yearning to go back to vegetable farming.
After returning to the United States, he realized that there probably had been plenty of new agricultural developments that had taken place in his “lost 11 years.” He wanted to make up for those lost years, so under the G.I. Bill he attended agricultural courses in Bellows Falls, and learned all of the new developmentsso that he could go back into farming.
He and Jake, his brother, both well-known figures in the area farm stand market world, began their stand in 1946. Carrying on the family tradition, Pete is still delivering produce now from 15 to 20-acre parcels of land. His operation is geared to the local and transient buyers of his produce- the vacationers taking back fresh new Hampshire produce to their homes in the various city areas or to their vacation cottages, and the local homemakers who don’t have time or space enough to have their own gardens but still want to can and freeze produce.
When we first came up here, we fell into the latter category. Pete’s Stand was “on the way home,” so when we could spend time and effort, we picked up a few bushels of one thing or another. After the kids and I had shucked several bushels of corn and canned numerous quarts of tomatoes from Pete’s Stand I had this awful thought: “this produce is too perfect for him not to be using all kinds of chemical fertilizers.” “Oh no!”
The next trip down, I asked Pete (very apologetically) if he perhaps did use chemical fertilizers. At this point in his life, he was working for Hubbard Farms all day, tending the stand and the gardens until after dark, and was probably exhausted. He really need a question like that like “a hole in the head.” This was in a period of “chemical awareness,”- “you are what you eat,” and all that.
His sparkling blue eyes looked at me aghast. And he said calmly, “Come with me, I want to show you something.” So over the hill we went. Pausing at the crest, he waved his arm to the east and said, “Do you see that? That is the finest chicken manure you’ll ever see, and it’s been aging for two years.” (Boy, was I relieved.)
“That is what grows those vegetables, healthy soil doesn’t need any kinds of chemicals. Nature takes care of it,” he added.
Pete’s son, Michael, is a partner in the business now, and they have two “crackerjack clerks” that are taking care of the stand, so I was lucky to catch up with Pete at all. After asking for him for about the fifth time, he pulled up to the stand, and so I asked if he had a couple of minutes to post for a picture and relate his life history. I knew from one of his “crackerjacks” that he had a big order of 8-10 bushels of carrots to pull, but he whirled around and grabbed a squash and a tomato and said “shoot,” “keep talking….” then, “you must have enough to write a book; I’ve got work to do!” all said with a good-natured grin.
Unfortunately, the only “war stories” he related, “were not for print,” but I did get his feel for the soil. He said that after the land has been run down, it takes about two years to bring it back up. The chicken manure puts back about 40 percent of the nitrogen required the first year, but there are residual percentages that take effect afterwards. He plants rye in the fall on his garden lands, then plows it under in the spring to further the nitrogen content of the soil. Meanwhile the residual content of the chicken manure fertilizer builds up with successive spreadings.
Last year I was still picking tomatoes at the end of September but this year Pete doesn’t foresee that happening. He also said the corn is good this year; now is the time to freeze or can it. By the way, he verified what we’ve all suspected, “This is the worst year for bugs I’ve ever seen!” he exclaimed.
Image as donated by Dwayne Fairbanks and originally published in The Shopper, September 9th, 1981. I took the liberty of typing the article up for ease of reading.
Today we named a field.
Pete’s has farmed many different fields over the years; some are little spots, hidden behind houses or divided up by woods and rivers, some we’ve been farming for fifty years, and some we’ve picked up in the past few years. Our style of farming means that we’ve walked (and crawled, hands and knees) every foot of every field we’ve farmed. You get to know their secrets- their hidden rocky spots, the places that stay cool and keep the summer spinach from bolting, the spots where the fog creeps in and protects the fall crops from the early frost. You get to feel the history of the Connecticut River Valley, rolling back through the ages, in the ground beneath our feet.
Each of those fields, with their unique and hidden personalities, has a name. “Head over to Romie’s and get a bushel of loose beets” or “it’s time to weed those carrots over on the ‘back forty’”. Winter evenings we plan out the working life of that land, when it rests, what it grows. We get attached. We remember the people who let us farm their land, who give us that chance to get attached. We remember Craig, Romie, Charlie, and the family and friends who worked those fields over the years.
