SUMMER 2024 | 13 THE GARDENS A stone’s throw from Bear Creek Mountain Resort, Salvaterra’s Gardens sits across from two-story homes along a back road overlooking Alburtis, a borough of approximately 2,500 people. Turning onto a long paved driveway to enter the property, visitors pass his ranch home, about 75 feet from the road, and his children’s outdoor play equipment to their left. Past the house, where the path turns to gravel, is his farm stand and a parking area. On this day early in the growing season, Salvaterra works with one of his employees in the farm stand. The back wall is lined with freezers that include his produce as well as local breads and meats, such as chorizo, sausage, chicken and steaks, which he sells especially when his own offerings are limited out of season. His short hair and chin stubble from his playing days have been replaced by a full beard and long hair, pulled back into a man bun.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 the setup, weeds must be picked by hand, and paying staff only to weed, he says, wouldn’t be profitable. 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 first started without tunnels, but the yield was too unpredictable and not up to the quality he prefers when selling. In the first small tunnel, one of 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 –Matt Salvaterra ’03 “ This fits my personality. It mimics a lot of things football was.” Matt Salvaterra was named the MVP of the 2000 Rivalry game played between Lehigh and Lafayette in Easton.
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