“Pete’s Stand offers more than vegetables”

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.