Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Working the land in Chadds Ford
There is something romantic and very special about farms and farmers.
There is something romantic and very special about farms and farmers.
During a two week time period this Spring I visited three farms. I got a kick out of each farm and was inspired by the people who work them.
I took a pad and pen to Happy Cat Farm in Wyeth Country where I interviewed owner Tim Mountz. His partner is Nate Taylor.
Mountz was working on a two-acre field, with 85 varieties of tomatoes on a sunny day. The farmer also grows lettuce, peppers, carrots, beans, corn, microgreens, onions and cut flowers.
The tomato plants were small, but Mountz said some would grow as tall as seven feet high. He quipped that some varieties of tomatoes would grow as big as his head— which he said was huge.
Much of the harvest will be mixed together to make sauces. Many of those tomato squeezings are headed for fine restaurants and three Community Supported Agriculture distributors.
“We’re not the earliest, we’re not the latest, but during tomato season we’re the greatest,” Mountz said, with a broad smile.
For six weeks during late summer, the farm’s 1,500 tomato plants produce 2,500 to 3,000 pounds per week. The fields are harvested for more than 14 weeks.
Too much rain can spoil a crop. Or if it’s too hot early, the flowers will drop.
“Moisture is the enemy,” Mountz said about excess liquid that can create fungus and disease. “Dry is perfect.
“You can add water to the field but not take it away.”
Everything at Happy Cat Farm is grown organically, though it is not certified.
The farmer showed me Japanese Potato insect eggs on the underside of a small leaf that he had plucked from a fledgling plant.
He told me that he would spend the rest of the morning and afternoon removing and smashing the pests, and if he wasn’t fully successful, only organic spray would be used.
Oh my, that’s a lot of stooping over.
Mountz grows great tomatoes with great stories. One variety, Jaune Flamme, is orange on the outside and red inside.
“It’s all about the history,” Mountz said.
His grandfather was killed in a car accident and grew beans in Lancaster. Mountz recovered some of those beans and approached William Woys Weaver, the “Pope of Heirloom and Historical Vegetables.”
Those Stolzfus string beans were special.
The farmer was told by Weaver that the beans were “extinct and no one had seen this bean in 70 years.”
For ten years, the future farmer had worked a conventional job, but those beans changed his destiny.
“That was my legacy tapping me on the shoulder,” he said. “You are going to have to grow food and not be a landscape architect.”
Mountz, or “Farmer Tim,” teaches Sustainable Agriculture at Westtown School for 600 preK through 12th grade students. He tends some of the school’s fields with the help of the students and feeds them with the bounty as well.
The Chadds Ford farmer also saw his seed business, with some weeks as many as 50 orders shipped, grow by 11,000 percent in one year. Squash seeds are a big seller.
Mountz had just started out his day when I saw him and he was still rela
tively clean.
“I get filthy, that’s how I know I’m still in it,” he said. “Tomatoes are dirty, dirty work.”
Mountz pointed to his hand and said that a crack stays black every year until mid-January.
“Farming is what I do,”
he said. “My family came here to farm in the late 1600s.
“It’s burned into my bones and I have to keep doing it.”
Looking around at that beautiful farm almost caused me to gasp out loud. I didn’t ask, but I’d assume that Mountz rarely regrets his decision to farm.
Well, maybe after several hours of stooping over and squeezing egg sacks he might waver.
“It keeps you grounded (literally),” he said. “It keeps you humble.
“And you should see how well I eat in the summer.” Bill Rettew is a weekly columnist and Chester County native. He has been known to get dirty, but not in a productive way. You may contact him at brettew@dailylocal.com