Growing Vegetables at Sunnyside Farms

The former owner of Sunnyside Farms is no doubt more famous—haven had his agricultural exploits written up in The Washington Post and The New York Times. But devoted gardeners and those who have an interest in organic food will perhaps be more interested to talk with Nivardo Loya who is in charge of vegetable production at Sunnyside Farms in Rappahannock County. He is the guy who actually does the day-to-day work to grow the vegetables here.

Nivardo came to Sunnyside Farms eight years ago from Chihuahua, Mexico because he had a cousin working here. His wife Lorena might be the only platinum blond from that rural countryside of mestizo peoples. Nivardo and his wife live with their two children Rocio, a student at UVA; and Diana, a 7^th grader; and Lorena’s brother in a house located right next to a dozen or so greenhouses. Outside 2 orphaned kittens roll about and play in the yard. In one corner of the yard Nivardo is building a fence to try to keep his remaining 2 chickens alive---the other 40 that he had were eaten by the foxes.

To get to Sunnyside from the town of Little Washington, Virginia turn left on Harris Hollow road. Go a few miles then turn right onto Sunnyside Orchard Lane crossing a bridge that warns heavy trucks “23 tons only”. On this early morning on the left-hand side fog hangs over the nearby mountains. Stop at the first house on the left to ask directions and two men straight out of Deliverance are working without shirts on a broken down car in the front yard. One of them has a huge scar down his stomach. They point the way to the farm house and greenhouses behind the creosote treated fence.

A lot of people in Rappahannock County know about Sunnyside farms for its former owner David Cole was an executive at American On-line who put a lot of money into making his farm a showplace for organic farming . He bought the 425 acre farm to great fanfare in 1996 and sold it to the great disappointment of locals in 2006. The Washington Post characterized the slow retreat of Sunnyside from Rappahannock when they wrote in June of that year, “Speculation concerning the future and possible sale of Sunnyside has increased over the past year as shoppers noticed the dwindling stock at Sunnyside Farms Market on Washington's Gay Street and far fewer produce choices at the FarmFresh Dupont Circle farmers market where Sunnyside is a founding member.”

But all of this talk of business does not interest Nivardo. His interest is strictly agriculture. Standing in one of the dozen or so greenhouses where is it almost too hot to breath Nivardo explains how he farms tomatoes when by definition an “organic” farm is not allowed to use chemical pesticides. Nivardo explains that there are two problems with tomatoes---a virus and a fungus that turn the leaves brown. So to avoid that he plants tomatoes in two different green houses in two different soils. If one patch dies the other should survive. And then he does not replant tomatoes (nor eggplants nor peppers since they are of the same family) in the same soil for 4 years. And to make sure that the fruit gets ripe he pops suckers off the plants, which are shoots which grown yet another shoot.

He also grows eggplants. (Nivardo does not know the Spanish word for “Eggplant” and neither do I so we just call it “Eggplant”.) These are planted in buckets whose bottom has been knocked out. The idea is to raise the plant up a little in the raised beds and give the roots some loose soil into which they can grow. As anyone who has planted eggplants knows their delicate leaves are attacked by leaf hoppers. To stop that Nivardo sprays agricultural soap. And to give them a trellis upon which to grow he runs a string to the top of the greenhouse.

While there are 12 people working at Sunnyside farms Nivardo tends the greenhouse for the most part by himself pulling weeds by hand. The other employees and interns work in the orchard or travel to the farmers markets. Of course when it is raining they help here in the only place where it is not raining.

Nivardo shows off his Super Star onions. These are enormous and they are sweet too like Vidalia. He says last year they sold them for $1.50 but people were willing to pay even more. So this year they raised the price to $3.00 apiece and they are selling fast. The onions are planted so close together that they seemingly have crowded out any possible weeds. They are started indoors from seeds which are planted 3 inches apart. After 7 weeks they are moved to the greenhouse. Asked when he knows to move the onion to the greenhouse he says, “When they are ready I plant them.” meaning he does not need to consult any book.

