Website: http://www.comebackfarm.com/

Location: Asbury, NJ Hunterdon County

Owners & Founders: Mark Canright

Scale: 40 acres

Operational Staff: Peter Tischler

In Operation Since: 2004

Describe Comeback Farm:

Pete: The house is 1780, or something. When they bought it, it was in pretty bad disrepair {laughing}. He spent about four years getting it livable before they moved onto the farm. He started working on doing some cover cropping and some stuff before that. It’s been a work in progress, that’s why he calls it Comeback Farm! It’s still coming back! {laughing}. It’s a good name, yea. 

I believe Mark bought the property about 7 or 8 years ago. There’s something about the energy of this place, you know? I pull in off of the road right over here and it’s just calm here. He’s got a good piece of land. He’s been seeding for quite a while.

It’s so beautiful here.

How did you and Mark get hooked up?

Pete: My friend Wanda had a customer that had a beautiful permaculture garden and wanted to rip it out and put a lawn in. So, Wanda isn’t going to want to waste these plants. I was doing a pruning job down there, and so I picked up a couple hundred yellow raspberry’s that she had pulled out.  I brought them out here and well, I guess I had seen Mark before, but we had never really got talking.

So, we got to talking and he said “Oh!  I have always had fruit dreams!” and I go, “Well I’ve got fruit dreams too!”

I had bought a lot of fruit trees and plants and I was going to sell them as nursery selling, just for resale. And so, we talked more that day, and he had to leave so I finished healing them up and uh, we got together the next week and it just made sense for me to take all of those trees and plant them here, and grow them out instead of selling them. So we got our fruit dreams started! Some times things just fall into place and it’s the right thing to do you know? {Smiles}

{Enter Mark from mowing}

Mark:  I have had from the start of my fruit dreams, visions of grandeur, pear fruit dripping from my mouth! It just so happened that New Jersey’s premier fruit grower was landless! And, he lived less then 10 miles away from here! And, that he had all of these varieties of fruits from his nursery business! Trained in the way of Michael Phillips, he knows cutting edge stuff!

Are you involved in any other advocacy work around farming and the food systems?

Pete: I am a member of Transitions Newton, I help them out. It’s really based on localization and really one of the key elements in localization is agriculture, so yea I guess so in that respect.

Mark: I am a Beginning Farmer mentor for NOFA-NJ’s Journeypersons Lindsay & Joann.

How has the fluctuating weather patterns affected your decisions on plantings?

Pete: One of the things that we are trying to do is get as much diversity as we can and I think we are doing a good job with that. Mark has one row of peaches in there that has succumb to our spring frost but the truth is that they look pretty good, and they will grow.

It’s a tough year; it was a really tough spring. It uh, it got so warm, everything started blooming early, and then we got that cold spell. Down here, we lost our peaches. Up North, a lot of people lost their apples to the frost. So, it’s a climate change thing. Diversity is the only thing I can see that’s going to really help. I know there is also a lot of late blight around here now. Weather that is climate change, or people not really taken good care to keep their viruses down, I don’t know – it’s hard to say. And, a lot of it is weather related just naturally, so.

Mark:  I used the heaviest weight row cover and a 10 foot plastic pole – it was a wide cover, at least a 15 foot wide cover. At least with smaller trees you can still get up and over them. But on a cold night, with 20 degree wind, that freezing temperature is still going to penetrate that row cover. So, we are working on the next plan, which is potentially an overhead wire guide we will have with used greenhouse plastic. Basically on a freezing night, a person on each side can pull it down. That erratic spring frost seems like a trend in the last decade. Even small fruits are susceptible to damage. You think you are home free, but then you come out some time in May and they just drop and they are gone. 

Pete: Mulching and botanicals definitely helps a lot.  Treat your trees like your health and try to build it up from the inside. People don’t realize what a strong immune system fruit trees have.

I noticed you have an amazing fence up!

Mark: Yes! It was funded last December and it really has helped. It has been crucial to this expansion. And it uh, stops the deer but it doesn’t seem to stop the weeds. But it’s a great thing.  The currants! Are there currants to be eaten?! 

Pete: There are.

What varieties of fruit will you be working on here?

Pete: We have over 200 varieties. We will probably be at 350 trees, and we will have about 200 varieties and that will be it for this year. Next year we might add 100 or so more trees up here that way. I would like to get to about 500 trees and organically that’s about all I could handle until I get some help! I will show you! {walking through the orchard}

We have a lot planted and still a lot to do! One thing you learn on a farm is that you never walk anywhere empty handed, cause it’s a real long way out there!  A couple weeks ago we planted about 40 Paw Paws all along the creek. The deer stay away from them. We’ve got a good patch of blackberries in here. We planted a couple hundred raspberries down that way plus a couple hundred or so that Wanda gave us.  I’ve got my trees sealed in here that are going to go in the orchard and then this area is going to become a trial area for some thornless blackberries.

