Pickers Welcome and Products to Peep

If you haven’t heard the news yet, our strawberry U-pick is open and so so SO ready for pickers. We’ve planted 10 different varieties of strawberries set to ripen sequentially over the peak berry weeks and right now almost every variety has fruit to try. Come and pick and see if you can find the berry that best suits your taste buds. Spoiler alert – they all taste amazing.

Did you know these strawberries were planted around this time last year? Strawberries are a biennial crop – that means they prefer a full season of growth before bearing fruit the next season. They’ve been cared for for over 365 days – watered all last season and mulched in the fall before the winter’s cold – don’t let the precious labor of love that went into growing these sweet treasures go to waste. We’ll soon be planting next year’s crop and need to know how in demand these berries are – the more you pick the more we’ll plant!

We’ve got some plans spinning for the unpicked fruit we’ll be recovering…maybe some Titusville Jams for the farm stand, frozen berries for your winter oatmeal, or a future co-ferment with the apples we’ll be harvesting this fall for cider. Let us know what you’d like to see!

Already we’ve been partnering with some Poughkeepsie local friends to support their value added products – which we carry in the farm stand! Little Thief Cashew Cheese has been purchasing these berries wholesale from us to make their Strawberry Jalapeno Cashew Spread. If you or any other local makers you know are interested in purchasing strawberries from us wholesale or would like to partner with us to be featured in our farm stand please reach out to our sales team: sales@titusville.farm we are growing in some really beautiful ways and want to bring y’all along! OR if you have products you want to see carried – we want to hear that too. Drop us a line!

In addition to Little Thief, we are also now carrying the most refreshing and thoughtfully flavored kombucha around from Laughing Gut – brewed right here in Poughkeepsie and the most amazing mushrooms grown just across the river by the coolest mushroom farmers around Alisa and Adam of Sugar Shack Mushrooms. Right now the stand has Lion’s Mane, Maitake, and Oysters all for the taking! If you haven’t introduced your kiddos to butter sauteed mushrooms yet – I can’t recommend it enough , it’s saved dinner for us when we’re running behind on many occasions already this season.

All this to say – there’s a lot to offer when you stop by the stand this week so don’t forget to do it!

We’re now open weekly Weds – Sunday 10am – 4pm!

Happy Pride! -Celebrating Queer Farming

We are lucky and proud to have some incredible LGBTQ farmers on our team. Farming has often been an act of liberation, resistance and empowerment. In honor of pride month and as a way to stand alongside and support our community of queer farmers here at Titusville we’re excited to share this space with one of queer team members who felt excited to write a piece to share with ya’ll about how pride and farming walk hand in hand in his life. From our markets and flowers team…a note from Iso:

Pride is something I’ve always struggled with, at least for myself. It’s always been easier
for me to celebrate someone else’s accomplishments or identity than my own. Whether it be fear,
shame or dissatisfaction, something always managed to squash the feeling as it sprouted in my
chest. When I started at Titusville, I was intimidated by the way my coworkers would talk about
their work– with such passion and pride– yet incredibly jealous of the assuredness they carried
themselves with. New to the rigor and toil of farm labor, I was nervous that I might never reach a
point where I felt good about what I was doing, a worry that I remembered far too well from my
youth. I spent a majority of my life trapped in a state of discomfort; overgrown in a pot too small
to contain me, my roots tangling around each other and refusing to burst.
But in just a few weeks on the farm, pride has taken on a new meaning for me. I feel it in
the calluses on my palms, in the sweat and dirt caked on my clothes and the way my skin heats
with the hammering sun. It is something to be cultivated and nurtured through deliberate
choices– a culmination of love, acceptance, and simple understanding for everything that I am.
It’s what gets me up in the mornings, and it’s the final push that gets me to the end of each day. I
wouldn’t say I’ve learned how to be proud, but rather that I’ve learned how to stop resisting it.
What I love most about Titusville is that it isn’t just composed of farmers, but of people
who love farming, who take pride in their work and in being part of the community they serve.
And the more time I spend around them, the more I hope to reflect that pride in myself and for
others.

Farm Favorites: The love hate relationship – why our most cherished crops require the most care…and have the price tag to match!

