The quality-conscious,
big city customers at Janoski’s Farm and Farm Market, on the
outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pa., want their Halloween pumpkins to be
mud-free. And the Janoskis can do it.
“Just before the pumpkin vines run across the rows, we apply
a weed killer, Gramoxone,” Dan Janoski said. “Then we
mulch the row middles with straw.”
But, this is not a labor-intensive process for the Janoskis, thanks
to a mechanical straw blower.
“The blower can blast the straw from the bales 30 to 40 feet
across the field,” Janoski said. “It’s a three-man
operation. One man drives the tractor, another feeds the bales into
the blower, and I run the blower.
“On average, it takes about an hour to do an acre. We aim for
a layer of straw just thick enough so you can’t see the soil
through the straw.” This takes about one hundred bales per acre.
Janoski got the idea of spreading the straw this way when he saw highway
crews using the mechanical blowers along state roads.
“It has saved a lot of labor,” he said. Before the blower
was purchased, workers spread the straw by hand, using pitchforks.
The pumpkin plants for their 25 acres of pumpkins are started in cell
packs in a section of their 100,000 square feet of double poly greenhouses.
They are then transplanted to the field in black plastic with drip.
The Janoskis run a multi-faceted operation. In addition to 200 acres
of a wide variety of vegetables, and a smaller acreage of fruit, the
Janoskis operate a year-round farm market that includes a large gift
shop, the greenhouse operation, and, most recently, a restaurant complete
with a John Deere dining room. During the growing season, they supply
the produce for the restaurant.
Their spring bedding plant business, though, is the most important
part of their operation, Dan said. The Janoskis have developed a loyal
clientele for the bedding plants they grow by sticking to one principle:
“Don’t go cheap.”
“We use the same varieties of seed for our vegetable bedding
plants that we use on our farm,” said Janoski. “You can
buy pepper seed for $35 a pound, or you can buy it for $900 to $1,000
a pound.
“We use the $900 to $1,000 a pound seed for our own pepper plantings,
and we also use it for the bedding plants we sell, so our customers
get the advantage of the disease resistance and good production of
the best hybrid varieties in their own gardens.”
Of the wide variety of vegetables the Janoskis grow, sweet corn and
tomatoes are the top sellers.
“In sweet corn, this is a bi-color area, and Delectable and
Sensor are out most popular varieties,” Janoski said. “Our
first planting of sweet corn goes in under clear plastic as early
as March 20, and we had sweet corn for sale at the market by July
5.”
In all, the operation plants 20 acres of sweet corn under clear plastic.
“We gain two to three weeks using the clear plastic,”
Janoski said. “It has worked out well for us. People seem to
remember where they bought their first sweet corn of the season, and
they keep coming back for more.
“It’s interesting. At the beginning of the season, we
can go from no sweet corn one day, and the next day have 500 dozen,
and it all gets sold without a lot of advertising. Our Web site helps.”
The Janoskis grow their wide variety of vegetables – which includes
15 varieties of peppers – to sell at their farm market, where
they sell about half of their production, and at a nearby farmers’
market which is open three evenings a week.
“We can take three or four truckloads to the farmers’
market each evening at the height of the season,” Janoski said.
“Everything sold there must be home-grown.
“Trying to sell wholesale is getting worse every year in this
area. Our area is not well suited to growing large quantities of a
single crop.”
The farm’s wide variety of crops, though, does seem to have
a bright side as far as labor is concerned.
“Our workers seem to appreciate the opportunity to work for
us, because we’re doing so many different things,” Janoski
said. “Being able to move from crop to crop breaks up their
work day, and the workers are able to learn a lot. We feel very fortunate
to have the same workers coming back year after year. We use about
40 workers in the field. Many of them are migrants from Mexico with
green cards. We’ve never had any trouble in getting enough help.”
Cabbage is becoming more and more popular with the operation’s
customers.
“We start harvesting cabbage in late spring,” Janoski
said. “And we make new plantings every week or so through the
summer – totalling about 5 acres over the season.
“We’ve harvested as late as Christmas in some years,”
he said. “We plant of lot of Blue Vantage and Bravo.”
Some of their late cabbage is stored for sale into February and March,
as are their potatoes, which are mostly Katahdin, Reba and Eva.
To please their quality-conscious customers, the Janoskis do not use
a harvester to harvest their potatoes. “We dig our potatoes
by machine,” said Janoski. “But then we pick them up by
hand and put them into bushel baskets.
“We’ve gotten a lot of good comments from our customers
about the quality of our potatoes,” he said. “Machine
harvesting bangs and nicks potatoes. The nicks, in our customers’
homes, can quickly turn to rot. One year we ran out of our own potatoes
and bought some in, and our customers said on the difference. We believe
our harvesting method produces a nicer product for our customers.”
At the end of the growing season, everyone’s attention turns
to the greenhouse poinsettia crop, where Dan coordinates packing and
shipping. The operation plants 60,000 cuttings, and is able to sell
about half their poinsettias to a variety of groups who use the plants
for fund-raisers.
“We sell to churches, youth groups, preschools, high schools
to raise money for senior trips, and boosters for football,”
said Janoski. “It’s a niche between wholesale and retail,
and we enjoy working with these groups. We try to educate them about
how to handle the plants.”
In a soil-building program that takes half their acreage out of production
for a full year, after the vegetable crops are harvested, every other
field is strip cropped to build up the ground and prevent erosion.
“We plant winter wheat and rye,” said Janoski. “In
the spring, it’s allowed to grow up, go to seed, and dry down.
It’ll be five to six feet high. Then halfway through the summer,
we chop it down into the soil, and it reseeds.”
In late November of 2003, this second crop was knee high. “Next
year, then, we’ll plow it under,” said Janoski.
The Janoski operation is run by JoAnn and Sonny Janoski and their
son Dan; his brother Mike; and their wives; and also their grandson
Jeremy.
