The Two Gardens of R&D Gardens
Ramona Heitmann and Doug Davidson don’t tend to just one garden - they have two.
In total, they have a half acre of fruits and vegetables. There’s .3 acres of garden at their Fergus Falls home and another .2 acres near Beardsley. The two gardens allow for a bit of gardening competition as the gardens fall into two USDA hardiness zones - 4a and 4b.
Beardsley also holds the record high temperature so it is the warmest part of Minnesota.
It’s plenty for this couple who sell the produce, through their operation, R & D Gardens, at the Wednesday and Saturday Fergus Falls Farmers Market.
What can they grow on a half acre of land? Plenty!
Look at this list of fruits and vegetables they offer at the market - spring and fall strawberries to cabbage, potatoes, garlic, peas, beans, broccoli, tomatoes, kale, dill, peppers, lettuce. Shallots, leeks, greenionions, onions, carrots, beets, celery, parsley, soybeans, ground cherries, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, Kohlrabi, corn, herbs, eggplant, cucumbers, melons, zucchini squash and radishes.
There are five laying hens by their Fergus Falls garden plus fruit trees.
They are not newbies to gardening.
“Both of us gleaned some knowledge of gardening from our families,” Ramona said. “It was a natural thing to have a garden.”
Ramona learned about preservation from her mom and now harvedsts and cans fruit and vegetables from the couple’s gardens.
It’s hard for her to remember a time when she hasn’t been gardening. More than 10 years ago she moved with her former husband to the Campbell area. They had a CSA or Community Supported Agriculture. When she moved to Fergus Falls, she continued the CSA model.
“It fed my gardening addiction,” she said.
Ramona and Doug have been together for about four years and continued offering CSA shares until last year.
“We started doing the farmers market in large part because Doug wanted to do it,” she said. “We are still tweaking our model.”
There is still the issue at the end of the farmers market of what to do with the vegetables that didn’t sell, she said. They have a small root cellar where they can store carrots and they have a deep freeze for frozen items. Ramona also cans and does some fermentation.
She admits that sometimes she feels like Lynn Rosetta Casper, the former host of NPR’s The Splendid Table. Casper did a segment in the show where listeners would call in to tell the items they had in their refrigerator. Caspers would then tell how she would prepare it all for a meal.
Ramona does something similar in her own kitchen taking the “ugly” vegetables that customers probably wouldn’t purchase and using them in the couple’s meals. The end result is a tasty dish.
That colorful array of fruits and vegetables that line their Farmers Market tables get a great start in their two gardens. A small greenhouse on their property is where the plants get started. The garden is no-till with the paths between the rows of planted vegetables mulched. The organic mulch offers weed suppression as well as a cleaner walking path especially when harvesting produce after a rain.
Seeds aren’t planted on a whim. There is a plan. It’s developed early in the year and hangs in the greenhouse, she said. The plan is important. It helps the couple to plan the rotation of their crops.
The Fergus Falls garden is also colorful with flowers, like sunflowers, planted amidst the rows. It adds color and an ambiance to the plot.
“Depending on the size, it can be a daunting,” she said. “A garden is a lot of work.”
She suggests anyone considering raising a garden to start small.
The first time she started her own garden, she had her mom on speed dial, Ramona said.
Ramona is a chemistry professor at Minnesota Community and Technical College in Fergus Falls. She has summers off giving her the time needed to plant and nurture the garden.
Doug is a “recovering academic,” Ramona said. He previously conducted research in psycholinguistics and loves working with data. Some of the data he gets excited about now is weather data. Yri farm has two weather stations and is in different ag weather networks or mesons - ndawn/mawn and NEWA.
He travels to Beardsley once a week and spends 2-3 days there tending the garden and harvesting for the market. The choices of produce grown on the Yri Farm (Doug’s name for the Beardsley garden) depends on this timing. They can only grow plants there that don’t need a higher picking frequency than once a week. They have done well with onions, potatoes, leeks, peppers and eggplants at the Yri Farm this past season.
The two raise a few varieties of almost everything they plant. Have a question? They have an answer and can guide you on best ways to prepare it.
Included in the array they display are herbs. Ramona cleverly worded signage by each describing all herbs they have for sale including poison ivy. The sign soon states that they don’t actually have poison ivy, but please don’t touch the herbs because people are going to eat it.
They save seeds which she says happens all season long. The timing of collecting the seeds is determined by plant variety and can happen between June and November, Ramona said. The exchanging of seeds and, sometimes, processing, typically happens in the winter.
Their name, R & D, not only stands for the first letter in their names - Ramona and Doug - but is also a play on research and development. The two look at different gardening methods as well as new varieties.
They have a gardening partner - Bekki. She has gardened with Ramona for about 10 years and is, as Ramona says, “an integral part of the success of the Fergus Falls garden.” She helps with all of the gardening except the farmers market. So far she only asks for payment in vegetables - kind of like work for a CSA.
There are many norms to gardening, but the challenges of the growing year plus new varieties and production methods make it exciting as well as sharing it with the public through the farmers market.
