Cape Cod’s best farmer stands gazing at rolling land he has been working since 2009, from Route 6A in Barnstable rising and undulating nearly 50 acres, though with three greenhouses, storage for machinery, a farm stand, a dirt road, fallow areas and woods, Tim Friary and his crew are cultivating around eight acres this year.
“Everything cycles,” says Tim, “nothing is planted in the same place twice.” Then he talks through this year’s what and where:
Clover to help rebuild soil fertility, then rectangles of tomatoes, butternut squash, watermelons, edamame (soy beans), ginger, flowers for bouquets, eggplants and peppers, lettuce greens, beets, more lettuce, beans, garlic, more lettuce, onions, cucumber, more greens, strawberries, cabbage, more beets, kale, potatoes and alfalfa.
That’s not counting two acres of beach grass, sold in clumps and plugs to stabilize dunes and barrier beaches, a profitable mainstay since Tim’s earliest growing days more than 40 years ago. They are ammophila and spartina of different kinds, “very cool grasses, they can send out runners 40 feet long,” thriving in sand.
To give you an idea how much food emerges from this swath, every year Tim takes about half of his butternut squash (formerly sweet potatoes) and sends the harvest to local food banks and pantries. That half portion of just one small chunk means an annual donation of two tons of squash, maybe three.
There were pigs too, as many as 120 “finished” a year, though he has stopped mainly because he’s been having a hard time getting enough workers; his crew is about 10. For similar reasons he’s also cut back on selling at farmers’ markets where he was a star attraction, focusing on his own “CSA,” Community Supported Agriculture, 85 buyers who pay at the beginning of the season and get whatever comes in week by week. He’s also supplied Wholefoods, restaurants and retail outlets.
And everything is organically grown -- even though a pesky cucumber beetle really did a number on cukes this year.
Now 67, Tim grew up in Taunton, “a rough little town, and I had a tough family life.” His grandparents lived nearby and going there was reprieve and escape because they had a subsistence farm he loved that fed a big family, a lot of canning plus lambs in the spring, chickens getting their heads lopped off before dinner.
“I always wanted to grow stuff,” he remembers, and his first job out of college was working in a Department of Mental Health halfway house mainly for schizophrenics who he’d get planting, gardening, “digging in the dirt, focusing on something, anything. It helped a lot of them.”
Three years later he started growing Christmas trees, then native plants. “We’re still the largest grower of beach grass in Massachusetts, though that doesn’t mean that much,” he smiles.
The land he now works belongs to Barnstable County, and has a farming history. The county took it in the 1930s or early 40s, and the story goes that the departing owner stripped rich topsoil to deliver to a fancy golf course in Hyannisport, making big bucks. To this day the soil remains “bony,” as Tim puts it.
But that didn’t stop the county from setting prisoners at the nearby jail to forced labor growing their own dinners (as well as feeding plenty of politicals). That decades-long practice ended in the early 2000s, before Friary won the first lease to run the place.
An agricultural easement keeps this land as is, a tactic used more often on Martha’s
Vineyard, where rolling farmland embraced by stone walls isn’t a unique sight. But Tim’s panorama is hard to find elsewhere on the Cape (except Coonamessett Farm in Falmouth); our remaining farms are smaller pockets. The days when most of flat sandy Eastham was carpeted with asparagus, strawberries or turnips, filling trainloads headed for city markets, are long gone.
Then again, there is a new cash crop: Is Tim interested in growing pot?
“It doesn’t really appeal to me,” he says. “For one thing, there already are too many people doing it, it’s kind of ridiculous. So as far as the good stuff, no. Then I thought about hemp, for CBD and oils, but I just didn’t want to get into it.” Being on county land, the politics might become controversial too, legal as it would be.
So he sticks with his staples, glad that beach grasses can supplement “edibles” -- vegetables not gummy bears. And while he has no regrets about farming, would do it again, he sees ways he could have been better; focusing on fewer crops, mechanizing faster, building his CSA sooner. Then he steps back, musing in a way that expresses a reflective sense he always had, but farming probably deepened:
“The one thing I really missed, or screwed up on, was not paying attention to people as I was working hard. That had an affect on people I love, being focused on a demanding, never-ending list of things to do. So I’m trying to come to a point where I understand that either it works out, or it doesn’t.
“And I’m finding that usually it does.”
At the farm stand, a customer trying to hide chagrin doesn’t see strawberries. Are there any?
“No,” calls Tim, smiling my way. “Tomorrow.”
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The beets, and beet greens, are delish. I always stop by the Cape Cod Organic farmstand to see what’s just picked, and then plan my dinner menu from what’s there. His mesclun lettuces are always great.
Have known Tim for years and always appreciated his vision.