From the Lehigh Gridiron to Salvaterra's Gardens

At Lehigh in the late 1990s, early 2000s, Matt Salvaterra ’03 was synonymous with football. Look no further than the bobblehead the university had created in his likeness—the only one ever made for football and one of four ever made for any sport at the university—for evidence of his popularity in the Lehigh community.

The four-time member of the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll was the first-ever two-time captain in Lehigh’s modern history. His list of accomplishments also include 2002 Patriot League Scholar Athlete of the Year—one of only four Mountain Hawks to ever receive the award—and All-Patriot League twice. Not only was Salvaterra a member of three Patriot League Championship teams, but the squad advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament twice during his time at the school.

His short hair and chin stubble from his playing days have been replaced by a full beard and long hair, pulled back into a man bun.

As he walked toward his field of tunnels sprawled out across almost the entire east side of the property, he says it was tough to estimate exactly how much land is used for growing because his gardens are not a typical, square growing area. Despite having 10 acres of land, Salvaterra does not grow on all of it.

He will never compete with a full farm, he says, and grows produce to fill the void of what big farms don’t always grow.

“A lot of your bigger farms that have more land are going to be much more aggressive growing things like corn, potatoes, broccoli, things that are going to take up a lot of space,” he says. “But things like lettuce mix become too labor intensive for them. And in the dead of the summer, to get it to germinate and then to harvest it in between thunderstorms? They're not going to have enough tunnels, so they just don't do it. We kind of fill that niche, but in order to fill it, you have to protect the crop or else it's too up and down.”

Most everything on the property is grown in tunnels—long rows with a half-moon structure over top covered in plastic—using a no-till farming method because he has found that it leads to less weeds. And with their setup, they have to pick weeds by hand and paying staff only to weed, he says, wouldn’t be profitable for them.

The tunnels are covered, but not closed on the sides in the summer. They’re covered to keep water off the leaves of the plants and regulate exactly how much water they get using his irrigation system using groundwater. A particularly heavy thunderstorm, hail or wet summer can wreak havoc on their crops without the cover.

Salvaterra says they first started without tunnels, because the yield was too unpredictable and not up to the quality he prefers when selling.

In the first small tunnel, one 100 on the property, he had dill growing on May 1, with space for eggplant to be planted. He also had three medium-sized tunnels, and in the only heated tunnel on the property, just behind his house, Salvaterra had tomatoes growing; he expected them to be ready to be picked the second week of the month.

Despite having a heated tunnel, he says he’s still careful about what he grows in there. For instance, he doesn’t grow tomatoes year-round; he’d need supplemental lighting for that, which wouldn’t be cost-effective. Instead, he uses the heated tunnel to extend his growing season for tomatoes.

“People generally are going to bring cherry tomatoes [to markets] in July,” Salvaterra says. “You're going to get a lot of months where there's not a lot of them, so you're not competing with anyone, but you're not going to pay to do that in the winter.”

In the winter, he limits what he grows to produce that doesn’t need as much light and can freeze and thaw, such as kale, spinach and swiss chard.

‘I WOULDN’T CALL IT FARMING’

Salvaterra got the idea for his process from a book he read when he first started gardening about farms on the outskirts of Paris in the early 1900s. Those farmers used methods to grow crops effectively on small plots of land, much like what Salvaterra is doing, to provide those in the city with vegetables year-round. They used cloches—Salvaterra describes them as glass carboys with the bottoms cut off—to protect the plants and extend the growing season. At night, the plants would be completely covered, and during the day, the cloches would get tipped up to let air underneath.

They also timed everything out so that while one type of produce was being harvested, others were already growing. Salvaterra noted how labor-intensive it was, which is why he made modifications for his own use.

“Everything out here is more gardening, but it's like a standardized form of gardening,” Salvaterra says. “I wouldn't call it farming. It's farming, but it's not like a farm when you’re driving by cornfields. If you see romaine growing in California, it's not like that. It's more like a standardized form. And the beds are constantly rotating. They always have something growing in them. To make enough money, you have to have a plan that you’ve worked on for years where the timing’s all right.”

His plan for what to plant when, and how much of it, to make the most of his limited space took years of trial and error. With each part of the country different due to light and temperature, he couldn’t talk to anyone outside the area for tips on timing. He set out a schedule, wrote down all the dates, saw what worked and what didn’t, and tried again the following year.

“If you plant spinach, you have to know exactly when you're going to plant it because it can't be too big going into the winter, but it can't be too small,” Salvaterra says. “If it's too small, it's not going to actually be harvestable. When the light conditions drop, it won't be harvestable until the next February. If it's too big, it actually just causes disease problems.”

Salvaterra even has a strategy for field mice. Knowing they’ll snack on the crops, in one tunnel he plants more dill than he plans to harvest on the outside and then the eggplant goes in the middle. He says the field mice eat the first thing they find and leave the eggplant alone.

GETTING INTO GARDENING

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