Home gardeners embrace optimism each spring. Market growers combine informed aspiration with hard reality. Jeffrey Rugen, with 15 acres and eight greenhouses, lives in Hope.
The week after a spring storm dumped more than a foot of snow on his place, knocking out the power and forcing him to tend to generators reluctant to keep the hothouses warm, Jeffrey said, “Farming is not as romantic as people think.”
His Hope Valley Farm is tucked amid the hills and creeks of southern Hamilton County. In the 1800s this area supported about a thousand residents, many of them living off the land, their vegetable plots, orchards, fields and livestock sustaining them. Now, according to Jeffrey, the population is half that number, and when it comes to growing food, “I’m kind of a…