The Work We Do: Chris Kaplan-Walbrecht, Garden of Eve Organic Farm and Market

My name is Chris Kaplan-Walbrecht. I’m the farmer at Garden of Eve farm.

We farm 60 acres of certified organic vegetables and I’ve been farming here for about 20 years. 

We’re a pretty diverse farm, so we’re not a typical kind of one-crop, two-crop wholesale farm. We’re very diverse so we grow about 85 to a hundred different varieties and different types of vegetables. 

I have respect for all farmers. I know how hard it is because I grew up on a dairy farm. I went to school for environmental science and my wife went for environmental policy, so we were really educated on the impact that chemicals have on the environment. There’s nothing easy about conventional farming and there’s nothing easy about organic farming, which is a little harder because there is more hands-on work. I figured that if I was going to learn, I might as well learn to be an organic farmer.

We are growing strawberries that are coming now, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. And then we grow a lot of different vegetables so anything from arugula to zucchini. So it would be tomatoes, beets, carrots. Strawberries season is one of the busiest times of the years. They are perennial, so they’re kind of hard to grow, and we do grow a lot organically so we tend to be one of the go-to places to get organic strawberries.

Also we do have a very large greenhouse operation, where we start a lot of our plants.

So people like to see where there plants are coming from.

We have the farm stand, but we also do a lot of farmers markets and CSA, which is Community Supported Agriculture. We sell shares to people throughout Long Island and New York City.

What most people see is the farm stand, and that’s about all you can see from the road. You can’t see how big the farm is, so we started to try to attract people back onto the farm so they could experience the farm as a farm.

So we grow some u-pick crops, like strawberries, and then we also have animals that people can come and see.

“The Work We Do” is a News-Review multimedia project profiling workers around Riverhead Town. It is made by possible by Peconic Landing in Greenport. See more photos on Instagram.