In November, Messenger was kind enough to sit down in conversation about his experience farming at the Village over these last eight years. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You are sunsetting the farm and heading towards your next steps. What does it take to kind of put the farm to rest?  

There are some obvious things of removing crop residue from this year. I have some plants I’ll move to the compost pile. If there is enough time in winter to remove vegetables, I can seed a cover crop, which is my preferred option to over-winter a bed. Depending on the timing, you can either plant something that dies over the winter, which is easier to incorporate in the spring, or you can seed something that does survive the winter, and those come back in the spring. I like to at least make sure there is no bare soil over the winter. So I’m mulching with whatever is available, I have a lot of straw mulch I get from a farmer in Kensington. You can use leaves, wood shavings. One of the last things is planting garlic. I planted one bed yesterday and trying to get the other done today.  

I was reading the NOFA-NH interview and you were talking about your inspiration for getting into farming after art school. I’m paraphrasing, but the sentiment was that you wanted to do something practical and tangible and spend time outdoors doing some sweat equity. You saw farming as a way to make a positive impact and incorporate these characteristics you wanted in a job.  

Now that you’ve been farming for a number of years, how has your lived experience matured and evolved from the sentiments you expressed about what you hoped to get from this line of work? 

I think some of the initial experience was more environmentally focused, and I wanted to make sure I had more than just a job where I clock-in and clock-out and go home; I wanted more of a livelihood for myself. That still applies, but in being a market gardener these past three years I’ve found the most meaningful things I’ve been getting out of the farm has been my interactions with my customers. Coming back every week, chatting with them. It’s still working, but the thing that keeps me going is knowing that I’m meeting people who want to eat my food and value it and cherish it. I feel like I am a member of the community and people appreciate what I do.  

It’s one thing to have a nice pretty garden, and it’s another to have your food in someone’s fridge and feeding their kids with it. It added an extra layer I didn’t know I was exactly looking for.  

When I was working for the Co-Op most recently, that was just five years of growing it and leaving it at the store, and whatever happens to it, happens to it. Before that, I worked on a CSA farm, and that was all production, and the produce would go on a box truck and go to pick-up locations. It felt really satisfying loading up pickups full of food, but I didn’t interface with the end users.  

You’ve been here for a total of eight years, and running Turning Mill farm the last three years. You mentioned in that same article that each year you refine the operation, and the farm ecosystem improves. Could you summarize the ways in which you’ve seen this farm ecosystem evolve and the areas you’ve refined things?  

I do everything on a hand scale; I use hand tools. The first tool I use to prepare a bed is a broadfork, its a long tined fork that is aerating the soil. I started eight years ago putting that thing in the soil and there was a lot of resistance when you’d pull back on the handles. Over the course of doing that to the same beds, twice a year, for eight years, the soil is looser and pliable and easier to work. The color has improved a little bit; it’s gotten darker and richer and more chocolatey brown. Those immediately come to mind.  

There are certain pests and weeds that pop up that are specific to the way I grow compared to when I first started. I do a lot of mulching, so the soil really appreciates that, and so do slugs (laughs). There are certain crops that resist that better than others, so if I were to proceed doing things in that system, I’d focus on things that don’t get completely devoured by slugs. Also, the fact [the garden] is minimal till, the weeds are drifting more to perennial weeds or encroaching more from the edges. 

You wanted to keep capacity low and basically do what you can complete with your hands; those are some of your guiding principles. When you know the tool set will be limited to hand-level, what areas in production and harvesting do you go to innovate and keep things evolving?   

This winter I put some thought into the two or three things that I felt like I could address and save time on. One of the things was spinning salad greens. Half my sales are bagged lettuce mix and there is a huge demand for it. I was using just a 5-gallon hand spinner. You have to do that 20 times per batch of lettuce and its pretty tedious. It was an investment, but I got a 20-gallon electric spinner that saved me a lot of time.  

An interesting way of evaluating things is everything requires work. Work from me burns calories, work from an electric appliance is burning electricity, work from a tractor is burning fossil fuels. The work is being done by something, but I feel better when the work is either done by me because it feels sustainable in some way, or if it is done by something biological, like a cover crop is smothering weeds for me so I don’t have to till it, or it’s aerating the soil because the roots are going down deep.  

Sometimes it’s a matter of just buying a new tool, but I could spend $100,000 buying tools (laughs), so I’m limiting myself to two or three a year. This year was the salad spinner, and a tool that I thought would help hill carrots. I didn’t end up using it (laughs), but the idea was good.  

I’ve noticed that once I find something to be a bit annoying to do, then I’m less likely to do it. Just recognizing the fact that I don’t want to do something means that system is not designed in a way that it is efficient enough for me to want to do it.  

Trellising tomatoes and cucumbers in a greenhouse takes a lot of work, but it keeps the fruit off the ground and the plants don’t get wet and have fewer diseases and generally you have a higher-quality crop. But there is a lot of extra labor associated with that.  

I switched over to a different system and was going to save some time according to other farmers I talked to. Initially it worked very well, but I don’t know if my grafted tomatoes’ stems were too thick or I was using a different sized clip, but it was getting to the point where I couldn’t even get the clip off the plant because the stem had swollen so much you couldn’t get the clip off. I thought I was saving time, but now it’s become so annoying I didn’t actually do it at all. I gave up on the tomatoes in August and they just started growing wild.  

I don’t enjoy feeling like things are out of control, but farming, at least during the summer, you always have more things to do than you have time for and it’s kind of like an act of triage every day. What is the absolute most important thing that needs to happen and work down from there. It’s a daily exercise in decision-making and prioritization. Sometimes your decisions are forced by other factors, like, I have a Saturday market and I need to be harvesting for that on Thursday and Friday. Then, if Friday is going to be raining, then I guess I’m harvesting my greens on Thursday so I can spin them and keep them dry. You don’t always get to pick the most important thing to do (chuckles).