Clay Hill Corners Farm

Local farmer is a maestro of greens and lettuces.

This piece first appeared in The Vermont Standard.

Think of Carol Stedman as a maestro of greens and lettuces. For ten months of the year at her Hartland farm, Clay Hill Corners, she grows twenty or thirty varieties of greens, and blends them into fun and sophisticated combinations of flavors, textures, and colors. Sweet lettuces are a mainstay, but it’s the tangier, spicy greens that Stedman most loves to include. On Wednesday mornings, she and her crew fan out in the farm’s fields and hoop houses to pick the lemony sorrel, crisp anuenue, deep red merlot, peppery arugula, and other greens that she cleans, mixes, and bags for the afternoon Woodstock Market on the Green. “My dream of a salad is a mix of wonderful greens that is very tasty, not boring,” she says “all washed and ready, so that all you have to do is open the bag.”

Stedman has been tending lettuces and making salad mixes at Clay Hill Corners since shortly after she and her spouse, Marty Banak, bought the property seven years ago. Back then, she worked full-time as a sales representative in the natural foods industry, a job that required regular visits to eighty four stores spread across northern New England. In the mornings and evenings, Stedman gardened as therapy for the grueling 250 or so miles she spent on the road most work days. After a few years, she pared back the sales work and ramped up the farming. Even with a schedule that kept her away from home only part time, though, she felt ambivalent. She’d make her appointments, but if they fell on rainy days, she knew she needed to be transplanting, and on sunny days, she could think only of the many farm tasks left waiting. So three years ago, she made the leap to full time farming.

What Stedman chooses to grow is determined by her culinary sense of adventure and eagerness to try new things, balanced by practical considerations. Among her 25 varieties of tomatoes, for example, there are interesting specialties as well as reliable standards. “If you want a tomato that will blow your socks off,” Stedman says, “try the Japanese black trifele.” Eating the pear shaped fruit with greenish shoulders and a deep, dark red body is, “like drinking a glass of wine,” she adds. The sweet and juicy rose de berne is a staple because of its hardiness; when a late blight last year wiped out most of the tomato crop, the rose de bernes held on the longest. And the huge one pound or so German pinks are “fabulous” sliced across a hamburger or tomato sandwich. Stedman’s assortment also includes orange bananas, juliets, and fargos, which are good for sauces (juliets dry well also), and cherry-sized sungolds that go down like candy.

While tomatoes and greens have become fundamental products for Stedman, they weren’t the first edibles she planted on her farm. As the new owner of Clay Hill Corners, she at first often stood looking out her windows contemplating what to plant on the property’s rolling terrain. She ultimately hit on blueberries partly because the air that moves down her north-facing slope minimizes the possibility of frost pockets. Since the plants require several years to mature, Stedman spent the first few seasons investing in mulching, monitoring the soil’s acidity, fertilizing, and watering without a significant crop. Now, though, she has 640 fruit bearing bushes and a robust blueberry season that starts in mid-July and continues well into September.

Over the years, Stedman has learned that farming is not just planting, nurturing, and harvesting; it requires marketing as well. That’s one of the reasons she and some of her farming neighbors and friends created a collaborative to supply a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) arrangement, where subscribers pay periodically for a weekly allotment of farm products. Stedman supplements her greens, tomatoes, and blueberries with beans, cucumbers, squash, eggplants, and other produce, whatever is ripe and beautiful from her fields. Other collaborative members furnish goods including fresh eggs, onions, asparagus, corn, granola, potatoes, and peas. As the CSA’s administrator, Stedman enjoys making it fun; a few weeks ago, for instance, subscribers received all the ingredients for vegetable ratatouille, plus a recipe. Another week, she did a blueberry-blackberry bonanza that featured jams.

But it’s not just creating a market for her products that makes the CSA attractive. Stedman loves the idea of neighborhood-based agriculture not only because of her commitment to local eating, but also because of the feeling of community it engenders. During the process of starting up the CSA, she got to know many of her neighbors. She’s met even more of them since she opened a small produce stand at her farm, and helped coordinate the Friday Farmer’s Market in Hartland (4-7 PM). “I like the exchange of energy where everybody is supporting each other,” she says.

Carol Stedman will be the Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) Challenge featured vendor on September 1 at the Woodstock Market on the Green. She’ll be whipping up delicious hummus and pestos at 4:00 and 5:15 PM. Come meet her, and have a taste. For more information about healthy eating opportunities through the Clay Hill Corners CSA, visit www.clayhillcorners.com.