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Corrales Garden Produces 250 Lbs. of Vegetables, Fruit Each Week |
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Written by Jeff Radford
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Tuesday, 07 April 2009 |
Occupying almost half of their two acre home site at the south end of Corrales, the Van Riper Farm is astoundingly productive.
During the summer months, Richard and Martha Van Riper haul an average
of 250 pounds of produce each week to the Corrales Growers’ Market.
Fellow gardeners may want to learn how the Van Ripers achieved the
productive capacity they’ve built up over the past eight years. A few
quick facts offer insight: one mile of irrigation tubing installed new
each year; 30 cubic yards of compost; a fertilizer injection system and
—oh yes, radiant in-floor heating in their bathroom.
They've found their best-sellers are lettuce and arugula, but they tend
to shy away from crops that other growers produce in quantity such as
chilies, corn, and cucumbers.
Even so, the variety of their offerings is what keeps customers coming
back. “Every year, we try something new or exotic,” Martha Van Riper
explained. In 2008, it was peanuts and soybeans.
Although their standard offerings may vary from year to year and season
to season, their crops are likely to include: apples, arugula, green
beans, purple beans, lima beans, beets, black berries, broccoli,
brussel sprouts, red cabbage, green cabbage, cauliflower, carrots,
collards, eggplant, fava beans, garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, kale,
leeks, lettuce, onions, potatoes, peaches, pears, sugar snap peas,
peppers, plums, spinach, raspberries, rhubarb, squash, sweet potatoes,
Swiss chard and tomatoes.
Last year, the Van Ripers’ garden also sprouted two sun-tracking
photovoltaic arrays that generate 5.4 kilowatts of electricity to pump
irrigation water and cool their greenhouse.
The solar electric installation, perhaps the biggest in Corrales, fits
into the Van Ripers’ philosophy. And philosophy is the biggest part of
why the Van Riper Farm exists.
It’s about lifestyle and lifestyle choices.
“It’s the reason there is a Van Riper Farm. The original objective was
to provide a few vegetables for ourselves. At that time it was very
small, probably a tenth the size of what we have now,” Richard Van
Riper explained. “But we still ended up with some excess vegetables
that we decided to bring to the Corrales Growers’ Market. Our success
at the market encouraged us to expand the garden each year until we got
where we are now.”
“What started out as a hobby had become a major undertaking. We really
began to focus on why we were doing this. If you’ve ever been into
vegetable farming, you know there’s not a lot of money in it.”
“We started growing our own produce because we wanted fresh, pesticide
free produce, locally grown. Now in retirement, providing
that same locally grown fresh produce to our community seemed
worthwhile.”
“We talk to people who have qualms about buying vegetables
because they don’t know what to do with them. Our fast-food
oriented culture has contributed to food preparation ignorance and bad
eating habits. We help with explanations and recipes, hopefully leading
to a healthier lifestyle.”
For example, he said, “One of the crops we’ve had is kale. Kale is not
a popular vegetable. When we started growing it, we were lucky if we
had one person buying kale in the course of the Sunday market,” he
recalled. “Yet kale is one of the healthiest vegetables you can eat.
“But over time, by providing recipes and getting people to focus on the values of kale, we now sell a lot of kale.
“We’ve sold more each year, and we’ve really influenced people to
change their eating habits and shift into something that is healthier.”
“We really want to change people’s lifestyles. That’s why we're doing our garden.”
Educating the public about nutrition and the importance of eating locally grown food are prime motivation for the Van Ripers.
Not only do they hand out recipes for the vegetables and fruits they
sell, but they also operate a lending library from their growers’
market stand.
Among the titles they promote are The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael
Pollan which the Van Ripers say “will change the way Americans think
about the politics, perils and pleasures of eating.”
Another of the books they lend is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
They are firm believers in the growing movement to eat locally produced
foods. “The benefits of people buying locally is that the food they buy
locally is fresher and has consumed relatively little ‘oil’ to get to
the marketplace.
“Most of the stuff you see at supermarkets has traveled 500, a thousand
or more miles to get to that market. Not only do they need energy to be
transported, but they need energy to keep them cool. And by the time
the food gets on the shelf at the grocery store, not only has the food
lost a good deal of the minerals and vitamins in it, but it has
consumed a lot of additional energy.”
And that's where the Van Riper photovoltaic system fits in. “There's a
nice synergistic relationship that comes in when you use photovoltaics
to cover some of the energy costs you have from pumping water and
powering fans to keep the greenhouses cool.
“Our impact on the consumption of energy is significantly mitigated by generating our own electricity”, he said.
