with corn in the field, apples on the tree and pumpkins in the patch, it’s harvest time for area farmers

Thousands of ripe, red apples travel along a conveyor belt in a processing room at Applecrest Farm Orchards in Hampton Falls. Workers pluck out any undesirable apples and drop them on a separate belt as they collect bushels of salable fruit.

In an office connected to this room, Todd Wagner is on the phone at his desk. It’s a busy time for Wagner, fourth generation co-owner of the nearly 100-year-old farm. He says his crew has been working 100-hour weeks lately, and it’s difficult to tell if he’s exaggerating. Around fall harvest time, he starts work well before sunup and keeps at it until long after dark.

That type of work ethic is necessary to keep up with demand for fresh fruit during the peak fall season. In addition to selling apples at farm stands, Applecrest offers pick-your-own activities for visitors who stop by the farm on Route 88.

“Apple picking is probably one of the oldest New England traditions. It’s the epitome of fall,” Wagner said. “When you pick an apple straight from the tree and bite into it, that’s your apple.”

This year, Applecrest joined the Seacoast Growers’ Association, a non-profit organization that offers six farmers’ markets on the Seacoast. Farm stands and markets around the region have experienced heavy increases in foot traffic over the past couple of years, and Wagner saw participation in the SGA as a way to connect with customers.

“People are becoming much more aware of what it is they’re eating and where it comes from,” he said.

In addition to its namesake fruit, Applecrest offers pick-your-own peaches, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, rhubarb and pumpkins. The season for peaches and raspberries is just wrapping up around the end of September, and strawberries and blueberries reach their peaks in the summer. But apples and pumpkins thrive in fall, as do sweet corn, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, turnips, garlic, onions, a variety of squashes and many other vegetables.

As they gear up for the fall harvest, area farmers are reporting that the cool spring and unusually rainy summer have created adverse conditions for some produce items and ideal conditions for others.

“It’s a mixed situation,” said state agriculture commissioner Lorraine Stuart Merrill. “Some things are great because they had enough moisture and all that. Other things have been challenged because they got too much moisture ... Overall, there’s plenty of stuff available out there.”

Particularly hard hit were pumpkins and tomatoes, both of which are susceptible to a variety of molds and fungi if they get too wet.

“We saw a lot of rot,” said Wagner, who tends a large pumpkin patch at Applecrest. “Pumpkins don’t like to be wet … It’s pretty time sensitive and costly to combat that.”

Josh Jennings, who manages the Exeter Farmers’ Market on Thursday afternoons and operates Meadow’s Mirth farm in Stratham, agreed that this summer brought its share of challenges. But the weather didn’t stop farmers’ markets from experiencing tremendous success compared to previous years, Jennings said. The number of vendors in Exeter nearly doubled to about 25 this year, and customers came out in large numbers.
“We certainly had some difficulties with the rain, but we had a lot of produce going to market,” Jennings said. “I’m bringing about twice what I did last year to the Exeter market and consistently selling it.”

The fall harvest has brought Jennings a generous bounty of potatoes and winter squash, and he looks forward to harvesting his carrots in November. “I’ve never had this many carrots looking this good,” he said.

Vendors at the Hampton Farmers’ Market, which takes place on Tuesday afternoons through Oct. 14 on Lafayette Road, reported similar success. Abby Wiggin, who represents Wake Robin Farm in Stratham, offers flowers and vegetables, with an array of colorful squashes that include varieties like butternut, carnival, kabocha, sweet dumpling and delicate. She said her tomatoes did poorly this year, but potatoes and onions were strong.

The biggest impact of the rains, Wiggin said, was that she often couldn’t get out in the field to re-crop her land. But after some 30 years of family farming, Wiggin has learned to cope with whatever nature throws at her, including this summer’s long wet spells. “You take every year as it comes and you can’t really complain,” she said.

Across from Wiggin’s stand, Edie Barker presided over her Barker’s Farm stand on a recent Tuesday, vending corn, onions, squash, tomatoes, peppers, red cabbage and other produce items. “This time of year, it’s the winter squashes that are coming on,” she said.

