From snow removal to parking bans to nightmare commutes, we’ve heard plenty about the challenges our region’s cities and towns have been facing this historically snowy winter. But how are Boston-area farms dealing with all this snow?
February is by no means the busy season at Pleasant Valley Gardens in Methuen. But it’s usually not this quiet. The bulk of owner Rich Bonanno’s business here is flowers, which they grow in six huge greenhouses. On a normal year, they’d be well underway by now.
“We’d be in the greenhouse transplanting geraniums,” Bonanno said. “And transplanting hanging baskets. I’d have a small crew here and we’d be working.”
But Bonanno has instead been working for the past few weeks just to keep his greenhouses from collapsing under the weight of eight-plus feet of snow.
“When it snows, even if there’s no plant material in these houses we have to run the heat,” he said. “We’ve got to try to get the snow off the surface of the house and as that snow falls to the side we try to melt it just a a little bit so that the side pressure on the house is minimized.”
Otherwise the whole thing could come down. The thousands of dollars of heating oil Bonanno has burned through protecting empty greenhouses has been a hit to his bottom line, even before he’s plated a single flower. And snow still covers much of them, which has already delayed his planting by a week to 10 days.
“We really need two or three days above freezing,” he said. “A 36-degree day right now would be wonderful for us to get some of the ice off the outer parts of these houses.”
For now, Bonanno says they can still make up for the lost time and have fresh flowers ready for Easter and Mother’s Day, which are crucial to business.
“We’ll move our operation to south Florida,” he said, laughing.
Bonanno’s not alone. As president of the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Association, he’s heard from plenty of other area farmers battling the historic snow.
“There is work, outside work, that happens this time of year so people in the orchard business, apple growers, peach growers, people growing grapes, this is the time of year that they prune,” he said.
Just a few miles down the road from Pleasant Valley Gardens is Bill Fitzgerald’s Mann Orchards, home to about 2,500 apple trees.
“We haven’t been able to get out and prune them yet this year, which is a job we try and get done in the winter months as best we can,” Fitzgerald said. “But we’re going to be a bit delayed this year, as far as getting pruning done.”
That pruning is critical work that needs to be done by the time spring arrives. Without it, you’ll be looking at a disappointing fall.
“Trying to make sure there aren’t too many branches that overload the tree, trying to make sure that the sunlight can get into the interior of these trees and do its thing to provide nutrients and whatnot,” Fitzgerald said.
At 20 acres, Mann Orchards is relatively small, and Fitzgerald’s confident — for now — that it’ll be able to get the pruning done in time. Others may not be so lucky.
“I know some of my friends that have larger orchards are starting to get a little bit nervous in how they’re going to get their pruning done,” he said.
Mann says this historic winter weather hasn’t yet done major damage to the actual trees.
“It hasn’t been so cold to bother the apple buds yet this winter — the root systems and everything are actually warm underneath that snow,” Mann said. “So, all-in-all, I think the apple trees are pretty happy.”
But there is plenty of winter left, and a good cold snap could change all that pretty quickly. Where Fitzgerald is feeling the hit right now is at the Mann Orchard’s farm stand, where they sell their apples and other farm produce year round.
“Our business is off 25 to 30 percent since we had the first big snowstorm,” he said.
While the winter is costing both Bonanno and Fitzgerald, it’s not money they’ll likely recoup. They’re competing with growers from all over — most of whom aren’t battling a historic winter — so they can’t realistically raise prices. If this existence sounds stressful to you, I don’t blame you. Still, both men remain remarkably philosophical about it all. After all, they say, managing the capricious whims of Mother Nature is simply part of the job.
“We worry about frost at blossom time, we worry about cool rainy weather when blossoms are on the trees,” Fitzgerald said.
“Farmers learn to live with things not going perfectly,” Bonanno added. “It’s always something, It’s always something. We’ve dealt with other issues. We’ll deal with this one.”
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