A meter installed with their solar electric system indicates that from
when in was installed in August 2008 until January 2009, they have
generated 6,250 KWH and potentially prevented more than five tons of
carbon dioxide from being dumped into the atmosphere. And because their
photovoltaic system is tied into the power distribution grid operated
by Public Service Company of New Mexico, the Van Ripers’ excess
generation capacity and PNM incentives resulted in payments from PNM
totaling $179.67. Even so, they believe that economics behind
photovoltaics is not compelling, but “it just seems the right thing to
do.”
The Van Ripers had always had modest gardens during his career with IBM, but nothing like their effort here.
“Richard has always planted every spring,” his wife said. “It was a ritual.”
Growing up in Connecticut, his family always had large gardens. “So I
guess that’s where I was first introduced to gardening. I’ve always had
a garden, but never on this scale,” he said.
Before moving to Corrales, the couple’s home was in Westchester County
outside New York City. “The garden we had in Bedford was very small and
it was very difficult because there were a lot of trees.”
After he retired about ten years ago, they moved to a Baja Corrales lot that contained a home and little else.
“There was nothing here... just the house,” they recalled. “None of the
landscaping, none of the pool area, none of the garden. So the first
thing we wanted to do was create an oasis next to the house. That was
our first priority.
“We hadn’t lived here long enough to have gone to classes or do the
research to find out what might have been the best thing, so we kind of
went for an instant fix” by contracting with landscapers.
That was not entirely satisfactory, as they explained. “We started out
with a landscape architect. It was a very unsatisfactory experience. We
wanted a very natural looking area, but he came back with a very
rigid, rectilinear solution. We said ‘We don’t like that.’ So he says
‘what would you like?’ We told him we’d like this and that. And the
next thing you know he comes back with a plan that spits back exactly
what we told him. But what we were looking for was his expertise
to achieve a nice southwestern environment.
“We finally gave up and called The Hilltop and told them we wanted something that looks nice. And that’s what they did.”
That professionally developed area is to the east of the house which is
near the western property line and faces views to the mountains.
“Next we planted a small 25-tree orchard with apples, cherries,
peaches, pears and plums. Then we began work on our small garden.”
“For the first two years, we had just a 20-foot by 20-foot garden where
we grew the basics: lettuce, beans, tomatoes, squash, that sort of
thing,” Martha recalled.
Although she had no gardening experience before they married, her
husband says their partnering makes the Van Riper Farm so productive.
“We complement each other,” he said. “I do the growing and she gets
stuff ready for the market. That’s an incredibly tough process.”
To get ready for the Sunday Corrales Growers’ Market, he explained, “We
harvest garlic, onions, and potatoes on Wednesday or Thursday because
they hold up better. But the green stuff is very fragile.”
“We spend all day Saturday, into the evening, picking, washing and then
refrigerating all the produce. We fill three refrigerators with an
average of 250 pounds of produce. That’s a lot. And Martha manages all
that.
“The washing process alone is a big job and then there’s packaging and
refrigeration. And then Sunday morning early, she organizes it into the
display containers.”
“It takes both of our cars, my big Explorer and her Prius, to carry all that stuff to market.”
The Van Riper Farm usually sells from two long folding tables in front
of which are other containers of attractive foodstuffs fresh from their
garden. All of those display bins are replenished from their vehicles
backed up to their produce tables.
The Van Ripers are at the market by 8:30 a.m. setting up for the 9 a.m.
opening. Then it’s three hours of selling, making change, explaining,
educating, lending books, exchanging recipes and offering gardening
tips.
“By noontime, we’re ready to crash,” he confided.
Although they have enlarged and expanded their product line over the
last eight years, the Van Ripers are now thinking about pulling back a
little.
This spring, for example, they will not offer tomato seedlings, partly
to reduce workload and partly because tomato plants are available from
several other growers at the market.
“We’re about maxed out,” he admitted. They don’t sell from the farm and
they don’t normally sell at other metro area growers’ markets.
Martha explained their farm operation is relatively large for a single
market like Corrales’ but not large enough to take on several markets.
“We’re so busy on Saturday getting ready for the Sunday market in
Corrales that there’s no time to participate regularly in other
markets.”
“We hire part time help but we’re very fussy about how we want the work done.”
Her husband explained: “Weeding is fairly easy, but telling people how
to pick things is not. Part of your quality control is executed in the
process of picking. We end up discarding and composting about 40
percent of our harvest that does not meet our standards. Most of that
happens when I’m picking the stuff.”
“And when you’re picking, a lot of the plants are fragile. Bean plants
are very fragile, so if someone goes through the rows who is not really
sensitive to what he’s doing, he can destroy your future crop by the
way he harvests.