Each of the greenhouses here is filled with different produce and there are melons and asparagus planted in the fields. Nivardo says he won’t grow any more lettuce this year because in the heat of summer it gets too bitter. Its the same story for cilantro which he says he won’t plant anymore period because it bolts too rapidly and goes to seed.

There is lots of kale planted here although Nivardo admits it tastes better when the whether is cool. Beets are planted at various stages of maturity. There are cut flowers, cucumbers, French radishes and much more that is sold to 30 families who have signed up for the subscription program and to customers at the DuPont Circles Farmers market.

The vegetables grown indoors at Sunnyside are grown in raised beds. Nivardo does not pay too much attention to soil tests but instead prefers to look at the vitality of the plant as a gauge of whether it is growing well or not. He puts down lime to control the PH and adds fish fertilizer and lots of compost but other than that he does not pay much attention to trace elements like boron.

One of the more unique aspects of the greenhouses here is they grow produce year round. Rather than spending thousands of dollars to heat the space inside the greenhouse---heat that would for the most part escape from these walls insulated with only plastic---Sunnyside instead prefers to heat the soil. Outside the greenhouses is a wood and propane fired boiler that pumps hot water into hoses planted throughout the greenhouse soil. Nivardo explains that when the temperature of the air drops below 50 degrees the heating system comes on. The soil temperature is kept warm and Nivardo covers the plants with an agricultural cloth. He says it is brutal work keeping the fire going all the time. He rises at 3 AM every day and during the night to stoke the furnace.

Viticulture at Acorn Hill Winery

If you were to open a winery and had an unlimited budget it might look like Acorn Hill. The cavernous winery building has lots of gleaming new stainless steel tanks and floor space to add many more. For public relations they use the same firm that helped work on direct shipment legislation in Richmond. And for winemaking and grape growing they have the French who of course have centuries of winemaking experience the relatively recent success of New World winemaking notwithstanding.

Franz Ventre is the winemaker at Acorn Hill. He is a noted fixture in Virginia having worked in the States for some years. The viticulturist, Benjamin Abric, is brand new to the USA having tended vines the year before at the Domaine de Marotte in Rhône just a few miles from the famed Chateaux Neuf du Pape appellation. Consequently Benjamin is well positioned to comment on the difference between growing grapes in Virginia and France having just finished off his first vintage here in the Old Dominion.

Benjamin tends 36 acres of vines in this Madison County vineyard. Young and handsome he speaks English, French, and Spanish albeit his English is sprinkled with some awkward wording so I have edited some of his quotes here to make them easier to read.

Chateaux Neuf du Pape red wine is made from a mixture of 13 grapes both red and white. Yet for the most part none of these grapes are planted in Virginia. But Rhône in general and Condrieu in particular is planted with viognier which is of course widely planted in Virginia.

Benjamin says that in Rhône viognier is harvested earlier than in Virginia because the winemakers there want to have a wine with high acidity and they also want to avoid the rains of fall. Benjamin says, “[the] flavor and aroma of viognier changes very fast with brix.”

In Rhône they have less rain than in Virginia (7 inches during the growing season he says). Last year he sprayed fungicides 4 times while in Virginia he sprayed 9 times because of the rain and the humidity. He says that in France it is possible to go 25 days between sprays while characterizing that as “impossible here”.

In the ancient vineyards of Rhône they us the thoroughly modern VSP (vertical shoot positioning) trellis system 70% of the time. He says the French lyre system is mainly for table grapes. The remaining vines are head trained meaning they stand up by themselves with no trellis at all.

On this fall day the vineyard has just harvested malbec but Benjamin explains that the merlot needs to hang a couple of more weeks. He says you need to wait until the seeds are brown, brittle, and taste nutty in order for the fruit to be truly ripe. He says the grapes should be starting to lose their perfect symmetrical shape as they start to raisin slightly.

