Balancing Life & Land

For organic farmer Patti Powers, there's no longer a line between work and home - and that's fine with her

Author: By Sheryl Julian, Globe Staff

Date: 10/13/1999 Page: C1

Section: Food

Powers pulls on a slicker and broad-brimmed hat and opens the back door to a chilly, wet wind. She slips out of her clogs and sets out for the garden -- barefoot. She looks so happy out there, with the rain beating down and her bare feet in the grass, that it seems for an instant she'll open her arms and start singing. ``I love it here,'' she says.

You get the feeling that if Powers weren't so busy making preserves and vinegars for Cheshire Garden, her organic specialty foods company, she'd pull up a chair outside and watch the garden grow. Powers is so drawn to this natural life that six years ago she left her part-time job, as a research biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to farm full time. She had spent years being pulled in two directions, taking sabbaticals in the summer and at harvest time to concentrate on Cheshire Garden. ``I just wanted to be on the farm all the time,'' she says.

Her freedom comes at a small price. Powers and her husband, Ralph Legrande, work flat out on their 10 acres from spring planting through Christmas. Their production costs consume such a high proportion of revenues that they must take a deep breath before laying out even $1,000 for supplies. They live modestly, without ordinary luxuries -- like vacations. ``But there's no need to leave here,'' she says.

And the way Powers explains it, it makes perfect sense. If you woke up every day and did exactly what you wanted, if you could hardly wait to slip into your clogs to pad around the house and then out of them again to get to work, maybe the grass wouldn't be greener anywhere else.

Powers happens to have particularly beautiful grass, even with the drought, even with hilly, sandy, rocky land. On this parcel in southwestern New Hampshire, she has managed to grow herbs, Italian peppers, chili peppers, tomatoes, garlic, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, and plums.

The herbs and peppers go into vinegars, which were the first product Powers bottled. The plums are heirloom damsons, and she turns these into damson plum sauce. ``Sauce'' is Cheshire Garden language for preserves. Raspberries become Queen of Hearts raspberry sauce, and strawberries, King of Hearts sauce.

``Sauces have less sugar'' than jams, explains Powers. ``In jam recipes, you use more sugar than fruit.'' Hers are the reverse: She uses 2 parts fruit to 1 part sugar, so the mixture is not particularly sweet, and she adds no pectin, so the fruit and sugar never thicken into a solid mass the way ordinary jams do. When they cool, however, the sauces are thick enough to spread on toast, and the plum or raspberry flavor, for instance, is unmistakable. All of the fruit tastes are right out front, perhaps because farming, not jam making, came first. Preserving began simply as a way to use up surplus.

Putting up sauces is one of the few jobs that has ever kept Powers indoors. When she was a research biologist in the UMass entomology department, her work station was a university-owned abandoned orchard, where she studied insects in their natural habitat. Her work was ultimately used in integrated pest management research, or IPM, a system of allowing beneficial insects to rid the fruits of pests instead of relying on chemicals.

``I was outdoors three seasons, and I had to pay an awful lot of attention to details,'' she says. ``I still pay attention to details. My friend's daughter says I'm not a certified organic farmer. I'm a certified neurotic farmer.''

Powers laughs at this, but there is a manicured quality to the garden, and her vinegars look as if she has arranged each seasoning, which indeed she has. She admits to halving garlic cloves along the curve so they'll look nice in the bottles.

She learned that fastidiousness from her mother, Jane Powers. ``She's very careful about everything she does,'' says Patti. At 77, Jane Powers still plants and harvests an impressive garden. It's in the yard of her Shrewsbury, Mass., home, where Patti was raised. She maintains 12 flower and fruit beds, and puts up vegetables for the winter. ``She puts me to shame,'' says Patti. Her father, Lawrence, rototills the soil and maintains the equipment.

``Ralph can build anything,'' she says, including the small farmhouse they live in. (He constructed it in two years while working at other building jobs for the income.) Powers, who is 4 feet 10 inches tall, can't reach the light over her stove, and she feels lost around machines. But she picked the right guy.

``Yesterday, Ralph fixed the car,'' she says, ``and the lawn mower and the computer. We couldn't be living this self-sufficient life if he weren't as clever as he is.''

Four years ago, Legrande built a commercial kitchen beside the house. It is furnished so simply and practically, it's a wonder all professional kitchens don't look like this. Terra-cotta tiles line the floor, and a free-standing, three-section sink hugs one wall. Instead of built-in counters, Legrande set institution-size stainless steel tables together against the walls, to make extra-deep counter space.