“So scaling up the farming operation is difficult. Scaling up the picking and marketing part of it is the problem.”
The Van Ripers feel they have reached a production plateau. “I think
we’re about as big as we want to be,” Martha conceded. “We’re not as
young as we used to be and we’re just about maxed out.”
They said that they have begun to think about replacing the gardens
with a vineyard. “But not just yet,” Martha noted. “Still, we’re just
about at our capacity and tolerance for this.”
When their growing season ends in the fall, they pull up the 5,000 feet
of irrigation tubing and clear away the remaining vegetative waste
which is shredded and dumped into the compost heap. So from late
October to mid-January, the Van Ripers pretty much have time off from
their farming.
“That’s our vacation time. Because its winter, it’s led to vacations in
South America (Galapagos, Amazon River cruise, and Macchu Picchu) and
this year in Egypt and Jordan,” she said.
“The garden activity resumes in January, when I start seedlings for
lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, leeks and tomatoes,” her
husband explained.
“We plant the seeds in trays in the bathroom over the floor which has
radiant heating. Bottom heat speeds up seed germination. At any one
time, he said, the bathroom floor might be sprouting seedlings in up to
six trays of 18 four-cell units, or upwards of 432 plants. When the
seeds germinate, the trays get moved from the bathroom to the small
greenhouse.”
“The small greenhouse is partially insulated and electrically heated.
The seedlings grow much better out there in the bright sun than they
would under flood lights.”
“It's a lot of seedlings, but everything is staged. Some of the seeds
will start in early February, some in mid February and some in late
February. There’s always something in the bathroom,” he said, with his
wife chuckling gently nearby.
The seeds start in the bathroom, then move to the heated greenhouse
after they sprout, and then on to the big unheated greenhouse as it
gets too crowded and as the weather warms.
“In March, we start ground preparation outside in the big garden,” he
continued, including laying new irrigation tubing. We plant hardy
vegetable seeds, such as peas, and transplant some of the plants we
have been growing in the green houses.
“As I plant a row I lay out a strip of the irrigation tubing. The
irrigation tubing doesn’t go in all at one time; it goes in as needed.
While drip irrigation is the most efficient way to irrigate, we still
pump about 1,000 gallons of water each day during the hottest part of
the summer.”
He no longer tries to re-use the irrigation tubing year after year
because the emitter holes in the previous year’s tubing will have
clogged from mineralization.
Once the planting starts, it goes on almost continually throughout the
growing season. Hardy vegetables such as spinach go in first, followed
by tender vegetables, such as string beans. Some vegetables, such as
arugula, are planted again and again, perhaps nine or ten times as the
summer wears on. “The last thing I’ll plant is garlic in October
for the following year’s crop.”
The Van Ripers’ irrigation system is zoned for sequential watering
because the pump on their irrigation well is not sufficiently powerful
to water the entire garden all at once. “I used the size pump that I
had, and it will only pump about three gallons a minute. Because of the
size of the pump, I’m forced to go to zoning to irrigate the garden.”
Water flows to each of eight zones separately through nearly a mile of plastic tubing.
“But the key challenge with irrigating this way is preventing the tiny
holes in the tubing from clogging. The water has to be filtered.
The water straight out of the irrigation well has quite a bit of sand
which would clog up the little holes in the tubing quickly.”
“The water storage tank, fertilizer injection system, and two sets of
filters are in the heated greenhouse. The fertilizer injection system
adds a precisely measured liquid fertilizer to the filtered irrigation
water. And that’s important because, if you use too much fertilizer, it
pollutes the ground water. By using this metered, calibrated supply,
the fertilizer is delivered directly to the plants roots while
minimizing the problems of contaminating ground water with excessive
fertilizer. It works very well.”
The water from the little greenhouse goes into the main underground
distribution lines which go out to the zone valves in different parts
of the garden.
“Each one of the eight zones has two more filters. So by the time the
water from the well gets to the tube it has been filtered four times.”
“There are many components to being ‘organic,’” he explained. “It
starts off with using organic seeds, which we do when they are
available, but frankly, that never has made a lot of sense to me.
Chemical spays and chemical fertilizers are not allowed.
“We do use some chemical fertilizers but we do not use unapproved
chemical sprays. Our soil is sand with very little organic
material and almost no nitrogen. Manures contain salts and can be
contaminated with insect sprays, hormones and pathogens.
“The fertilizer injector allows providing a minimum amount of
fertilizer without the manure’s problems. We hope to gradually improve
our soil allowing us to eliminate the chemical fertilizers.