He explains, “When you sample some berries you have to do three jobs at the same time. First, the flavors. Second, the skins. Third the seeds. This is very important for the maceration in the tank. For example here you have some strawberry, some really fruity flavors like blackberries and things like that. Because in the grapes in the skins you’ve got natural flavors that we call in French ‘le catin’. And that comes out when it is really ripe.”

Benjamin comments on the soils here at Acorn hill. Like lots of Virginia soils these are naturally high in potassium, too high in fact to allow the uptake of magnesium and boron so he feed that to the vines with foliar fertilizers. He says these soils are rich unlike the rocky thin soils found in Rhône, so they planted the vine close together to curtail their vigor. He says the French soils are naturally at the optimal PH of from 6.5 to 7 while in Virginia soils are acidic in part because of fertilizers used to grow forage for cattle.

He says, “We have deep and rich soils. What we want to do by close spacing is to have natural competition between the vines. [This way] they are going to have less vigor. We are in a block of merlot with close spacing. There are about 5,000 vines per hectare.” The spacing is 7 feet by 3 feet.

One thing you notice is that there is less leaf pulling here in this vineyard that others you might see in Virginia. I have joked with friends that they must be paying their migrant workers by the hour because their vines have been plucked free of leaves on both the hot side (the west side) and the east side at least one foot above the cordon. Benjamin says he pulls leaves to let in air and sunshine but not excessively. He says, “You want to do leaf pulling to let the air and the sun penetrate the grapes. There is no reason to do more than that.”

Most vineyards prefer the area underneath the canopy to be bare dirt so that the grapes do not have to compete with weeds and grass for water and nutrients. But to keep out weeds and grass requires either lots of herbicides, many days of back breaking labor with the hoe, or a propane torch to burn the weeds away. Benjamin uses cultivation instead.

Benjamin uses a machine called “LUV Perfekt" which is manufactured by Braun in Burrweiler, Germany. This machine is attached to a tractor where it slices off grass and weeds by the roots thus eliminating the weeds mechanically. Benjamin says this has the added advantage of cutting off the shallow roots of the grape vines to make the vines grow roots deeper which he says can penetrate even hardpan soils. In Rhône he has seen roots on 100 year old vines go as deep as 50 meters in the rocky soils there while he read in a magazine there that in one vineyard roots were found as deep as 90 meters.

Here he makes a statement I had never heard before connecting deep roots to the concept of terroir. He says, “Actually we want to cut a little bit of root. If we cut the surface roots it encourages the roots to go deeper where they would find more minerals. They will be less sensitive to dry weather. Finally they are going to reach what we call in France ‘le terroir’. It depends on the nature of your soil if it is deep or not or poor or rich. When you cut the roots of the plant the plants want to be alive.”

Sounding like the noted soil scientists Gary Zimmer or Graeme Sait he says, “If I could work without herbicides that would be perfect for me because that is bad for the biological life of the soil. [In France they have shown that] not using herbicides increases the quality of the wines because it increases the quality of the grapes. The plant is alive so when you have some bad thing in the soil they are going to pick it up. We want biological life in the soil. That is really good to have biological life in soil.”

(This article appeared in the Spring 2008 edition of The Virginia Wine Gazette.)

Castleton Lakes Vineyards: The Soil Report

After 4 years of planting my own grapes I took a part-time job taking care of a 2 acre vineyard only 4 miles from my house--so this was two years ago. Someone else had planted it and abandoned it so it was scarcely alive when I went into the vineyard with a gang of Mexicans to hoe out the vines and chop the grass back to civility. The $100K irrigation system was not working and the ground was hard from drought. Four year old vines there were only a few inches tall if they were alive at all.

The vineyard was surrounded by an invisible fence dog retention fence powered by a solar electric charger but the dogs were long gone. There was a building where I could store equipment and the trellis system was complete. The owner, Mr. Jacquemin, had a DR lawnmower which is what I used to cut the grass.

There were two blocks of grapes there: 1.3 acres of viognier and 0.3 acres of cabernet franc. Mr. Jacquemin would not did not want to replant the viognier the first year I took it over believing because of his bad experience that viognier vines should not grow on his farm this despite the fact that the same grape flourished on my farm. So I did what he said and focused on the 330 cabernet franc vines 80% of which died that winter. In the spring I bought 200 cabernet franc vines from a local winery which I planted in June.

