Editor’s note: This is Caroline Pam’s final dispatch from the field for now. She’s got no shortage of stories to tell, and she will be contributing recipes occasionally in the coming months. Enjoy her essay about celebrating 10 years of farming in Sunderland, which just celebrated its 300th anniversary.
This time of year, I tend to say “no” to everything fun or extracurricular. But during the winter, I feel more ambitious and put things on the summer calendar that force me to escape the grind for a day. Back in February, I thought it would be fun to decorate a float and march with our farm crew in the Town of Sunderland’s 300th birthday parade on June 16. But as the Saturday approached, we still didn’t have a float, and I needed most of my staff picking squash and cucumbers — our brigade would have to be small. We almost bowed out entirely, but for some reason I didn’t fully understand, it just felt important to join in.
My husband, Tim, drove the John Deere tractor, and our greenhouse manager, Alice, helmed the Landini while I carried a Kitchen Garden Farm banner with Lilly and Mariel from the harvest crew. As soon as we waved our last wave to the impressive turnout of townsfolk camped out on their lawns to greet the long procession, I raced back to our pop-up farm stand at the ball fields where the food trucks, beer garden, bounce house and band stand were packed all weekend long.
Tim and I moved our fledgling farm from Hadley to Sunderland 10 years ago, and after all these years, we wondered if people in town even knew we existed. With the exception of our Chilifest one weekend a year, there are few opportunities for our closest neighbors to interact with the farm since we’re on a quiet side street, we don’t have a farm stand, and we work from dawn to dusk.
We met a few families in town once our children started going to the elementary school and discovered at the bus stop that there had been kids on our street for years that we had never even seen!
Sure enough, all along the parade route, people leaned in to ask where our farm was and how long we had been there. We also encountered some enthusiastic sriracha fans who cheered us on and put a spring in our step. My daughter excitedly dashed into the street to give me a fistful of candy she and her fourth-grade friends had been tossed from a previous parader.
I was surprised how many familiar faces I saw in the crowd as I waved to Bob Ahearn, the former fire chief who occasionally mows my lawn; Natalie Blais, the candidate for state representative whose kids were at nursery school with mine; and Elias from the post office. I couldn’t get that Sesame Street song “Who are the People in Your Neighborhood” out of my head.
Back at the market, I heaped up my little booth with zucchini and fava beans and radicchio and squash blossoms and all the summer goodies we harvest in June and seized this rare opportunity to introduce myself to our community.
I finally got to shake hands with many of the farmers whose families have been in town for generations — Laurenitis Farm, Thomas Farm, Mount Toby Farm. I also reconnected with our friend Dave, who is the 10th generation of Warner Farm, and Matt and Danya from Queen’s Greens, a first-generation organic farm with fields in both Sunderland and Amherst.
Meanwhile, my kids popped into my tent hot and sweaty from the sack races for shade and water as my parents did their best to keep up with them.
By the time I broke down my booth, the festivities had spread to my house, where a few friends had parked in our driveway since we live on School Street where all the action was taking place. Kids ran barefoot back and forth from our porch to the fried dough tent, while I finally put my feet up, and Tim put out some snacks for the families that kept streaming by.
As the fireworks exploded over the silhouette of Mount Sugarloaf that night, it started to sink in that I was more connected to my town than I had realized. Tim and I really lucked out that day 10 years ago when we spotted a “for sale” sign on a tiny farmhouse on South Silver Lane and decided to put our roots down in Sunderland.
Caroline Pam owns and operates Kitchen Garden Farm in Sunderland with her husband, Tim Wilcox. The farm grows organic vegetables, makes award-winning sriracha and salsa and hosts an annual hot pepper festival, Chilifest, in September.
