Blooming Hill Farm
At Foodshed.io we’re trying to cut down on the distance between farm to table, but there are some farms that take that concept to the next level by crafting dishes that incorporate their produce right on site. Blooming Hill Farms (you can find them on our app!) grows and forages over 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables on a hundred acres in Orange County, New York, and most of the produce is served on weekends at their beautiful restaurant. I spoke with Travis Jones, the owner of Blooming Hill, about the change the farm has undergone over the years, the sustainability practices he employs, and the joys of growing garlic.
ME (Michaela Elias): How did Blooming Hill Farm get started and what is your background?
TJ (Travis Jones): My dad started the farm in 1983 I believe. He started taking care of a vineyard for a wealthy guy who had his estate up here. Then he started renting land and then he bought his own land and started farming full time. I was born on the farm and I’ve worked here my whole life. I went to college so I didn’t work then but I came back after.
ME: Can you describe how you have seen the farm change over time?
TJ: Yeah, my dad started out doing the Union Square Greenmarket and that’s basically all he did until I was around 9 or 10. Then about when I was in middle school we really started doing a lot more wholesale to restaurants because restaurants started to want higher quality produce. That started to gain traction and it peaked probably around 2012 or so, and we had two trucks going to the city every Wednesday and Friday. Since then it has just dropped off, probably because the market is so saturated with so many small farms doing that now. I guess we were at the front end of the curve as far as selling to small scale wholesale. Now we have a restaurant at the farm, which we started ten years ago and that’s grown a lot. Our goal is to have the farm as a tourist destination, because we’ve found people enjoy it and we’re not competing with the larger businesses that have the same exact produce we have. We also do weddings and focus on bringing people to the farm, but we still sell 20 percent of our vegetables directly to restaurants…So I guess it kind of went from retail to wholesale and back to retail as far as the vegetable operation. Now we are trying to grow everything we need to use in the restaurant throughout the season, so we’re doing a lot of storage and greenhouse stuff. We didn’t have greenhouses for a long time but we’re trying to grow more in greenhouses because they extend the season and we get a lot of benefit out of that.
ME: What are you growing right now?
TJ: We grow pretty much anything you can grow in New York state. We have zucchini coming in and tomatoes and we’re going to start picking garlic to dry this week. We have lots of different herbs, we have fava beans that are just finishing up right now, we have all different snap beans that are in the middle of their season, and we have peppers which will be ready soon. We have lettuce, carrots, beats, radishes — we don’t really limit variety. A lot of people like to only grow stuff that they find easy but because we’re not trying to do as much wholesale right now, we’re just growing everything all the time. We will plant produce that has a low chance of success in the middle of the summer incase it works out…and sometimes you’ll get a successful planting when you wouldn’t expect it.
ME: Can you talk about some of the sustainable practices you use?
TJ: We grow most of our stuff in black dirt so it’s very high organic matter, very fertile soil and we don’t really use any external input, we don’t use compost or fertilizer or anything…the biggest sustainability difference we have even compared to other organic farms is that we don’t buy any sort of outside fertilizer. We try to do the minimum amount of tillage but really with the black dirt you can’t do no till so we try not to till too deep. We use small machinery…so we’re not compacting the soil with anything too big.
ME: Do you have a favorite fruit or vegetable to grow?
TJ: I like tomatoes. They’re kind of a pain in the ass to grow since the season is so long but they’ve always been my favorite. Garlic too, I put garlic cloves in everything. Garlic is also not a very easy crop but I like the way it works in that you plant it the year before and then it stays in the ground over winter and comes up in the spring. I’ve always liked the way that works and we’ve always done a lot of garlic.
Check out Blooming Hill Farm’s produce on the Foodshed app and go to their website for more information on the restaurant and events.