For me this vineyard was an excellent place where I could put into practice the lessons of organic soil science that I had learned. I would not tend these vines purely organically---there is no reason to do that unless you are some kind of nutty ideologue—but I wanted to mineralize the soils per the instructions of Gary Zimmer.

So I followed his advice and started the fertilizer program with lime and rock phosphate. The soils of the vineyard were 5.1 and 5.4 PH which is 10 times as acidic as the vegetable garden on my farm at that time. So in this environment it would have been best to put down rock phosphate first and then limestone later for acidic soils break help break down the phosphates from the rock phosphate. I wanted that soil to be alive, teeming with earthworms, friable, and have a good tilth. This would take some time as the soils here were too high in potassium, deficient in magnesium, and with roughly the same citation exchange capacity as sand.

I put my ideas down on paper in a letter to Mr. Jacquemin:

Looking at your soil report, the limiting factors in your vineyard are calcium (Ca), PH, phosphorous (P), and trace elements. Your vineyard soils at 5.1 and 5.4 PH are more than 10 times as acidic as they should be and at least 10 times as acidic as my vegetable garden. The calcium level in your vineyard should twice what it is. And phosphorous more than doubled. Not to worry because we have a plan. To sweeten the soil we add lime (calcium carbonate). PH is a measure of the number of hydrogen ions in the soil. When you mix calcium carbonate into the soil it reacts with the hydrogen to produce carbon dioxide gas, water, and in the process you lose hydrogen ions while at the same time gaining valuable calcium. As hydrogen disappears the soil becomes more alkaline, the PH increases, the soil is said to become "sweeter". This allows the plant to take up from its roots minerals and trace elements which it otherwise could not do because the acidic soil interferes with this process becoming a limiting factor no more.

Rock phosphate is part of your program. This is a naturally mined source of phosphorous. Phosphorous is needed for healthy roots and vines and for this reason I have already applied rock phosphate to the cabernet franc vineyard along with dolomitic limestone. This type of lime includes magnesium which you need as well. We are using organic fertilizers as opposed to the highly soluble chemical fertilizers manufactured using petroleum. Naturally mined rock is preferred as it will break down in the soil slowly over time. There will be a point in a few years where we no longer need to apply fertilizers with this approach whereas the conventional farmer using petroleum based fertilizers has to apply them year after year and in the process damages roots and makes the soil compaction problem worse. Hard soils cannot drain water and grapevine roots like other roots shut down when they are drowned. Your vineyard will be healthy, your fruit less prone to disease, and the earthworms will return to this dead soil.

In their current state, the soils in your vineyard have all the vitality of sand. The CEC (catation exchange capacity) at 4.4 means they (the cations) are limited in their ability to hold magnesium and phosphorous (anions). This means fertilizer needs on an annual basis are fairly high since what you apply to the soil tends to pass right through. So in addition to getting the soils in balance and healthy we have to feed soluble fertilizers to the vines. We will do like one of the local tomato farms and buy a 50 gallon tank of liquid fish fertilizer and feed it to the vines using the irrigation system. This is call "fertigation".

I told Ann Pallie I would come get her horse manure: all of it. (It would be cheaper for you to have a truck come get all of it at once than for me to make many trips. I will look for a trucker.) Her horse manure is ideal because it contains both carbon (sawdust) and nitrogen (manure) in ratios which facilitate rapid decomposition. The end result is humus. We need to spread humus on the vineyard to get the organic material up in the soil and do this every year. This stimulates bacteria and fungi and other microbial life to work on the minerals in the soil releasing them to the roots and thus the vine. Over time this will improve the CEC as well. Humus improves soil texture (tilth), makes it crumble (friable), and helps the soil retain moisture.