A six-burner Garland range and a commercial dishwasher are the only other equipment. There are lots of windows, looking out on flowers planted right up to the house and, farther away, beds of zinnias and fall perennials that curve and loop around the edge of the land. And that's it: The kitchen holds nothing else but two denim chef's jackets, hanging on knobs behind the door, and a barrel of white wine vinegar and the containers into which it's being siphoned.

It's a laboratory, sterile but cheerful. And this simple kitchen is what let the little business of Cheshire Gardens move to the next level. When it was finished, Powers and Legrande expanded their line to include mustards -- made eight jars at a time, mostly in winter -- and salsas, made with raspberries or strawberries, tomatoes, and chili peppers.

Powers seems a little surprised that the business works and relieved that she doesn't have to leave her home lab for her lab in the orchard.

Once settled in Winchester on Legrande's land, she planted a garden there and continued to grow berries and make vinegars. Then she started the preserves. She put a label on the jars, naming the company Cheshire after the county Winchester is in. A friend drew a portrait of her cat Rita, and that soon turned up on the label as well.

Back then, she made the preserves in the farmhouse kitchen, which had to be inspected by the New Hampshire department of public health. The department of agriculture was already coming regularly to check the organic garden. She likes being scrutinized. ``Certification shows that a third party is coming to the farm,'' she says.

But even with the preserves, the company wasn't making enough to support both of them. Legrande continued to take building jobs, and he had a stint as a cook at Northfield Mount Hermon School, just over the state line. Powers stayed at UMass, taking long summer breaks to harvest her crop.

Their operating expenses loomed disproportionately large, because Cheshire Garden is such a small enterprise. Everything Powers bought, she had to pay regular price for. ``The economy of scale hits us with a wallop,'' she says. ``We pay gardener's prices for everything. When you're buying seeds or plants, the more you buy, the less the price.''

Besides taking a beating on seeds, the couple was buying vinegar in small containers. Organic white wine vinegar from Spectrum Commodities of Petaluma, Calif., is available in a 55-gallon drum, but Powers couldn't buy it until the commercial kitchen was built.

She still hears the same refrain when she orders bottles or anything else -- lids, jars, and packing boxes. ``All of the people say, `Well, of course, if you bought a container load, I could give you a better price.' ''

But there's no place to put that much stuff. As it is, the farmhouse is bulging. So when Powers discovered that the smallest order for matte-finish metal-foil cap covers, to top the vinegar bottles, was a box of 24,000, she was surprised, especially at the $1,000 price tag, but then relieved. ``They don't take up that much room,'' she says.

In winter, while the snow piles up in the garden, Powers and Legrande get to work on the mustards. From four freezers, they pull berries and peppers and make salsas, too. And they carry on this dreamy life, walking in the woods behind their house, thinking about the land.

``There is a part of me that would love to jump on a plane and go to Provence,'' she says, ``but another part loves knowing our little piece of the world well, seeing the turtles come out in the spring, and the nesting robins. They're just about everywhere. There were three different nests in the raspberry patch.''

Nature, she says, happens on all levels, not just on the vine. ``There were deer who ate the raspberries, but it actually turned out to be a pruning job. The raspberries are more loaded now than they would have been without that. We had a rabbit invasion. The bunnies took out a third of the strawberries. That was bad, but then my cats went for the rabbits, and they got a few.

``We're living in balance,'' she says. The good guys outrun the bad guys, just as in the orchard laboratory.

But it takes more than a balance of nature to keep the company going. Powers has to make the books balance, too, and with that comes working all the time. ``People wouldn't imagine that you would be as engulfed in it. I think they think, `Oh, a garden. And she's running around barefoot.' But I'm consumed by it.''

Still, she says, ``it's a happy consumption.'' And an intellectually satisfying one. ``A girl who works for me found a Pelecinid wasp. It's not like any wasp you would have seen. Two-thirds of the body is the ovipositor, which is the egg-depositing apparatus. It lays an egg in the Japanese beetle larva, thereby killing it. It's a wonderful beneficial.''

The biologist has simply changed labs.

Cheshire Garden vinegars, mustards, salsas, and fruit sauces are sold at the Newton farmers' market on Tuesdays, Brookline on Thursdays, and Harvard Square on Sundays. The products are also available by mail order. Call 800-597-7822 for more information.