Tristan and Zach grow lots and lots of mixed vegetables. They specialize in stuff that has a short shelf life. This means lots of greens and other perishables. They do compliment the fast moving stuff with some staples. Onions they try to grow year-round along with squash, carrots, and some other diversified vegetables.
In the summer months they offer a CSA and attend two farmer’s markets. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It’s a nice program which makes it affordable for people to get a bag of vegetables each week. The CSA model is good for the farmers because it can be difficult to predict what is going to do well in a given season. It offers a little bit of flexibility since they can assemble a box with the freshest stuff they have at harvest time.
A newsletter goes out each week to their customers with a list of what’s in the share. Often they include a list of additional vegetables that are not in abundance or aren’t in their prime, but still good. Customers can indicate which of these they want to include in their base share if any.
Customers can sign up through their website as the CSA is open to anyone. There are many programs available for customers who could use assistance purchasing a CSA share. They work with NOFA, the Granite State Match, and the Mount Washington Valley Veg Food for All program.
Waxing Moon Gardens offer pickup at Tamworth Farmers Market, the Sandwich Farmers Market and on the farm.
Tristan and Zach first started their farm in the fall of 2019. They planted garlic. It took a few years to ramp up and grow into their space. Since then they have been refining what works in their climate.
Tristan always had a veggie garden, but she had never farmed professionally before starting Waxing Moon Gardens. She is a first generation farmer. She did have experience doing landscape flowers on different sites around Squam Lake. She really likes being outside and working in the dirt. It feels meaningful being able to supply food to people.
Zach started growing vegetables on a random farm job in his twenties. Like Tristan, farm work proved to be meaningful work and he loved that about it. He really likes vegetable gardening. He once took a job at a yoga retreat which had a farm to table component and learned a lot there. He went on to work at Brookford Farm in Canterbury for a few years, but personally didn’t like the tractor time.
At Brookford Farm Zach was on a tractor much of the time between May to August, but he prefers the kind of farm work they do at Waxing Moon Gardens now. He thinks it’s nice to move his body and do physical strengthening while he farms.
He also didn’t like how there was so much wasted space in tractor farming. When developing Waxing Moon Gardens he had to learn some new techniques but the principles and concepts of organic farming was the same at Brookford Farm. On his farm now, high-intensity spacing in concentrated areas is proving to be a strategy he prefers.
Zach and Tristan are most famous for their carrots. Good soil makes a good carrot. Carrots do well with plenty of water. They take soil tests to UNH for analysis and apply organic recommendations from them. They use chicken manure, alfalfa and compost as their only inputs to add fertility.
They get their compost from Benson Farm in Maine. This compost is made up of dock and dairy farm waste. The seafood industry produces a lot of high fertility wastes. Benson Farm mixes the seafood waste with dairy cow bedding and creates a nice product.
When asked about which vegetable people should try more, Zach suggested salad turnips because people don’t appear to know about them enough. Salad turnips are really different than purple-top turnips. They have a nutty, sweet flavor without the brassica flavor. It has a good crunch like a carrot and they don’t have thick skin.
Waxing Moon Garden’s Best Ever Salad:
- Arugula
- Carrots & Turnips real thin
- Little bit of red onion, or diced scallion.
- Roasted beets & toast the walnuts.
- Goat cheese from Rams Farm
- For dressing mix Oil, balsamic vinegar, salt pepper, salt & and pepper and a little prepared mustard and you’re good. Mustard powder works too.
Zach and Tristan offered some advice for new growers: keep the green stuff growing. Keep the ground covered. Cover crop is your friend. Don’t get discouraged, you can plant all the way up until the end of September. Not everything is going to work year to year, but keep trying. The secret to growing is volume and consistency, just keep going.
Tristan had a great tip for storing vegetables. Always cut the greens off the root vegetables if you want them to last. Cut them apart and put the root and greens in separate bags. Both the root and greens will last longer than if you kept them attached.
The next big project for Waxing Moon is a starter-house to start seeds. They want to build a greenhouse where they can grow optimal starts. What separates a tunnel from a green house is primarily the level of heat. But they aren’t looking to expand on their geographical reach anytime soon. They want to keep the food local.
For the more immediate future, they are going to do a one-time popup share in the fall. The drought affected them, so some of their fall crops struggled. However, they still have a quite a bit harvested. They are going to create an online store where people can buy bulk vegetables. Check out their website for more information on how you can be notified when the one-time fall shares are live.