An organic vegetable farm in East Calais is finding inventive ways to expand its business with a flower maze.
Reporter Erica Heilman stopped by to talk with the owners and get lost in a field of amaranth and sunflowers.
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Erica Heilman: So these are amaranth.
Mike Betit: This is amaranth, and these guys are super heavy right now because you can see millions of little seeds.
Erica Heilman: It's kind of a maroon, or at least at this point in the season, kind of a maroon and yellow color scheme.
Erica Heilman: That's Mike Betit. He's walking me through 3 acres of amaranth and sunflowers and cosmos and zinnias, except it's a maze. It's like a corn maze, except there's no corn. It's flowers and a profusion of butterflies and bees.
Mike Betit and Erlene Knapp are the owners of Hoolie Flats Farm, a 30-acre organic vegetable farm off Route 14 in East Calais. And like all Vermont vegetable farmers, their season is short, the weather is cruel and they're forced to be inventive.
Mike Betit: The maze, by the numbers, is 3 acres, 3 million seeds, zero petrochemical inputs and thousands of hours of weeding.
Erica Heilman: Where did this idea come from?
Mike Betit: So during COVID, we had a little farm. I had been doing a lot of wholesale into the city — organic vegetables — so shipping organic vegetables into New York City, but then COVID happened and there was just no market. Like all of the wholesalers just kind of stopped. The restaurants stopped, and there was like this weird lull where people were fleeing the city, and we had all this produce, but nobody was really buying it, so we just started selling it off the porch, and we sold like, whatever we could put out there, we could sell. It was great. People were coming in. People were grateful to have the outlet. The next year we kind of realized that that was maybe not as realistic as we thought. People were still showing up, but not like they were before. It wasn't the lifeline that it had been, so.
Erica Heilman: Because of Shaw's?
Mike Betit: Yeah, it's all Shaw's fault. Yeah, no.
But also, during that time — I plant pollinator strips. Zinnias and cosmos, sunflowers, a lot of sunflowers, crimson clover — for this specific reason, something for the pollinators to get there and get used to coming in. And so when I needed them to pollinate, like, our pumpkins, they were ready and available. So we kind of thought through the logistics, and we needed something to draw in customers. And it seemed like, you know, why not give it a shot?
Erica Heilman: Oh, it's so pretty.
Mike Betit: Yeah, and it actually breaks my heart a little bit when people don't make it here, because people get up through here, and then they get to the tower, and they're like, "I've just spent an hour to get to the midway point. I'm like, I'm done." So then they cheat, and they miss this. It's heartbreaking.
Erica Heilman: So we're surrounded by tall sunflowers and amaranth, and then you get to this beautiful place of lower flowers, but with many different colors — zinnias and more and more zinnias and cosmos.
Mike Betit: And it's in the middle of the maze, so you don't see it from the outside. So if you don't get to this eye of the maze, you'd never know it's here.
Erica Heilman: Monarchs everywhere. What else do you see up here?
Mike Betit: Hundreds of different bird species and different colored hummingbirds and lots of native pollinators.
Erica Heilman: Why do you do this?
Mike Betit: It was a hedge against, you know, so, like so many Vermont farms, we have prime ag soil that's right along the brook. It's nice and flat and sandy loam. It'll grow anything, as long as it's not flooded. But the last couple years, all of the bottomland flooded multiple times.
Cropwise, we lost all of our pumpkins, which is a huge part of our business. You know, I did wholesale pumpkins, both, you know, jack-o'-lanterns and pie pumpkins and winter squash, stuff like that. All that was wiped out. We had a couple generations of sweet corn get wiped away. And three years ago, we had an extended drought, and I lost 5 acres of carrots because there just wasn't enough moisture in the soil, and they burned through the organic matter. And it was, I mean, they just did terribly.
So, you know, the maze was about, you know, having a backstop financially, you know, bringing some people in, and you do better on it if you're doing retail versus wholesale.
[Sound of distant voices]
Erica Heilman: I found Hemlock and Jefferson in the first acre of this 3-acre maze. They were not making a lot of progress in the maze. In fact, they looked happily lost.
Erica Heilman: What are you feeling so far?
Hemlock: Magical?
Jefferson: Yeah, this is legitimately challenging, which I really appreciate, like the way that some of these dead ends are laid out, so you do kind of have to be on your toes. I like that.
Hemlock: And I think coming this late in the season, it's sort of eerie with all of the combination of living and dead flowers.
Jefferson: But all the amaranth, you wouldn't be able to see the amaranth like this if this was a little earlier, I don't think. And it really is magical.
Hemlock: I definitely like that you can see the gradual changing of summer into fall with the variety of flowers that are present and where they are in their life cycles.
Erica Heilman: There's a section that, you must persevere. Because there's a section at the top that's just very different and beautiful.
Jefferson: You can see it from here, like I want to sit in that chair in that tower! Obviously, that's the goal.
Erica Heilman: Mike and I made our way out of the maze, out of the last rip of color before it gets to be stick season, then early winter, and then midwinter, then into late winter, and finally, back to March, when some of us start seeds indoors and stand around waiting for those first green shoots to come up, and then they do come up, and it's a damn miracle every year.
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