“Last year, we tried to get along without it by relying on 30 cubic
feet of compost,” he explained. “But the compost that you get
commercially is not very good.
“In fact, of the 30 cubic yards I bought, I think probably 15 cubic
yards of it was sand. Of course the theory is, if you get good enough
compost, you don’t need to use fertilizer at all, since it
provides all the nutrients you need.”
After trying the bulk compost in 2008, he said he will probably go back
to the fertilizer injection system in the 2009 growing season.
“So when our customers ask if we are organic, we have to tell them that
we are not. The use of chemical fertilizers prevents us from applying
for certified organic status. We have found that what our customers are
mostly concerned with the use of chemical sprays.
“However, all sprays are not prohibited while remaining ‘organic,’” he
added. “You can use pyrethreum which is derived from chrysanthemums,
you can use some organic oils to suppress certain kinds of insects and
you can use soap sprays which is good for aphids.”
The Van Ripers have used beneficial insects such as ladybugs and
parasitic wasps to control infestations. Martha Van Riper pointed out
they have begun buying and releasing “beneficial insects” to curtail
common garden pests “That’s made a big difference.”
They also used a soap spray to control aphids in the 2007 growing season, and in 2008 they had almost no aphid problem.
“Aphids love the lettuce, the arugula, the kale, the broccoli and would
also infest the eggplant and eventually get to the beans,” he said.
“Aphids can be a substantial problem unless you have a lot of ladybugs
around. It worked. We spent $70 on beneficial insects. You get these
little white cards with a bunch of black specks on it. To this day, I
don’t know if any of the parasitic wasps hatched from the little black
specks. You can’t see them, but you can see the results. I don’t know
whether it was just from the ladybugs or not, but there seemed to be an
effect.”
But even more of a problem is the dreaded curly leaf virus. Notorious
for devastating tomatoes, the virus affects other vegetables as well,
and is spread by leaf-hopper insects.
The Van Ripers fight back by keeping some of their tomato plants in the
greenhouse as long as possible. “The real reason for the greenhouse
isn’t to extend the growing season,” he explained. “It’s really to keep
the leaf-hoppers off the tomato plants.
“I’ve done research on that and I’ve gone to the Master Gardeners
class, and I’ve talked to the experts from the N. M. agriculture
school. Nobody has a solution to the curly leaf virus. The only thing
they tell you is that there’s no resistant tomato variety and that you
should try to try to remove the wild mustard plants that the leaf
hopper multiply on.”
However, removing all mustard plants, the virus host, from your
property won’t be sufficient, he is convinced. “What do I do about my
neighbors? With our spring winds, your neighbor’s leaf hoppers will
soon be blown in.
“The only practical way I’ve found to protect my tomatoes is planting them in the greenhouse.”
Van Riper listed quail, rabbits, squirrels and gophers as other garden pests in his area.
“Quail are a problem because they love our asparagus tips. It’s ironic
because when we first came here, we saw just one quail, and for the
first six or seven years we were here, there were no quail.
“At one time, we were looking around for quail eggs so we could hatch
our own and release them. We like the noise they make. But quail love
asparagus tips, and they are also partial to some of your garden
seedlings that come up. So quail have become a problem. Our dog and cat
help somewhat, but it's good to get out in the garden early in the
morning to scare them off.
“Rabbits are a huge problem around this neighborhood, but not for me,”
he added. “I have a horse fence all around the property and at the
bottom of the horse fence is two feet of chicken wire.
“That chicken wire, along with routine maintenance walking around and
looking for holes where they try to dig under, keeps the rabbits out.
“The other problem is gophers. They especially like to eat potatoes and carrots. But they are trappable.
“Spring traps that you set underground are the only thing that I have found effective to control the gopher problem.
“You see the mound; you dig around it to find the tunnel, and then set
a traps at the tunnel openings. Usually within hours you get the
gopher.
“But it’s another of those problems that you can’t cure yourself. I can
catch all the gophers on my own property, but there are gophers all
around you. You keep nailing them, but they keep coming in.
“And squirrels are a problem, especially with the fruit. We’ve also had problems with porcupines.”
He blames porcupines for gnawing the bark off his fruit trees. “Not
only will they gnaw the bark and girdle the tree, but they will also
crawl out on the branches and the next thing you know, the branch
breaks.
“In the winter they eat the bark and in the summer they climb out on the branches to get the fruit.
“Farming is a kind of war between us and the pests. If you don’t take action immediately, these pests can cause major damage.”
The Van Ripers have other suggestions for solving local gardening problems.
“Our strong New Mexico sun damages the fruit from tomatoes and peppers.
