The Farm

Hidden Acre Farm is located in Bloomingburg which is on the southern tip of the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson Valley, New York State. The Shawnagunk Kill runs through the property and in the distant past, circa 10,000 years ago, the glaciers melted themselves all over our land and left us with some very favorable soils!

In the much more recent past, Hidden Acre Farm was the Miller Farm and Dairy. Our main field space hadn’t been in production for years before our first growing season in 2019. As such, much of our time and effort in our first seasons on this land has been spent regenerating the farm’s infrastructure and building up the organic matter in our soils - necessary to consistently churn out the highest quality, most nutrient-dense produce possible.

Since we opened the farm in the spring of 2019 we’ve been blown away by the support of our customers and community which has allowed us to sustainably expand the farm each year of operation while tackling infrastructure upgrades in the off-seasons. Starting out on just shy of an acre in our first year we are now working with over 4 fenced acres and our 5 96ft high tunnels which allow us to grow food from early spring through the cold New York Winters!

How We Farm

At Hidden Acre Farm, we are passionate about soil health and biology. We are a certified USDA Organic and Real Organic operation and all of our practices have two things in mind:

• Ensuring the natural biology of our soil can thrive, thus ensuring that everything we grow thrives too.

• Promote and conserve the native ecosystem on our land to achieve a thriving environment for local fauna and flora.

So no, we don’t use pesticides or synthetic fertilizers of any kind. We are a minimal-till and hand-powered operation, our annual crop plan includes a vigorous cover cropping schedule and through cover cropping, mulching, compost application, and meticulous crop planning, we ensure that we leave no bare soil while increasing the life in our soil each year.

A little about soil:

Soil science in the West started with Justus Von Liebig, who, a little over 100 years ago put forward the notion that soil is essentially nothing more than a storage bin for plant nutrients. At the time that all sounded pretty logical however, the soil-as-a-storage-bin paradigm has since dominated soil sciences and conventional agriculture, even after the role of organisms in soil formation came to be better understood. As science has progressed we’ve begun to understand more and more about the soil and it can now be viewed as the fascinating and incredible living organism that it is.

Did you know that there are over one billion lifeforms in a teaspoon of healthy soil? Plants are integral to healthy soil and if plants are taken away, soil stops living. Plants use photosynthesis not just to make themselves grow but to provide energy to all of the other living organisms in the soil. Plants convert CO2, sunlight, and water into food for the fungi, bacteria, and microbes in the soil which in turn give the plants back vital minerals and nutrients. All of these unseen lifeforms give rise to visible lifeforms that are just as important to soil health, from nematodes to earthworms and insects to animals and birds. This community of organisms is called the ‘soil web’.

So in a nutshell, our farming methods start and end with soil health.

Our Produce

Our farming practices ensure that the plants and flowers we produce have everything they need to truly thrive, and as a result, you can see and taste the difference in quality.

At Hidden Acre Farm we’re passionate about bio-diversity and as farmers, we have a big part to play in ensuring rare and endangered cultivars remain in production and stay on people’s plates. We’re members of the Slow Food movement, whose Ark of Taste campaign catalogs over 200 of these varieties in the USA and we grow many of them on the farm. When selecting varieties to grow our primary consideration is flavor (transportation and shelf life are not even on the list). We grow an extremely diverse mix of vegetables and flowers on the farm and try to ensure that we are growing as many open-pollinated varieties as possible and practice seed saving for many of our crops. We do grow some certified organic hybrid varieties, though our fields and cold frames are primarily comprised of old heirloom varieties coupled with new and interesting ‘heirlooms of the future’ that are coming out of some of the many amazing plant breeding programs happening across the US.

Most of what we grow is started from seedlings in our nursery, where we give everything the best possible start to life with high-grade Vermont Compost potting soil mix before they get transplanted to the field.

Greens: Specialty Salad Mix, Kale, Collards, Swiss Chard, Arugula, Spinach, Head Lettuce, Radicchio, Puntarelle Escarole, Pac Choi, Celtuce

Solanaceae: Tomatoes, Cherry Tomatoes, Ground Cherrys, Sweet Peppers, Hot Peppers, Egg Plant, Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes

Brassicaceae: Cauliflower, Sprouting Cauliflower, Sprouting Broccoli, Broccoli Rabe, Broccolini, Cabbage, Chinese Cabbage

Roots: Carrots, Beets, Kohlrabi, Rutabaga, Radish

Cucurbits: Summer squash, Winter squash

Other: Artichoke, Corn, Melon, Okra, Snap Peas, Beans, Fava Beans, Soy Beans

Meet The Team; Melissa, Jack, Phoenix, Griffin & Winston

Phi, our seven-year-old daughter; an expert flower harvester and bouquet maker, our less helpful but highly entertaining toddler son, Griff and our dopey handsome oaf of a golden retriever, Winston.

Keen for an adventure, Melissa and Jack moved from London, England to Austin, Texas in 2013 for Jack’s entirely un-farmy sales and marketing job. After four years and our fill of two-stepping, breakfast tacos, and country music we left Texas with Melissa’s master’s in Sustainability Sciences, a new-found interest in sustainable agriculture, a five-month-old baby girl, our gorgeous old pup, Daphne, a 1985 Chevy transvan with a rainbow stripe called Mabel, and a thirst for more adventure.

Melissa, Jack, Phi, Daph and Mabel road-tripped around New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and California when we found ourselves on a magical slice of earth in North Fork, California where we ended up for two formative years. Here we apprenticed on the legendary Kern Family Farm before becoming part of the management team. We thank the Kern Family for inspiring us to take the leap and start our own farm, and for going out of their way to give us all of the tools, experience, and mentorship necessary to do so.