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Wind Haven Farm owners, husband and wife Paul and Jenny Maloney grow 80 different varieties of gorgeous flowers with bulbs and seeds sourced worldwide but sustainable to thrive in eastern Virginia.
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The Maloneys are finding a resurgence in flowers as people are more interested in having locally grown flowers in their homes.
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Clockwise left to right, Jamie and Justin McKenney, Kenny McCartey, John B. McKenney and Tucker Douglas.
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Sion House Farm grows north of 42,000 pounds of hydroponic tomatoes every year.
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Blenheim Organic Gardens owners, husband and wife Lawrence and Becky Latane enjoyed farming on family land as a creative outlet that quickly became a second career.
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The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.
The land here on the shores of Chesapeake Bay has always been irresistible.
From the time explorer John Smith described Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay region as the place where “Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation,” the land has proven too hard to resist for those souls drawn to the dirt and the bounty it can produce.
Today Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay region is experiencing a fruitful renaissance in the cultivating arts. Residents like Paul and Jenny Maloney, Justin McKenney and Lawrence Latane have taken different life and career paths to arrive at the same farming destination.
They’re an auto mechanic, artist, oil field worker and reporter. Both natives and come heres who settled here and whose cravings to grow things takes this region closer to its John Smith-envisioned roots as a “fruitful and delightsome land.”
Here are their stories. Perhaps you’ll be inspired and find yourself looking longingly at the land and wondering what you can coax from it.
Wind Haven Farm: Paul and Jenny Maloney
You could say that Paul Maloney came naturally by Wind Haven Farm, a radiant farmstead tucked away in an undulating slice of Middlesex County on the back road from Hartfield to the Norris Bridge.
It’s practically genetic because Maloney is the child of parents whose 12-acre Dayspring Farm in King and Queen County is a model of small-scale sustainable farming.
But he didn’t think farm life was suited for him at first; he wanted to be a mechanic.
“I definitely had a reluctance to getting into farming full-time,” he said. “Nothing against it, but I knew what it would bring. On a farm there’s always stuff to do.”
Yet it’s funny how some things are inevitable. Or how things work out.
The two met and started dating in high school and got married in 2010 after Jenny Maloney had left Virginia Commonwealth University with an art degree. But she struggled professionally and, strangely enough, started working at Dayspring Farm. Then in 2013, Paul Maloney’s parents announced they were getting out of the flower growing business.
“I kind of got upset,” Jenny Maloney said.
Paul Maloney offered to till up their front yard and plant flowers for them. Then three years later he decided to enter the flower growing business full-time. The Maloneys started small by tilling up their front yard. They sold their flowers through CSAs and to small, locally-owned florists and grocery stores.
Six years later, their two acres have flower beds wherever there’s sufficient sunlight. They’ve rented nine acres around their house and use land nearby at Paul Maloney’s brother’s place. They have a small starter greenhouse to start their flowers and three larger hoop houses they use to extend their growing season through Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Every year they pick up a couple of new florists and word spreads. They now deliver twice a week in Richmond. They also sell to specialty grocery stores such as Wegman’s.
The Maloneys are finding a resurgence in flowers as people are more interested in having locally grown flowers in their homes.
“We are happy to be a part of that movement,” Jenny Maloney said. “We can offer them flowers that look more natural, have more scent, and last longer in the vase because they were harvested within 48 hours of delivery. We can also offer them varieties that they have never seen before. People’s faces light up when they see our flowers and that is the greatest reward.
They are also changing folks’ perception of a flower season beyond just the summer. The Maloney’s offer flowers from early spring until Christmas.
Our flowers are truly seasonal,” Jenny Maloney said. “We only offer what blooms naturally here in eastern Virginia at any given time. I feel like people have drifted away from their connection to the living world, and we can bring some of that seasonal connection into their homes and lives.”
Like all farmers, the Maloneys face the challenges and uncertainties of weather and pests, finding customers and selling a perishable crop. But unlike most farmers around who only grow corn and soybeans, the Maloneys are diversified with 80 varieties of flowers–they plant 3,000 to 7,000 plants a week into the field–blooming during the peak season.
“If one thing fails it’s not like a soybean farmer losing a whole field,” Jenny Maloney said.
“We didn’t originally set out to be farmers, and when times are tough we do look at the big picture and every time we decide that it is still totally worth it,” Jenny Maloney said. “We are connected to the land and seasons. Just about when you don’t think you can harvest another zinnia, the season changes and you start harvesting a new crop. We get to experience beauty every single day. We get to be our own bosses and steer our own ship, which comes with its own set of challenges, worries, and responsibilities to ourselves and our employees. If you are a business owner the buck stops with you, no one else is going to do it for you, and sometimes that makes for long days. When five o’clock rolls around and the employees go home but there is still work that needs to be done, Paul and I get it done. It is not uncommon for us to work a month straight with only a day or two off. This is one of our challenges, to create a better work/life balance. We are incredibly fortunate to get to work together every day as husband and wife, and business partners. We celebrate that we both have different skills and parts of the business in which we thrive, so we work as a team to propel us forward together. The great thing about farming the way that we do is that every year in late December, the slate gets wiped clean, you get time to reset, reformulate, and reinvent yourself and your farm to make it even more successful. Farmers are optimists, and every season brings new hopes and dreams.”
Sion House Farm: A Long Strange Trip to the Farm Family
While the Maloneys seemed to drift naturally toward farming, Justin McKenney’s was more of a long, strange road trip. When Justin McKenney was out West after college, working seasonally fighting forest fires in the “big empty” of Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and as a park ranger in California’s Yosemite National Park, he came to one conclusion: He didn’t want to be out West.
Born and raised in Fairfax in the urban sprawl of northern Virginia, McKenney also knew he didn’t want to be there.