Mark had started the orchard seven years ago and there were about 60 mature trees in here. And, his layout is just absolutely beautiful. When I started laying out the trees I could just start reading his mind! And it’s so weird too, cause’ all the trees I bought, it was just so; if the row was 17 trees long, I just so happen to have 17 Asian Pears – it’s just been working out that way, its just crazy. So down here he started growing kiwi’s. He’s never really gotten a trellis up so that’s part of my summer project. Some more blackberries there and four runs of blueberries in there. A long row of grapes, and a couple more rows of blueberries.

On those sticks there, we had started up a couple of hops and we propagated them early in the spring and we got a little hops making field for some of our beer making friends {laughter}. This area here is going to be all peaches, yea its going to be a good sized peach orchard. We got a really good variety that will ripen early until late in the year, all different kinds so that’s gunna be really good. 

For the rest of the orchard, we have got some elderberries that are going to go in and put in a pollinator strip. Um, Elderberries are just one of our best medicines.  You know, as things continue to change we are going to have to be more and more self reliant on our herbal medicines and it makes sense to grow a lot of them.

So here are two rows of tart cherries that Mark had started. You can see we had to do a little fill in on them. At the end of the row are some white currants. We are going to do some white currants and black currants. Kind of an underutilized fruit that is really great for jams and some good for fresh eating. And gooseberries there too! Green gooseberries are one of the strongest anti-cancer medicines that I know of.  

Mark: This area here – the rows turned out that they were not quite parallel so we have a triangle that will actually be perfect for some dwarf apple trees because they don’t get too tall or crowd. 

Pete: Then Mark’s daughter can come out here a pick a few without a ladder! 

Mark: The other triangle is in the sculpture garden, open to all kinds of closet sculptures’ so that as you walk through and view the sculptures there will be all kinds of fruits in season. So you can graze your way through! 

Pete: Then we have some modern apples that we are growing as well. We got two rows of Asian pears and a lot of the ones that Mark had planted are starting to fruit.

Mark: The top of the hill has the best frost protection the higher you go. The rest of the land here is so sloped it only makes sense for growing fruit! We have some yellow clover mixed in with the rye here. Peter is not afraid of some big apple trees! But we are interested in dwarf trees as well because they are more draught resistant and you don’t have to climb!

Pete: The last two rows of trees we got here are European plums, prune plums, bloom around September, October. They are good for eating, drying, storing.  Just beyond that is a row of Hazelnuts! Then there will be the pollinator strip with more medicinals & elderberries. Then just beyond that at the top of the hill we will have a row of apricots. They are a tough one because they bloom so early, and there are going to be years when we lose then but we will try and spray against the frost when we have to.

Close to the fence back there we have the cherries so that we can net them out and protect them from the birds. We also have really good summer plums, Japanese plums. All the way up to where the land flattens out are the historic apples.  Then Mark will be planting the vegetables up there.

How does the fruit farming and vegetable farming really play into one another for nutrient needs?

Pete: Yea, so we are using some permaculture principles – basically you should try and get two uses out of anything that you can. So we will be using all of the land. Once everything is planted out my goal is really going to be changing all of the soil. The soil that Mark needs for farming vegetables and the soil I need for farming fruit are really different. His soil is a bacteria soil, and mine is a fungal soil.

So I am going to start adding a lot of leaf mulch, all browns, wood chips. I will inoculate it with some microrise that I got from a place where I split wood for the last ten years is all full of good fungus. And then I will spray that with fatty acids, some ground fish. The last thing I will do is plant a lot of uh, woody perennial herbs and some medicinals under the trees! Some thyme, sage, and a lot of chives. They also attract some beneficial insects and repel the other ones.  So yea, we have a lot of work to do on the biology but that stuff is the fun stuff! Just keeping some really diverse biology going, and keeping everything intact.

What business model will you be using to bring your fruit to market?

Pete: We are working on our plans. A lot of it may be direct market. We are thinking about a CSA and some fruit shares. So that would be cool. Marketing fruits is a whole other issue, and yea we will figure that out too!

Mark: There are a lot of people that would turn up there noses to tart cherries. But my theory is that in a CSA setting there are a lot of people who if they can come out and pick something red off of a tree and put it in their mouth that the flavor is only secondary! We have not tested it yet.  I can’t understand quite why the birds aren’t eating them! You know there is some red fruit! Some cherries.

Pete: They got a lot of other stuff to look at right now! {Birds flying everywhere, Mark graze’s on a tart cherry}

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~

TBD Location                                          

{ Saturday & Sunday, January 26th & 27th, 2013}

Featuring Michael Phillips, Ellen Ecker Ogden, &

Eliot Coleman as Keynote Speaker