PLAISTOW — In another sign summer is here, despite the weather, Goudreault Farms is about to open its vegetable stand. Peas will be ready for the Fourth of July.
"That tradition has not been rained out," owner Richard Goudreault said. "Peas and salmon, that's the old New England standby — with a hard-boiled egg sauce."
The pea crop, which thrived this season despite all the adversity, is one way this local farm is prospering by mixing New England traditions with new plant sciences.
Goudreault Farm, a fourth-generation family business, does represent one of the area's last "growers," Goudreault said.
"We grow everything we sell and we just grow as much as we can sell," he said. "That's a tradition that's pretty much gone."
But today's typical customer patronizes the farm for advice about organic growing and gardening, he said.
In this economy, with many people considering staying home for vacations, Goudreault said the farm is banking on the likelihood the simple comforts, like a trip to a farm to see the animals and pick up some fresh vegetables and eggs, will keep the customers coming.
Earlier this month, the farm added a Native American medicine wheel garden as a community space. The wheel was daughter Deborah Goudreault's brainstorm, he said. Richard Goudreault dug the garden and volunteers helped fill the 45-foot circle with healing plants and herbs.
"It's a sacred circle," Deborah Goudreault said, explaining how stone rings were divided into the four compass points.
Native Americans believed the wheel focused the Earth's energy for healing and uplifting humanity, she said. The concept seemed to fit with the farm's mission of teaching about organic farming.
The farm has survived by mixing the old and the new, her father said.
His late father, Eugene, owned the original Goudreault Farm in Haverhill, Mass., but the property was bisected when Interstate 495 was built. Father and son started the Plaistow farm at 82 Newton Road in 1962. Goudreault married wife, Lu, in 1953.
Originally, she said, they wanted to farm because they thought it would be a good place to raise a family.
But Richard Goudreault is doubtful the next generation will keep the farm going.
"It's going to be a tough one to pass on," he said. "There's no vacation. You work seven days a week. I've always worked on a farm," he said. "That's our life."
But he doesn't expect his grown children will want to give up their jobs and stay on the farm. For now, his children and grandchildren do help.
Goudreault's son David, for example, manages experimental greenhouses at the University of New Hampshire. His work gives the family farm access to the newest and best growing techniques.
Their son also came up with a new direction for the business when the family decided to abandon the dairy farm, Lu Goudreault said.
"We had been raising heifers and when the government imposed a milk quota, nobody wanted them," she said.
Her son, who majored in plant science and horticulture at the University of Connecticut, suggested "flower power," and the greenhouses opened in 1982.
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