STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Sometime this week Ed Zinader and his wife Sara Berman will head out to the greenhouse behind their home in Bellevue and push it along a track, leaving the spinach that they had planted inside exposed to the sun.
They’ll then plant tomato plants on the ground that the greenhouse will cover in its new location.
The yearly ritual is one of the ways they maximize growing veggies in a high-altitude clime like the Wood River Valley’s.
“The spinach in the greenhouse was planted the same day as this was,” said Zinader, dipping his hand in the dirt amidst rows of spinach planted outside the greenhouse. “And you can see how much bigger the spinach in the greenhouse is.”
Zinader showed off his seven-plus acre Squash Blossom Farm this past week to representatives attending the National Association of Counties’ Western Interstate Region Conference at Sun Valley.
The tour was one of several arranged by Blaine County Commissioner Larry Schoen, Administrative Services Manager Mandy Pomeroy and others. Tourgoers also went to Idaho National Laboratory, Clif Bars manufacturing plant in Twin Falls and the Big Wood River near Ketchum, where attendees learned how the county was dealing with a 2017 flood that had ripped a yard away from one home.
The tour of Squash Blossom Farm was illustrative of how Sun Valley-area farmers deal with short growing seasons to provide healthy tasty locally sourced food for valley residents.
Zinader described how he and his wife, a school teacher who was on a school field trip in Ecuador during the tour, had started four year ago with a quarter-acre garden to get their feet wet.
“My wife had worked at a farm in college and I had grown up on a dairy farm,” said Zinader, who uses no synthetic or chemical products on the farm.
The two first offered their produce via Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).
They sold out in a week that first year, recruiting 25 members to pay a membership fee to receive boxes of spinach, bok choy, kale, garlic, beets, snap peas and other produce each week from June through October. This year they maxed out in two weeks, with 65 members signing up.
“Community Supported Agriculture is a great program because it gives farmers money to work with at the beginning of the season so they don’t have to take loans out,” Zinader told tourgoers.
Over time, the couple also moved into retail, selling their produce at the Ketchum Farmers Market, Atkinsons’ Markets in Ketchum and Hailey and NourishMe.
“Our goal is to get good food to everyone who lives here, and not everyone can get to the Farmers Market and not everyone is here all season to be able to take advantage of a CSA membership,” Zinader said. “Selling at local stores is nice because it’s so easy to walk into a store, hand off 40 pounds of produce and not have to stand at booth all afternoon. The other way people here get food is through restaurants so we’re starting to think about working with some of the restaurants.”
Growing produce in the Wood River Valley has a lot of challenges, Zinader noted. The soil is not grade A. And the valley doesn’t have the hot water that the Hagerman Valley does. On the other hand, cool summers allow local farmers to grow such cool weather crops as spinach and salad greens that Boise-area farmers can’t grow.
“Already, Boise’s asking for ours,” he said.
One of the keys to growing in the Wood River Valley is lots of covering, be it black tarp and plastic over hoops above row crops or the moveable greenhouse.
Zinader and Berman, for instance, will move the greenhouse that they use for spinach and tomatoes back to its original location in October to raise an additional crop of spinach through November.
The plastic covering the greenhouse lasts about four years.
“I took it off last winter because I was afraid how the snow load might affect it. But I will leave it on next winter,” Zinader said.
Zinader went full time on the farm last year and Berman works it in between the last day of school and the first.
It’s a heavy workload for two people. But they’ve managed to cut down the work through efficiency tools like a Japanese paper pot transplanter whose name in Japanese means “my little pulling buddy.”
The paper chain pot transplanting tool is pulled by hand and allows a single person to transplant as many as 264 plants in less than a minute while standing upright, rather than having to kneel or stoop. The pots feed themselves through the transplanter, dropping into a furrow that closes over once the transplant is done.
“I managed farms for 10 years and saw myself making a nice paycheck while the farmer made nothing. So, I invested in tools that could help with efficiency,” said Zinader.
The couple has also learned a few tricks of the trade during their experiments. They originally planted raised beds for some of their greens but are now letting them flatten because they’ve noticed the winds dry the edges.
And, when they ready their greens for market, they wash it and spin it in a Maytag.
“The main way to get greens to stay in refrigerator for up to three weeks is keeping them dry,” Zinader said. “The spin cycle is perfect for that.”