Another important harvest item in early fall is grapes. Flag Hill Winery in Lee harvests its grapes over three consecutive Saturdays, with 75 different volunteers participating each weekend. This year, the harvesting began on Sept. 27, and owner Frank Reinhold said he was expecting his best yield in five or six years.

“We’re actually—knock on wood—looking for a very good harvest,” Reinhold said.

The summer rains came at the right time for the seven French hybrid grape varieties at Flag Hill. Volunteers will use pruning sheers to cut the grapes from the plant and drop them into a lug, which holds about 35 pounds of fruit. From there, the grapes are dumped into a harvesting gondola and transported to the winery, where they are unloaded into a crushing and de-stemming device. The resulting juice is pumped into vats, where yeast is eventually added and fermentation begins.

“Six months to three-and-a-half years later—poof!—you have wine,” Reinhold said.

During the harvest festival at Flag Hill, volunteers get to stomp grapes and then press their juice-soaked bare feet on T-shirts to make custom clothing. Then comes a traditional fall harvest feast. But if you’re interested in participating, don’t get your hopes up—Reinhold reports that about 6,000 people are signed up on the waitlist.
But don’t fret. Traditional harvest celebrations will take place throughout the region in coming weeks. Festivals are held every weekend at Applecrest, complete with horse-drawn hayrides, a petting zoo, corn roasts, make-your-own scarecrows, face painting, apple pie, cider, ice cream and live bluegrass.

Some Applecrest guests have been attending the harvest activities and picking apples in the orchards for several generations. “I brought my kids when they were little, and now they’re grown and they come themselves,” said Lynn Pineo, of Seabrook, as she picked apples with a friend on a recent weekday.

Why go to the trouble of picking your own apples when you could just buy them from the grocery store?

“They’re much better, fresher, crisper,” said Pat Brokenbough, of Newton, as she munched on one of the farm’s 28 varieties of apples.

Dover will host a full day of apple madness on Saturday, Oct. 4, when the 24th annual Apple Harvest Day takes over the Garrison City. The event takes place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in downtown and Henry Law Park, with more than 100 craft booths, free live entertainment, children’s activities and, of course, lots of food. For more information, visit www.dovernh.org.

Also on Saturday, Oct. 4, Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth will host a traditional celebration with its first New Hampshire Fall Festival. The all-day event will include a range of activities reflecting four centuries of fall harvest traditions in northern New England. There will be craftspeople, livestock, barn dancing, garden tours and an ongoing stream of educational demonstrations.

“This festival really gives us an opportunity to have such a wide variety of craftspeople and trades people and demonstrations really showcasing the agricultural history (of New England),” said Amy Moy, director of marketing for Strawbery Banke.

Celebrations of the fall harvest date back to ancient times across the globe, Moy said, and many of our enduring traditions came to the United States from England in the 17th century. The festival will address not only the harvest of autumn foods, but other crucial fall activities. There will be demonstrations of hand-shearing sheep, wool spinning and weaving—all traditionally important jobs for making warm winter clothing.

There will also be food canning and preserving demonstrations, as well as basket and box making, all important for storing edible foods through the winter months. Blacksmiths will demonstrate ironwork and coopers will reveal how to make wooden casks and barrels.

“All of these people have been involved throughout the centuries with food preparations,” Moy said, noting that many of the same techniques used centuries ago are still employed today. “We have this rich agricultural history in New England, and especially in New Hampshire, and especially here in the Strawbery Banke neighborhood.”

Farming is another lasting tradition in New Hampshire, and although large dairy farms have dramatically shrunk in numbers over the years, a growing number of small horticulture farms have experienced a resurgence. With movements like Seacoast Eat Local and Slow Food Seacoast spreading awareness in the area, Stuart Merrill said the state is experiencing a “cultural renaissance” when it comes to farming and eating.

“People got away from our traditional seasonal ways of eating. Now they’re rediscovering the seasonality of foods,” Stuart Merrill said, noting that root crops like beets and turnips can be delicious when slow roasted. “People are learning how to cook again. It’s really very exciting.”

