Four Season Farm
The farm at Stone Barns Center is a four-season operation with approximately 6 acres (24,000 m2) used for vegetable production. It serves as an educational resource by illustrating land use that is environmentally, economically and culturally sustainable. The farmers use an intensively managed six-year rotation schedule in the field and greenhouse beds, preserving the soil and locking in important nutrients.
The farm grows 200 varieties of produce year-round, both in the outdoor fields and gardens and in the 22,000-square-foot (2,000 m2) minimally heated greenhouse that capitalizes on each season’s available sunlight. Among the crops suitable for the local soil and climate are rare varieties such as celtuce, suiho, hakurei turnips, New England Eight-Row Flint seed corn and finale fennel. The highly diversified crops allows farmers to hedge their bets against poor weather.
The farmers use no pesticides, herbicides or chemical additives. The primary amendment to the soil is a highly nutritious compost, often referred to as "black gold," made from leaves, grass clippings, livestock manure and hay, and the restaurant’s kitchen scraps. A six-month composting cycle that uses natural biological heat processes, reduces the weed and pathogen contamination to produce a fertilizer key to the health of the farm.
Read more about this topic: Stone Barns Center For Food & Agriculture
Famous quotes containing the words season and/or farm:
“When we reached the lake, about half past eight in the evening, it was still steadily raining, and harder than before; and, in that fresh, cool atmosphere, the hylodes were peeping and the toads ringing about the lake universally, as in the spring with us. It was as if the season had revolved backward two or three months, or I had arrived at the abode of perpetual spring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruit, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)