Soils need anions like sulfur and boron added each year because these have a negative electric charge and thus cannot cling to negatively charged clay soil particles (in fact they are pushed away). So they leech into the soil and the plant can no longer reach them. But we are covered. I have a bag of calcium borate in your tool shed and have applied about 1 lb to the cab franc vineyard (it does not take much). And sulfur is sprayed on the vineyard as a protection against powdery mildew as is copper sulphate. So the spray program covers the copper and sulfur needs which we add boron by hand.

The final part of the soil nutrition plan is to plant and shallow incorporate into the soil legumes like clover to add nitrogen to the soil as well as smother crops like rye grass to keep out the weeds and poison ivy. I planted both crimson and red clover in the cab franc vineyard. These plants "fix" nitrogen from the air (80% of the air we breath is nitrogen) and draw it into the plants. So when the plant is tilled into the ground it releases nitrogen back into the soil for other plants to use. Nitrogen is not listed on the soil report because it is highly volatile. When you apply it is drifts off into the air in the form of ammonia and leeches in the soil in the form of nitrates. So when you incorporate rate it you need to till the soil or lose most of it in the air or better yet grow your own nitrogen in the manner I just described.

Anyway that is the plan with regards to soil health. Of course the plan for disease, weed, and mildew control is another chapter in this volume of information.

Hindi

India

Kanada

Telegu

Hindi

Gardening for God

Before I went to visit Berea Gardens Hartland farm I read Victor Davis Hanson’s “Agrarian Dreams”. This professor of the classics at San Jose State University has become a commentator having been propelled into some notoriety over the immigration debate with his book “Mexifornia”. “Agrarian Dreams” is a memoir of Mr. Hanson’s raisin and plum farm that he tended with his family in the San Fernando Valley in California. After reading this book the first time I wrote Mr. Hanson a fan letter of sorts saying that we both had a lot in common: I too had written on the subject of illegal immigration for a Washington think tank, I too was a grape farmer, and I had been an arm chair scholar enamored with the classics. But then I felt silly because I took a second look at his book and realized it was a deeply sad chronicle of a family’s failed efforts to make a profit with grapes and plums. With the seconding reading the effect was the same as when Lionel Trilling wrote a critique of the poetry of Robert Frost. The “over the hills and through the woods” poetry of Robert Frost he said was not at all cheerful stuff suitable for school age children. Rather it was the melancholy musings of a sad man who actually buried his own son in his back yard and wrote about it in the poem “Home Burial”.

Victor Davis Hanson relates his family’s struggles to make a profit with raisins and plums. He is a conservative yet he blames President Reagan and his department of agriculture for the collapse in raisin prices that drove so many people including Mr. Hanson’s family off of the family farm. His animosity for the secretary of agriculture is like that of Wendell Berry who devotes so much of his ire at Richard Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Butz who was promoting the idea that the only way that a farm could prosper was to get large. Butz actually wrote that “food is a weapon”.

Mr. Hanson says that while prices for commodities like raisins fell below the price at which they could be grown the middleman who operated cold storage facilities that could keep several acres of fruit chilled were making profits as they always had done. While the farmer was forced to even let his crop rot in the field for lack of a market as the price of raisins full under President Reagan the price in the grocery store remained the same or went higher.

I had bought Mr. Hanson’s book used from Amazon.com and someone had stamped into the cover “discard” as if some library had decided to toss it out. But its theme is current today. Mr. Hanson would be pleased that with the go local, go organic movement family farms are again in vogue and it is now possible to break even with your farm and perhaps even make a profit organic agribusiness notwithstanding

Organic farming is not just a way to grow food for the students and teachers at Hartland College. For these Seventh Day Adventists who are vegans it is a way of live and a part of their religion. These Vegetarians for Jesus operate the Berea Gardens Agricultural Ministries in Virginia where learning to farm is required of every student who graduates from the college.