This year marked something new, a first in the long history of Janiszyns farming the Valley. Today we signed the papers and for the first time, we own a field we farm. It’s a step toward stability for our business, a field we can feed, maintain, and care for- and know that it is ours forever.
This means that from this point on, that field is Ours. Ours to protect, to nurture, to manage. It means a little piece of that fertile valley will always be farmland- no houses, no fast food joints. That rich loam will never leave, dumptruck by dumptruck, sold off to parts unknown. And it’s, really, thanks to you. Every dozen corn, every bunch of radish, we’ve saved away a little to make this happen.
Now, we’re off to “John’s” to go pick the last of the brussels sprouts and see how that cover crop is coming along.
We’re Back! Opening Day (and Covid guidelines)
We’re so excited! Opening day is coming right up! We want you to know that we’re taking all precautions to operate safely. Here are some things we’re doing:
During Harvest: we’re washing our hands frequently, sanitizing harvest buckets and implements (as well as our vehicle handles and steering wheels!) when we go out to harvest; we’re wearing masks while harvesting produce that is intended to be eaten raw (I’m not going to make the field workers wear masks while harvesting corn for example, you’ll peel and cook it before eating).
Washing and preparing for sale: We will be cleaning and sanitizing our wash tables and dunk tanks and will wear masks while washing; gloves will be optional for staff as we have a handwashing station for staff- ALL STAFF have been trained in proper hand washing. You’ll notice that we are pre-packaging more of our produce than in the past; we hate to waste the plastic but this will eliminate some unnecessary contact with the produce, and make checkout faster and easier (pre-bagged items will be sold by the piece not by weight, they will be weighed when they’re packaged to ensure uniformity).
The farm stand: Customers will have a handwashing station with sanitizer available at the entrance; you may use our shopping baskets which will be sanitized after each customer. We will have disposable masks for customers who need one, but we strongly encourage you to bring (and wear!!) your own mask to reduce waste. We encourage customers to use a plastic bag to pick up their produce rather than their bare hands. More, but not all, items will be pre-packaged. We are afraid we must discourage visiting and chatting at the farm stand, specifically within the building and carport. We have made an effort to space items out, but we will need customers to limit the length of time they spend IN the structures.
Health and Hygiene: We must ask that you stay home if you have any symptoms that may be associated with Covid, or if you have recently traveled out of the area. We will be wearing masks and cleaning and sanitizing as much as possible, and all staff are monitored for symptoms of illness. Farm Stand staff will be allowed to remove their masks temporarily for water breaks. You may also see field staff working (at least six feet apart) without masks when they are weeding and performing other non-harvest related tasks.
What to do if you’re concerned about entering farm stand: Call Teresa! 802-376-9737 and she/her staff will fill an order to you. We encourage you to call ahead so that we have time to fill your order. You will pay when you arrive to pick-up the order (we can call or text you when it’s done!) We can bring it out to your car and bring a tablet to complete the sale. Checks, credit cards, EBT/SNAP, and cash are all accepted.
The health and safety of our community and our families is very important to us; whatever your personal beliefs regarding mask use, we do ask that you wear a mask while shopping. If you have a medical condition preventing you from doing so, we understand and will not prevent you from shopping. Please understand the risk to YOU is minimal compared to the risk our staff are taking by being exposed to hundreds of people and that some of those staff members have vulnerable family members at home.
Family Farming in a pandemic (plus, potatoes!)
Olly “helping” while Teresa works from home
Our shipment from Fedco arrived this week, with 1,100 pounds of potatoes! That’s about twice what we planted in 2019; as I said in my last post, we received a grant through the Monadnock Co-Op’s Farm Fund to purchase a planter and digger to speed up our potato ‘process’. John’s been spending a lot of time on Craigslist (tractor fever!) and he came across some antique potato equipment down in Hadley, so we packed up the three wains in the truck and headed down. One thing I’ve learned from parenting at work (and in public generally) is that with three kids you get Noticed- when we’re lucky its generally folks smiling and reminiscing about when their own kids were little.
