College Seniors Plan Now For 2009 ‘Veggie CSA’

College Seniors Plan Now For 2009 ‘Veggie CSA’ By Sandy Vondrasek

Claire Garner and Ben Crockett have spent fall weekends erecting a greenhouse and tilling pasture land in preparation for operating a 20-acre CSA there next year. (Herald / Tim Calabro)

Claire Garner of Randolph and her "best friend" Ben Crockett of Waterford, Maine, aren’t waiting until they graduate from college next spring to do "the next thing."

Both seniors in agriculture-related majors at University of Vermont, the two have been commuting to Randolph weekends this fall to lay the groundwork for a half-acre market garden at the Garner family farm on Route 12 South.

Starting next June, "Sundora Farm" will be the newest CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in the area, providing 17 weeks of fresh veggies to the 20 customers who buy an advance "share" in the business.

Over the past few months, Crockett and Garner have tilled a half-acre of former pasture land and seeded it in winter rye, and almost completed construction of a 16-by-24-foot "hoop house," in which they’ll start seedlings early in the spring.

Garner, reached by cell phone last Wednesday while she was studying at the UVM library, said the idea for starting the CSA came out of a conversation last summer about the future, with her parents, Pauline and Randy Garner.

Garner, an ecological agriculture major who has interned on several vegetable farms, and Crockett, a sustainable landscape horticulture major whose focus has been apple orchards, will graduate in May with bachelor’s degrees.

Her parents just happened to have a tractor, 10 years’ worth of aged horse manure, and a hillside’s worth of open, pesticide-free pasture land. And they were thrilled to have those assets put to use.

Garner expressed her gratitude for this "fantastic opportunity" to start up a CSA with relatively low financial risk.

Garner, the business planner and "veggie mastermind" of the operation, plans to finalize the CSA structure over the next few months, and start selling shares in February.

This fall, she has worked alongside Crockett, whom she calls "the tractor man, the tinker, woodsman, and technical brains" of the operation, on the hard work of erecting the hoop house on the rocky land.

The half-acre market garden might yet be expanded to a full acre, and the partners are also mulling the idea of raising chickens and selling "shares" of meat as well as veggies.

They are both committed to running a pesticide-free and sustainable operation, on land that has been pasture for 30 years.

"We could be certified as organic, but because we’re so small, we’re not," Garner explained.

She and Crockett are also committed to educating the public about natural, sustainable practices at their "educational farm."

To that end, Garner is maintaining a photo-packed blog, detailing the dreams and realities of the project. The site, http://sundora farm.blogspot.com, explains, for one, the genesis of the Sundora name—it’s a combination of the names of two animals on the Garner farm, Dora the family dog and a 20-year-old Morgan horse named Sunny.

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