We plant them much closer together than the store or seed packet
recommends.
“Normally you might plant peppers 18 inches apart; I plant them six
inches apart, so that the foliage protects the peppers from sun scald.
“Lettuces are also damaged by our strong sun. All of my lettuces are
planted on the west side of my garden where they get shade in the
afternoon from the Russian olive trees. That’s the kind of thing you
can do to try to minimize the sun problems.”
They took a similar approach to assisting their apricot trees —but it
didn’t work. “Apricots are the earliest blooming fruit trees that you
probably have. Because they bloom so early it makes them susceptible to
late frosts. We have that bad combination of having warm periods in the
late winter, which gets the trees all excited about budding out and
flowering, and then in late March you can have a killing frost. If you
have a cold front coming down and it's a clear night, the temperature
can drop precipitously.
“So our notion was to plant our apricot trees on the north side of the
house to protect them from the sun and hopefully delay when they would
come into blossom.
“Theoretically it made sense to me, but it didn’t work. They bloomed at
the same time. The fact that they were shaded, the fact that the ground
was still frozen there because of the shade that it gets we thought it
would make a difference. But they seem to be more influenced by the
total light of the day rather than by how much sun they were getting
from the south or how intense the light was.
“Our strong sun was also damaging our blackberries. The sun was
literally cooking the berries on the vines. We found a possible
solution on the Internet. A Dr. Herb Stiles of Virginia Tech developed
something called a shift-trellis that reduced sun damage to
blackberries. His adjustable trellis system supports the berry canes in
different positions in relation to the sun’s angle.
“In the spring you tilt it so it is facing south. As the canes blossom
and form a green berry, you then tilt the trellis from a south
orientation to a north orientation. That way the natural foliage tends
to shield the berries which are now facing north, protecting them from
sun scald,” he explained. “We have some success with the shift-trellis
but it requires a lot of work building the trellis and then training
the blackberries to grow on it. There is no free lunch in
farming.
“We continue to look for ways to improve our blackberry and raspberry yields. There is very strong demand for them.”
He said soil quality is also a major problem. “We have been forced to
rely on chemical fertilizers to grow quality produce. We have
been working on a long-term plan to improve our soil. We tried a
quick-fix with commercial compost, but were disappointed with its poor
quality. We now are relying on our own compost.
“We compost all vegetable matter from the garden. We shred
everything with a large tractor attached shredder that even handles
tough corn stalks. The shredding greatly accelerates the composting
process. We also compost all vegetable kitchen scraps. We mix
this compost with a rototiller into each row as we plant. As a result,
our soil is gradually improving.”
While the Van Ripers have gotten many aspects of gardening figured out,
they still enjoy finding new challenges. They make a point of trying
new crops each year. “At the end of each market season, we ask people
what they think we should grow. Some successful suggestions have been
arugula, lima beans and fava beans. One suggestion that did not work
out was mache [a specialty lettuce]. But mache likes a very wet, damp
environment, so it didn’t grow very well here.
“When you introduce new things, you have to be careful because if it is too unfamiliar, people just won’t buy it.”
Gourds are another staple in their garden. Martha Van Riper uses them
for her own craft projects and sells them through the Van Riper Farm
Web page. “There is a pretty good network of people who want gourds,”
she noted. She sells them decorated and undecorated.
When she first started growing them, she would pick them and take them
inside to cure. “Recently I’ve had too many gourds to bring them all
in,” she said. “I’ve found that just leaving them on the vine is a
successful way of letting them cure over the winter.
“In February or March I’ll go out and get them, and by that time they
are dry and lighter and easier to handle.” There is good demand for
dried gourds from local artists and last summer a Japanese gourd artist
in New York saw her gourds advertised on the Van Riper Farm Web page
and ordered several.
The Van Riper’s site that can be found at www.nmfarmer.com. They
originally set it up to keep customers informed on what vegetables
would be available at the market. Since then they’ve added pictures of
their farm, reading lists related to the importance of eating locally
produced vegetables, and information on their photovoltaic
installation. “It’s a shameless promotion of issues that we feel are
important,” Richard Van Riper said.
Reflecting on their experience farming in Corrales, they conclude that it’s been a wonderful experience.
“While it has been a lot of work, we feel that it has been very
worthwhile. Some folks are eating better because of our efforts.
Further, we have made a lot of friends at the market, both customers
and other vendors.
“After our experience with farming, you can’t help but be impressed
with the results of our fellow farmers. We have seen the Corrales
Growers Market expand and improve during our eight years selling
there. We really feel that we, along with our fellow farmers,
have been able to contribute to Corrales’s agricultural heritage.”
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