We were so fortunate that the lady we went to see let the kids ramble and explore her old tobacco barn, gather chesnut husks and birds nests and other ‘treasures’ while we loaded her grandmother’s potato grading table and cutter into our truck. She patiently explained why her barn had so many “holes” in it and a dozen other silly questions.
I spent the next few afternoons cleaning and rebuilding the cutter, cleaning and oiling the grading table (which is beautiful!!) before putting the cutter into action: last year it took us 18 hours (combined work crew hours) to cut and plant 450 pounds; this year, with just “the family” we cut and planted 300 pounds in just 6 hours! We were able to cut our labor in HALF! Since one of the biggest costs in farming is labor, this kind of investment in efficiency will help us keep our prices low and let us move on to other tasks (there is just SO much to do this time of year).
We spent a beautiful Saturday playing in the dirt, throwing potatoes around, exploring the pond behind the field (lots of frog eggs), and still managed to get our work done (shout out to Diamond Pizza for feeding us, because we were all completely worn out by the end of the day!)
Our “new” hundred year old potato grading table after a few coats of linseed oil
The potato cutter in action, I can cut a 50 pound bag in 15 minutes!
2020 Monadnock Farm Fund
We’re happy to announce that we have been chosen as a recipient of the 2020 Monadnock Coop’s Farm Fund. These funds are available through the generosity of the Monadnock Co-Op and the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. With these funds we will be expanding our potato and onion production. We’ve purchased a potato planter and potato digger that will enable us to increase our production and efficiency. We’re anxiously awaiting the arrival of 1,100 pounds of seed potatoes from Fedco Seeds. After much research and debate, we settled on a style of digger which (although more expensive) will enable us to dig delicate new potatoes as well as onions without damaging them. 2019 was our first large-scale attempt at potatoes, and we successfully raised over 9,000 pounds of potatoes. Potatoes are a crop that was once grown in large quantity in Walpole, and we are happy to bring that tradition back (in a small way). This year’s order is a mix of organic and conventional seed, with many varieties chosen so that we can see what will grow best for us. We’re looking forward to selling to nearby schools and restaurants, in addition to providing our customers at the farmstand with plenty of potatoes from July through November.
We’re so grateful to the Co-Op and it’s supporters, who believe in the value of local agriculture. I’ll be posting lots of photos and videos of this equipment “in action”!
April Happenings…
If you were to drive by the farm stand at any time in the last month, it might look like we’d shuttered our (non-existent) doors and moved on; if you want my complete honesty, there were a few years we’d talked about that “what if”. But this is 2020, and we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. We’re fortunate to live in a time and place in the world where we’ve never known an empty grocery store shelf, and the idea of standing in line for our groceries (even if we can still afford to pay for them) is alien to many (but not all) of us. We’ve seen a lot of businesses temporarily shut their doors, without knowing whether they’ll be able to recover from this turn of events and reopen.
But that’s not “Pete’s” and that’s not what’s happening. We know that nothing in life is guaranteed, except maybe the ol’ ‘death and taxes’, and most important: people have to eat, and “somebody’s gotta feed you people”. That’s why you’ll see us hard at work, last week it was new plastic on our greenhouse, this week there’s a massive excavator parked on our lawn along with some tidy piles of topsoil. We’re making room for a very exciting change at Pete’s: we purchased a 24 by 24 farm stand building! We’ll at long last have lights and heat, as well as a freezer and coolers for retail. If all goes as planned, we should have local eggs, milk, cheese, and meats for sale alongside our usual bounty of produce. Having lights and electricity will mean we can stay open longer in the Fall, maybe right up to Thanksgiving. It’s an exciting change for us, because you’ll be able to buy everything you need for a 100% local meal. To help with our season extension, we’re also putting up a second “high tunnel” in the next month.
We believe that with the world so full of uncertainty, local food is more important now than ever. We also believe that fresh, nutritious, local food should be available to everyone. We are making big plans and we can’t wait to see you all in June. If you see us out working in the fields, a honk and a big wave is always welcome- we’ve missed you all.
“Peter Michael Janiszyn, Gone to War”
It all begins with an idea.