Despite the cheery outlook, New Hampshire still only produces a small fraction of its own food, with some estimates as low as 3 or 4 percent. “New Hampshire supplies a very tiny portion of its own food, and I think we are capable of supplying more of it,” Stuart Merrill said. 

A number of challenges have prevented New Hampshire from producing more food for its own citizens. Tempers flared in Portsmouth this summer when the city’s Health Department banned poultry from the Saturday farmers’ market, which is held in front of City Hall on Junkins Avenue. The Health Department banned chicken because New Hampshire poultry farmers with under 1,000 birds are exempt from federal licensing requirements. The health inspector feared that the sale of federally unregulated meat on city property would be a liability—even if it meets state guidelines.

Stuart Merrill said the Department of Agriculture has formed a task force to improve New Hampshire’s farming infrastructure. She acknowledged that there is currently no meat inspection program and few meat processing facilities in the state.

“There are some efforts afoot to do something about those shortages, and that would create a considerable increase in supply,” she said. “We’re trying to do something creative and cost efficient.”

A problem for growers like Wagner is colony collapse disorder, a largely unexplained syndrome that has been killing off bee populations. Wagner has turned to releasing bumblebees as pollinators at Applecrest, and other farmers are doing the same. An advantage of bumblebees is that they are more active in the rain than other bees, but they are also more expensive, especially as demand for the insects grows.

“Many more growers are turning to bumblebees as a pollinator,” Wagner said.

Apple season will come to a halt toward the end of October. Stuart Merrill and her crew recently finished harvesting and chopping 100 acres of corn for cow feed at the Stuart Farm in Stratham. Most of the area’s farmers’ markets close down for the season in October, with the last taking place in Portsmouth on Saturday, Nov. 1.

But many farmers will continue growing new crops into the winter, as Seacoast Eat Local launches monthly winter farmers’ markets in the region. Sara Zoë Patterson, of Seacoast Eat Local, helped organize three farmers’ markets last winter as a pilot program to gauge their success. She said two holiday farmers’ markets, held last year in Dover on the Saturdays before Thanksgiving and Christmas, were immensely successful, each drawing about 1,200 visitors. A smaller market held in Exeter in February drew about 750 guests.

Six monthly farmers’ markets have been scheduled for November through March this winter, including two holiday markets on the Saturdays before Thanksgiving and Christmas, both from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Atlantic Culinary Academy in Dover. Zoë Patterson said many farmers are responding to the success of last winter’s markets by growing more produce this time around. She said about 50 vendors have signed up for the holiday markets, and 15 to 18 will attend the other four events.

“The success of these markets is what has driven farmers to grow more food for the consumers,” Patterson said.

Jennings said he altered his planting schedule this year to make sure he would have plenty of produce ready for the winter markets. He added a root cellar to his farm to help control humidity levels and temperatures for stored root crops, winter squashes, onions and carrots.

With the Exeter Farmers’ Market wrapping up on Thursday, Oct. 16, Jennings said he would normally be winding down his farming activities for the year around this time. This year, however, he estimates that one-third of his production is aimed at the winter markets. “It’s been a significant change for us, but the demand is there,” he said.

Patterson listed a surprisingly diverse selection of items that will be available at the winter markets. There will be potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic and winter squash, as well as eggs and cheese. There will also be almost every imaginable type of meat, including duck, quail, chicken, turkey, beef, pork, venison, elk, goat and lamb.

On top of that, there will be an assortment of other sundry items, such as teas, mustards and baked goods.
Jennings said the success of the farmers’ markets this year has altered his entire approach to farming. “It’s changed the way I farm, it’s changed the way I make money, it’s changed the way I look at farming,” he said.

When he started participating in the markets five years ago, Jennings’ biggest concern was marketing his products. But, with demand for fresh, local, organic foods steadily increasing, he can now focus on offering quality produce year-round.

“If you can grow a good quality product, you will probably be able to sell it,” he said.