Green Acres

Long before the sun chases the night away Stefan Hartmann and Margaret Shelton are waking. These two organic farmers are college educated leaders in their fields. On family farmsteads west of the Cape Fear River Hartmann and Shelton value time-honored farming and gardening traditions passed down from their ancestors. Each produces wholesome homegrown vegetables edible herbs and flowers for a growing market of locavores who prefer to dine on locally cultivated crops found within a 100-mile radius of their home.

In Ivanhoe Hartmann’s Black River Organic Farm yields fresh produce handpicked and trucked to a farmers’ co-op in Pittsboro and two organic food co-ops in Wilmington. On Saturday mornings two hired hands drive his bumper crop to the Riverfront Farmers’ Market on Water Street.

Hartmann a city boy by birthright started farming 30 years ago after agriculture studies at Georg-August University in Goettingen Germany where he was born. When he graduated he came to America retracing his mother’s roots to her girlhood home in Ivanhoe.

“I obviously had a lot of connections to this place ” Hartmann says. “I am on the old home place farming one of the fields my grandfather actually farmed.” He cleared 16 acres of pine trees that his grandfather planted putting the land back into farming.

“There were not a lot of organic farms here. Nowadays it’s different. I’ve seen the whole industry grow and blossom ” Hartmann says.

“He was for a long while the only organic grower in the east but that is changing. He paved the way ” says Debbie Roos the North Carolina Cooperative Extension agent for Organic and Sustainable Agriculture in Chatham County. “Stefan has been one of our farmer leaders and a founding member of the Eastern Carolina Organics (ECO) co-op based here in Pittsboro ” Roos says. The farmer-owned marketing and distribution service helps rural organic farmers like Stefan Hartmann gain access to urban markets.

“I really can’t produce enough for this market now ” Hartmann says. “That’s a good dilemma.”

As the crow flies 40 miles southwest of Hartmann’s Black River farm Margaret Shelton’s herb farm is eight miles west of the Cape Fear River out back of Leland. She is one of the co-founders of the Riverfront Farmers’ Market.

“We grow everything we sell ” Shelton says. “This is a different kind of farming and a different kind of sale but I think for me having a market to go to is a nice way to save energy ” Shelton says.

On two acres near the headwaters of Town Creek on the Morgan Branch of the Cape Fear River on her family’s 200-year-old home place Shelton’s farm is a stone’s throw off the beaten path a right turn off of Highway 17 South onto Goodman Road.

Surrounded by a pristine natural woodland forest of loblolly and longleaf pine her farmland is nourished by untouched Carolina bays.

“It’s a gorgeous natural area ” Shelton says. Wild Pinkster azaleas blackberries cockleberries wild ginger tiny two-flower and native carnivorous plants like Venus flytraps pitcher plants sun views butterwort and bladderwort grow among the bracken fern and wiregrass. In one pond behind the herb farm where the dam washed out some local beavers built a lodge.

It is into this paradise that Shelton and her husband retreated following college and graduate school. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology she moved back to her girlhood home when their oldest son was 4. That was 25 years ago. Since then she has been gardening and cultivating herbs organically.

“I grew up on this farm ” Shelton says. “We always gardened. That’s part of what you do when you’re out in the country. My mother gardened and my grandmother. I grew up doing that ” she says.

Her soil is nurtured with organic matter like horse manure from her neighbors’ farms and organic mulches from roadside cuttings. She also propagates a cover crop of Austrian winter peas and red clover.

“Her working girls — three wild boar Scarlet Ginger and Nutmeg — were imported from Indigo Run Plantation. She moves their fence around the herb garden where she needs them to work plant roots and foliage into the soil. The yard birds sometimes contribute more than they take away like the female turkey that scurried out of the yarrow after laying an egg.

Deer also wander freely into her garden and forage. “Edible flowers pansies they love them. They tear them out of the ground ” Shelton says. Natural predators and cold weather in winter force her to protect her plants with a low cover like a white sheet. In her greenhouses she cultivates herbs from seeds and cuttings.

“Seeds are a mixture of genetics. Things I do from seed because they’re so easy to do are things like basil dill parsley and chive. The cuttings are plants that I’ve collected over the years like lavender garden sage and rosemary. I do propagation so that I get the same plant as the parent plant ” she says.

In addition to the farmers’ markets in Wilmington and at Poplar Grove Plantation Shelton services local restaurants and caterers.

“We’ve got some very good chefs in the Wilmington Southport Figure Eight Island and Wrightsville Beach area ” Shelton says. “When you have good chefs running the kitchen making decisions they are buying fresh herbs.”

Hartmann chews a ham sandwich garnished with arugula dill and lettuce picked fresh from his fields with a spread of soy mayonnaise between two slices of organic bread. In between bites he explains how he prepared his soil.

“We added tons and tons of compost — poultry litter. My program now is cover crops ” Hartmann says. “Any time there’s a little bare soil you need to cover it.”

Most of his plants start in the greenhouse from 60 percent organic seeds and 40 percent untreated seeds.

“We start anything we can from seed and do a transplant ” Hartmann says.

“It was so hard to find untreated seed and tell them ‘Please leave that fungicide off.’ Then you have to order so much and they charge you extra for leaving off the poison. I don’t gripe about it ” Hartmann says. “We just do what we gotta do.”

He controls insect pests with natural remedies.

“The weakest plants usually attract the most insects. It’s very simple. I just try to prevent the problem ” he says. “Very seldom do I actually have to do something beyond providing a good environment ” he says.

“I’ve never sprayed. I rely on bacterial solutions against the worms. I have some hormonal treatments against the potato beetle. Against the aphids I order lady beetle from California and I release little parasitic wasps. I’m not the expert on pesticides ” Hartmann says. Deer feed on his sweet potatoes snap peas and strawberries. He controls them through fencing.

“After 30 years you’d think I’d know it all. In farming you never know it all. If you think you do you’re not a good farmer. It’s like real life you never stop learning.”

1. Organic waste — anything that was once alive that has never been processed or cooked.

2. Organisms and biology — microbacteria fungi nematodes protozoa — devour leaf litter grass clippings food scraps — earthworms and arthropods in turn feed on the microbes. The microorganisms known as compost starter can be purchased in kit form.

1. Oxygen — turning the compost stimulates the decomposition process.

2. Particle size — instead of tossing the whole banana peel cut it into small pieces.

3. Carbon-to-nitrogen variable — the ratio by weight is two parts carbon to one part nitrogen. Microorganisms utilize carbon (shredded newspaper) to eat and nitrogen (vegetable scraps coffee grounds eggshells and manure) to produce the enzymes to break everything down.