A tale of two farms; two farmers

This is a tale of two farms: Beacon Street Farm in the center of Gloucester, and Apple Street Farm on a rural lane in Essex.

Both started in the last two to three years, one tiny and urban, one sweeping and pastoral.

Beacon Street Farm must plant above the gritty city soil in raised beds with trucked-in compost. Apple Street Farm, which formerly housed a barn of horses, has ready fields of rich loam. Weeding all of Beacon Street Farm might take an hour; weeding at Apple Street requires days of expensive labor.

Both farms are organic. Both farms supply restaurants and their own homes with bountiful, gourmet, heirloom produce.

To Lara Lepionka and Stevens (yes, there's an "s" there) Brosnihan, the news four years ago seemed all doom: the war was escalating in Iraq, the economy was collapsing, and the globe was getting warmer.

Struggling with a house, a baby, and a toddler, Lepionka asked, "Am I stupid, or is this very hard economically?"

Feeling helpless and ineffectual, Lepionka desperately wanted to control something, so she planted a garden, like the Victory Gardens of World War I and II, which were planted not only to increase the food supply but as moral boosters, empowering people to feel they were personally contributing to the war effort in the form of labor and food.

Lepionka suddenly recognized a home garden's power, the autonomy it provides, the nutrition, the control over one's life.

Now, on one-tenth of an acre, partially occupied with a house, Beacon Street Farm raises enough organic food to provide the family with produce through March, and to sell limited amounts to Gloucester restaurants Duckworth's Bistro, Alchemy and The Market.

Frank McLelland of Apple Street Farm, also chef and CEO of L'Espalier, the Sel de la Terre restaurants, and Au Soleil catering, says, "I started this farm for my needs."

On 21/2 acres of tilled beds, Apple Street Farm produces 14 varieties of tomatoes, six kinds of eggplants, eight different peppers, mesclun, herbs, winter squash, summer squash, cabbage, three types of kale, leeks, scallions from seed, bok choy, turnips, beets, cucumbers. Laying hens, cooking chickens, pheasants, ducks.

Besides the singular-but-charming Tom Turkey, I must be forgetting something. The point is that McClelland produces 50 percent of the food for his four fine-dining restaurants, and for home.

When I visited Frank this week, he showed me a table laden with heirloom tomatoes as gloriously wine-red and unctuous as a Chardin still life.

"I can't wait to take these into the kitchen tonight," McClelland said with candid pride — pride that probably fuels his dawn-to-midnight work days.

With three full-time staff, McClelland farms by day, and drives into the city to his restaurants with the day's harvest in the afternoon. As a four-star chef, McClelland has earned the highest culinary prizes — "Best Chef Northeast" James Beard Award, "America's Best Restaurants" from Gourmet magazine, "Best Places" Award from Food and Wine magazine,, "Award of Excellence" by Wine Spectator magazine, to name a few; growing prized food may be McClelland's next personal challenge.

"I've always had a garden wherever I lived," he explained.

At its old site, L'Espalier had a 100 square foot rooftop plot. McClelland would harvest herbs and greens in the afternoon, and the chefs would compose dishes with what had arrived on their cutting boards, an important shift from telephone orders and truck deliveries.

McClelland farms with same intensity and authority with which he perfectly minces a shallot. I cooked with him one day; we were in his farm kitchen, preparing a dish he had invented just then from the day's harvest, but his greatness as a chef never paled. He was in his own home, his young daughter banging on a toy piano nearby, but his stoney concentration never softened; his command was palpable. He is clearly only comfortable with perfection.

Later, McClelland showed me around the farm's wide beds of Eden-like produce, every plant and animal vigorous and shiny-feathered. It was clear that Frank didn't just give orders; he walked the place in a worn T-shirt and muck boots like the man who had just weeded the bok choy. He walked with the authority of someone who understands the value of the end product, what it means to cook with a fresh egg from free-range chicken. What it means to cook with a cabbage just pulled from the soil. To roast a pheasant raised in a small flock, well fed, and tucked in at night with a "here, here, here."