My father, Peter Janiszyn, was born in the autumn of 1915 in Montague, Massachusetts. He died at my home in Springfield in the autumn of 1997. In between he became the most famous member of our family living in America. I can’t imagine that his fame and legend will ever be superseded by any family descendant, though each person in this world has a story to tell and great deeds to accomplish.
My father’s story is one of action, labor, war, struggle, sweat, blood, toil, and eventual triumph. And his tale is dominated by World War II. When he was 16, Peter enlisted in the United States Army. He was assigned to a battalion of Coastal Artillery and sent to Panama--not a bad tour of duty, since he entered the service to warm and clothe and feed himself. I’ve seen old snapshots of Peter in Panama, riding mules, and transporting heavy guns, and looking for all the world like he was ready to jump on horseback and dash off with Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. After Panama, my father was stationed in New York City--he was a staff sergeant by that time in the late 1930s, and he commanded a small artillery crew that was a part of the coastal defense for the city.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor late in 1941, my father was not drafted or enlisted in the service. He was already regular army. And off he went to Scotland in 1942 for more training for the coming conflict with Adolph Hitler and the German war-machine, then a brief cruise with the huge Allied Forces that hit the beaches of North Africa and started the slow rupturing of the Third Reich that would not end until April 1945.
Think about that for a moment. My father was a soldier in war, serving for almost three years under such estimable military commanders as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton.
To understand this, imagine that you went to war when you entered your freshman year at Springfield High School and didn’t leave the war until sometime during your senior year. In between you would find only campaigns, battles, fighting, killing, assaults, utter destruction and devastation, the face of the enemy and the twisted dead. In between, if you were Peter Janiszyn in World War II, you would remember names like Algiers, Tunis, Kasserine Pass, Bizerti, Palermo, Rome, Arno, Southern France, the Rhine River, the Battle of the Bulge, and the finally the jewel in the crown of the God of War, Berlin in flames and the utter dismemberment of the Thousand-Year Reich. My father told this story of World War II Biblical Apocalypse to me in bits and pieces of narrative through our 23 years of farming together. It is an epic tale of courage and sacrifice that would top anything that Aragon, Achilles, King Arthur, Luke Skywalker, or Odysseus could spin around the campfire at night.
When World War II in Europe ended in 1945, Peter Janiszyn was a First Sergeant. He was as highly trained as any professional soldier in the U.S. Army has ever been--war does that for you--and he was prepared for the invasion of Japan. That invasion never took place, Japan surrendered in August 1945, and my father came home in the fall of 1945, married my mother Anna Tysiak, who he had met in New York City before the war, and came north to Westminster, Vermont, to farm a stretch of the Connecticut River Valley with his older brother, Jacob Yanizyn.
So Peter Janiszyn left the military and entered civilian life. But the war continued in his stories and his thoughts. When we farmed together in 1997--he died from lung cancer in the fall--Peter was still talking about that tough bastard Patton, and anti-aircraft artillery ordnance, the frozen doom of the Battle of the Bulge, and his fear of Japan in 1945 and the invasion that was predicted to claim over a million and a half American soldiers if it ever took place.
After 1945, my father was at war for the rest of his life. And he had photos, and certificates, and letters, and discharge papers, and honor patches, and parts of old uniforms to prove it. But the war rang most true in the stories and recollections that sprinkled into his conversation--and his effort and heroism showed itself in the visions that he carried night and day, waking and dreaming.
My father--Peter Janiszyn--could speak Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. He once greeted Rosalynn Carter at his vegetable stand. He received personal, cordial greetings from two presidents. He ran for public office. He fought off alcoholism. For a while, he worked two jobs, night and day, to support a family of four children, one son suffering with severe mental retardation. And he fashioned a small vegetable business, a retail and wholesale establishment known hither and yon as Pete’s Stand, out of nothing but sweat and labor and dreams and a stable of Kubota tractors.
By all these civilian and domestic standards, Peter Janiszyn, my father, was a hero. But he was, first and foremost, a soldier. And his position in the United States Army, a rank he served with honor, discipline, sacrifice, and distinction, makes him the most famous member of our family, now and forever more.
Pete with grandson, John, who is wearing Pete’s hat from the Army
Michael Janiszyn
10 December 2003