Tomatoes, Dahlias, Apples…the cream of the crops – beloved by all…market shopper and farmer alike. However, upon seeing that fruit at market the farmer and consumer often have a different reaction. Firstly, there is of course excitement had by all…and and unyielding desire for a tomato sammie causing the mouth to water… and then the eyes drift to the price tag…”WOW! $X/lb for a tomato? That’s wild!” is something I’ve often heard at market over my seasons in the stand. Meanwhile, the farmer is now lost in an automated memory …triggered by the smell of that fresh tomato…of spending hours upon hours in a hot high tunnel caring for these crops and trying to wash away the tomato tar off their hands at the end of the day.

The local tomato is just one example of a seasonally treasured all-star and high value farm crop. We’re gonna take a mini-deep dive into the why and how of all that jazz to get us all excited about what’s ahead and to prepare us for that sticker shock that comes on each season -let’s learn the value of our food together!

Titusville has seen and observed widespread love for tomatoes, and we prepared. We’ve invested in heated 8 high tunnels for crop production on our farm – half of those have been dedicated to answering the call for heirloom tomatoes. Those tunnels are not only a large investment to build but the propane we pump into them in the early spring months to keep our tomatoes happy also tacks on a significant cost. This is where it all starts.

Our farmer also dedicates a significant amount of his winter crop planning time to researching and selecting the best varieties of tomatoes to grow each year – and there are A LOT of options to sort through!

Then comes purchasing the seed. As one might expect, the rarer, more special, or prolific varieties (which we try to prioritize!) often cost a bit more to purchase. Our farm is growing nearly 7,000 tomato plants this season – and that is just a fraction of the amount of the seeded order to provide a buffer for any failures that might happen during seeding/greenhouse care.

We seed into thee best, organic potting mix our region offers from Vermont Compost and hours upon hours go into watering and caring for these plants before they even get into the ground.

Planting 7,000 plants (20 x 175′ beds) is no easy task!

This season we also installed a trellising system that took significant labor to set-up. Each plant getting it’s own support network of hanging clips and rods that will allow us to “lower and lean” our plants – supporting their growth even late season so we can harvest fruit as long as possible.

Then comes the pruning. My oh my – a hard game to keep up with. Tomatoes are a vigorously growing vine and the more vines they send out, the less energy they have to produce fruit. It’s the farmer’s job to keep the tomatoes focused on producing fruit on a singular vine all season long by removing any side vines they try to send out…we call these “suckers.” See the image below to see what I mean. Having a singular vine also keeps the plant compact and tidy, preventing the spread of any disease from plant to plant.

These suckers are relentless – and if you don’t stay on top of them your tomato house can quickly become a jungle. We’re in the heat of this battle right now so send up a prayer for our team as they hustle those suckers away and keep those central vines climbing higher.

Once the fruits start ripening the race continues to keep up with the harvest. Our crew really packs on the muscle this time of year- hustling back and forth down the long pathways with (hefty) crates full of tomatoes ready for market.

The marketeers also do a lot of heavy lifting during tomato season unloading and reloading the vans and coolers to get these crops out to y’all!

So…now, armed with the knowledge of what it takes to be a thoughtful tomato farmer (applied to the 7,000 plant crop you know we’re working with) – do those marketeers a favor and send them home with a lighter load 😉 We can’t wait to see our fruits front and center on your summer plates!

You’ll start seeing cherry tomatoes at our markets this week and I expect some of our bigger fruits before our next Blog post in July!

Other crops that you’ll see with a price tag reflecting their extensive labor and care are our Dahlia flowers that will start coming on at the tail end of summer. We care for these flowers all season long from tuber to bloom – we dig, divide, plant, stake and protect all season long! Right now the crew is putting in a lot of hard work staking these beds to support our plants of which we have over 3,000 of ! It’s a lot of stake pounding!

Similar to our tomato plants – our apple trees are requiring a LOT of hands on work right now. Each of the trees in our 5-acre orchard are having their fruits hand-thinned to produce an apple worth harvesting this fall. Not only is this a labor intensive task, but this crop will be the first harvest happening over the last 3 years of their planting and care. These trees are hard at work making up for lost time with their fruit…making our first batch of apples and cider an incredibly treasured and valuable commodity we can’t wait to share.

Thanks for coming on the journey with me this week to learn more about the value and care of the crops we’re bringing to ya’ll week after week – it’s a such a pleasure to be heard and to be building this connection. We hope to see you out there and continue these conversations, to keep spreading knowledge and celebration of local farms together.

Love,

Your Farmers