Much of the actual farming McClelland learned from his grandfather who, after a textile career in New York City, retired to New Hampshire to farm. A worldly, cultured family, Foster McClelland, the grandfather, had been an assistant ambassador to Russia during the revolution, and spoke seven languages. Frank's grandmother painted notecards for Tiffany. Poetry, art and opera swirled in between the generations, which had its share of heroes. That New Hampshire dinner table, always set with crystal and candlelight, offered McClelland his first taste of farm-to-table food. In the 1980s, when free-range chickens returned to grocery stores, one bite sent McClelland straight back to New Hampshire.

Remember, however, one-tenth of an acre, including the house.

With their children, Willa, 7, and Beatrix, 3, Lepionka and Brosnihan live in a congested, sidewalk-lined, Gloucester neighborhood with backyards so tiny most people would be happy to fit a swing and a kiddy pool in them.

On that fraction of an acre, Beacon Street Farm grows tatsoi, garlic, onions, all kinds of lettuces, arugula, beans, peas, favas, summer and winter squashes, asparagus, tomatoes, peppers, artichokes, corn, herbs from parsley to bronzed fennel, eggplant, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beets, swiss chard, cucumber, Brussel sprouts — heirloom and other varieties of each, like purple carrots, chioga beets with pink and white rings, and delicata squash. There are six chickens, a box of vermiculture (worm composter), an active compost pile, and rain barrels made from old fishing bait barrels.

Lepionka and Brosnihan grow in terraces on their front yard, in boxes along the timbered wall that defines their back border, in beds along their side yard where most people would say, "this is where we put the picnic table," and call it a day.

In plastic trash barrels in their driveway, they grow potatoes; Purple Peruvian, French Fingerling, and Adirondack blues and reds.

Once you see this operation, you begin to think how much sense it makes. You begin to think, wow, these people actually have plenty of space, and it's amazing how little footage growing food actually requires. You begin to see even more possibilities. You think, "there's that plot of land along the house that's just a patch of weeds — get some tomatoes in there!"

"I see farms everywhere. I see patches of full sun in a backyard; I see slopes that are uneasy for a lawn chair, but where we could plant," Lepionka says, as amazed as anyone at the huge rewards a tiny patch of soil bestows.

Lepionka also realized the power of gardens to build community, particularly in an urban environment. She realized that gardens not only provide good nutrition, but they get people outside. They get them talking to each other, sharing growing problems and ideas.

With this enthusiasm, Lepionka now works for the Cape Ann Farmers Market, running the Backyard Growers Program, which teaches people in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods how to have their own gardens.

Families are given 2-by-2-foot growing boxes, some good soil, which comes from a pile in Lara's driveway, right next to the potato field, along with hands-on mentoring and follow-up from Lara. The Backyard Growers Program is now helping people garden in Lepionka's own Beacon Street community, Riverdale, and Maplewood. Not only are these new gardens providing food for the neighborhoods, but growers can sell their food at a special table set up for them at the Farmers' Market.

Filling an important social vacuum, the Victory Gardens provided additional food in a time when food was scarce, and fed souls as well as stomachs. Both these farms exist because good food is scarce, and there are important secondary gains.

Lepionka has realized the power of a garden to empower oneself and build community; McClelland has reconnected with an important dimension of his childhood while finding a new way to bring his personal passion and mastery to a business that was founded on just that, but which has grown to industry scale, a brilliant way of re-making intimacy in a large corporation. Just imagine if Bill Gates decided to start making microchips again himself.

Food for Thought is written by Heather Atwood, an author and mother from Rockport. Questions and comments can be sent to Heather at heatheraa@aol.com or write care of Gloucester Daily Times, 36 Whittemore St., Gloucester, MA 01930. And follow her blog at gloucestertimes.com/foodforthought.

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