Bob Gregory is in charge of the greenhouses and farm here having emigrated to Virginia from California 5 years ago where he spent 30 years growing almonds and cut flowers. I could not help but be a bit envious as he stood in his greenhouse showing me beautiful onions, bell peppers, beets, and Swiss chard all varieties I had found difficult to grown in the formerly compacted soils of my own vegetable garden (things have much improved on my own farm since I embraced organic techniques). Male students in jeans and tee shirts and women in skirts worked in the fields hoeing 5 acres of sweet potatoes, egg plants, lettuce, asparagus, and sweet corn. The work here was not just academic—these students and their mentor were saddled with the responsibility of feeding the student body.

Off to the side of the vegetable plots was a large compost pile made of the leftovers from vegetable plants, alfalfa grown for this purpose, and peanut shells hauled in by the truckload from North Carolina. Unlike a lot of organic growers Bob Gregory does not use cow manure for compost because he says that cows could have been giving antibiotics which of course would end up in their manure. Other than that he follows most of the ideas of organic farming but is put off by the rigidity of some of the rules here. He says, “Frankly I disagree with some of the organic standards.” He feels some of the organic standards as stipulated by the USDA do not make much sense. He grows his vegetables “without the use of toxic pesticides. I don’t claim that it’s organic.”

Bob explains agriculture is “part of our faith”. He says, “There are lessons to be learned in the garden that are of a spiritual nature.” Certainly the poet Wendell Berry would agree with that. There is also a practical goal to all this farming which is to teach the students something useful for when they go out and do missionary work in rural areas.

I asked Bob how he controls pests without chemical pesticides. Part of the secret is timing he says. He explains that flea beetles which love the tender leaves of eggplants are a problem for three weeks in the spring. So he times the planting to get the plants established after that first cycle. Beyond that he uses insecticidal soap.

Berea Gardens grow tomatoes indoors to have less problems with fungal diseases like late blight. One of the advantages of growing inside is they can get high enough temperature (135 Fahrenheit) to drive the virus out within a week by closing the windows.

He says root-eating nematodes are a problem in parts of the farm. The control is to let mustard grow for a year. The seeds they drop drive out the nematodes.

The farm here is 6 acres of vegetable gardens and 300 acres of corn and soybeans. Here is where Bob has chosen to be practical rather than dogmatic. He uses the conventional preemergence atrazine to keep the weeds out of his corn. Without that he says there would be more weeds that corn.

Berea Gardens also grow watermelons and blueberries. He says watermelons get lots of viral diseases. Bob rotates by the melons by hand to avoid forming a yellow spot one one side and to keep insects from tunneling in. He puts copper on the blueberries because “A couple of different bacterial attack them.” The other problem here is the obvious one for people on the East Coast and that is Japanese Beetles. He says in one night they trapped 25 pounds of them. He had never seen a problem like this in California and complain they attack everything, even the sweet corn.

Commenting on the difference between dry weather agriculture in California and the rain, heat, humidity, and severe cold of Virginia he says of his students, “If they can grow a successful garden here they can do it anywhere.”

Goats at Rosewood Hill Farm

Located 1.5 hours from Washington, D.C. in Rappahannock County Rosewood Hill Farm is 65 acres of pasture and forest. We sell grass fed goat meat at farmers markets in Northern Virginia. We also grow Indian vegetables like bitter gourd (Chinese melon), egg plant, and okra.

Did you know that most goat meat sold in the Washington area is from goats raised in far away places like Texas? There they are fed pure protein and straw then trucked several thousand miles across the country using up lots of petroleum. It is much better for your health and the environment to buy locally grown meat and vegetables. Our goats are treated with kindness and are happy playing outdoors nibbling on grass and vines. We do not give our goats growth hormones or antibiotics because we don't believe you should eat those either.

Most Virginia farms raise cattle but goat meat is the meat most widely consumed in the world so it makes sense for the local farmer to cater to the large number of Indians, Arabs, and Latinos living here. That is what we do. We understand your culture and appreciate your literature and languages. We know that immigrants would like to eat the same meats and vegetables here in Virginia that they have grown up eating at home. For this reason we would like to sell goat meat to you.

Write us an email with any special requests or look for us at the farmers markets in Herndon and Leesburg.