For a stretch he’d worked at aGander Mountain sporting goods store in Charleston, West Virginia. While he met his wife Jamie there, nope. It wasn’t for him.
He drifted up to the Pennsylvania oil fields. The money was good, real good. The work, not so much. He’d work 14 straight 12-hour days, get seven days off, then do it all over again. The killers were the bitter cold winter nights trying to keep uncooperative gas well equipment working. There had to be a better way, he thought.
But McKenney was running out of options, especially with a wife and two children to support.
His extended family had a spread on the Northern Neck, a place where he loved to roam as a kid. He talked to his wife, Jamie McKenney, about moving down to metropolitan Farnham with the view of the Rappahannock River on the land that’s been in his family since the early 1900s. There was just one sticking point.
“What are we going to do?”McKenney said.
He thought about aquaculture and oyster farming or crabbing and making a living off the water. None of it seemed too promising.
Then he found a video of hydroponic farming, which is growing plants without soil in nutrient solutions in a controlled environment such as a greenhouse. He soon went with his recently retired father, Jack McKenney, to a two-day crash course on hydroponic farming.
“It was awesome,” McKenney said. “It completely blew my mind.”
McKenney moved his family to the Northern Neck in June 2015. He was going all-in on hydroponic farming. Two months later he started constructing greenhouses and had the first four completed in October with the first seeds planted that month.
“I didn’t know if it was going to work,” McKenney admits with a grin.
It took a sizable investment, but it’s working alright. McKenney’s Sion House Farm has thousands of tomato plants—he can grow north of 42,000 lbs. of tomatoes a year—lettuce, cucumbers, and other produce yielding crops year-round that he supplies to local farm stands and grocery stores from White Stone to Richmond. Jack McKenney makes three delivery runs to Richmond a week.
“I grow a lot of food in 10,000 square feet,” McKenney said.
He controls pH levels and adjusts nutrient inputs by computer. The water for the plants is supplied by artesian wells and tested regularly, and he has bees living in the greenhouses for pollination.
While hydroponic farming carries risks—high-powered thunderstorms can be nerve-wracking—one of the few downsides is what it’s done to McKenney’s palate. His tomatoes are picked vine-ripened, not harvested green and trucked thousands of miles across the country.
“I’m a vegetable snob now,” he said.
“Our tomatoes have just as much taste if not more than field tomatoes,” he said. “They’re ripe when we pick them.”
Jamie McKenney has also caught the farming bug. She’s opened “County Line Market” on Route 360 that features locally grown produce, hand-dipped ice cream, Virginia-produced milk, cheese and eggs and other local goods.
Blenheim Organic Gardens: A Creative Outlet
For Lawrence Latane, farming had an inevitability to it. He was born into American farming royalty you might say as a descendant of GeorgeWashington’s nephew. He also lives on land his father bought in the 1950s that is well-suited to farming just down Popes Creek Road from the George Washington Birthplace NationalMonument.
Yet you could say he eased into it. It was his wife, Becky Latane, who took the first foray into farming when she launched an herb farm with a partner in the late 1990s. Although the venture was short-lived, she gained valuable experience and a working knowledge about the business of farming.
Becky and Lawrence extracted what she learned and applied it to their new venture, Blenheim Organic Gardens, which they birthed in 2000. He was still working as a newspaper reporter in a bureau covering the Northern Neck for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“It was,” Latane said, “a gardening hobby that quickly got out of hand. We knew people that were growing for market and in the course of writing for the paper I had done a few things about alternative agriculture and that sort of thing and it just all sort of came together. I just sort of started farming. Growing produce.”
In farming about 10 acres surrounding their colonial home he found a surprising realization: Farming was a creative outlet to rival writing.
“I didn’t anticipate that it would kind of parallel or resemble the same sort of creative pleasure that reporting would carry with it,” Latane said. “That was a big surprise of mine. Over time, the creative interest in farming, or growing produce, outcompeted the creative interest in writing.”
In September 2008, Latane was eligible for an early retirement from the Times-Dispatch. He took it and became a full-time farmer.
But farming carries an inherent tension of pleasure versus pain: The pleasure of coaxing something from the ground that’s so pleasant to eat carrieswith it the pain of untimely death that can occur suddenly or slowly over the course of a season. A crop can be killed in a surprise spring cold snap, or drowned in torrential rains that can arrive at any time, or die of thirst in a tenacious drought, or be tormented by relentless heat, or devoured by abundant bugs and critters that flourish every Virginia summer.
But Latane is far from alone in knowing intimately the farming tension. Several years ago he discovered in his house a tattered mid-1800sf arm ledger signed by LawrenceWashington Jr. that describes damaged and destroyed crops along with the trivial matters on the farm.
“It struck me that misery loves company because a lot of things he recorded is the stuff that still goes on,” Latane said.
Blenheim Organic Gardens supplies produce such as greens, tomatoes, carrots, peppers and more to consumers in Fredericksburg and elsewhere. The Latanes have survived rough times, including last year when a combination of weather problems and the loss of wholesale customers conspired to leave their operation in the red.
They’re not giving up. It’s inLawrence’s blood not to after all.
“This is going to be a unique year,” Latane said. “It will be an opportunity to either triumph against adversity or just get kicked again.”
If You Want to Start FarmingIf the stories of the Maloneys, McKenneys and Latanes resonate with you and you want to start farming but don’t know where to begin, the U.S. Department of Agriculture offers help: newfarmers.usda.gov/new-farmers. Another good informational source is the Virginia Cooperative Extension at ext.vt.edu.
Blenheim Organic Gardens · 804-224-7039
Sion House Farm · 703-314-4775
Wind Haven Farm · 804-512-6262