Trial and error, and a flair for growing unusual varieties of vegetables, are the seeds of success for Ted Hutten
IT’S 6:30AM on Saturday morning at the Historic Halifax Farmers Market. The doors have barely been unlocked, but the usual hustle and bustle has already started. The conversations take place in a myriad of languages. A Korean woman is greeted with a traditional and respectful, “Anyong haseyo” at the table by a blue-eyed worker. She enquires about the herb, kkaennip, displayed in front of her. A Bhutanese man is buying pounds upon pounds of purple and green amaranth leaves, excited to find a taste of home. A young Chinese family is buying nappa cabbages that weigh as much as the babies in their parents’ carriers. A man asks his friend in Arabic, “where did you find that?” pointing to the cousa, or vegetable marrow, his friend is holding.
Standing behind it all, answering a constant barrage of queries is Ted Hutten. Running on very little sleep and an early morning coffee, Hutten is all business, and all smiles. A local chef comes by to ask about an order. “Over there, in those boxes,” Hutten points, barely stopping the conversation he is having with a customer about the possibility of growing a new crop next year. “I’ll think about it,” he says.
Hutten Family Farm is located in Lakeville in the Annapolis Valley. This 48-year-old son of Dutch immigrants presides over 40 acres of vegetables, 15 acres of fruit trees and berry crops, and six green houses occupying 10,000 square feet, filled with all sorts of tasty and previously hard-to-find vegetables in this neck of the country. Although Hutten grows staple crops like carrots, onions, radishes and yellow beans, he also grows Chinese long beans, daikon (a large and peppery white radish used in Chinese, Korean and Japanese cooking), Shanghai pak choi, gai lan (a Chinese broccoli), ginger, peanuts, even okra. The list of things Hutten grew last year is more than 140 items long, and changes from year to year.
A born farmer
The story of Hutten Family Farm starts on April 22, 1966. That was the day Ted Hutten was born and the day his parents took ownership of the land Hutten still lives and works on. Hutten grew up with his parents tending to cows on their dairy farm. Hutten’s mother ended up selling the equipment, cows, and the quota (the amount of milk a farmer is permitted to produce) to support the family after his father was injured in a farming accident. Not long after, Hutten went to Acadia University in Wolfville to study computer science. “I hated being inside,” he says. “Despised it.”
Quitting university after one year, Hutten went on to do what he knew well: working on a dairy farm, this time at a neighbouring farm. Working 52 hours a week at the dairy farm, he also started growing vegetables on a half-acre plot of his mother’s farm. He would then drive to Halifax on Saturdays to sell his wares at the then-named Halifax Farmers Market in the old Keith’s Brewery on Hollis Street. “I grew green beans, kale, leeks, things that I thought were normal, that I grew up eating.” It was 1987, and even though very few people in Halifax cooked with kale or leeks, Hutten was able to find a clientele of European ex-pats who were excited to have access to such vegetables.
Hutten kept working at the dairy farm for another nine years. The half-acre of land he was working soon became four acres, all tended by Hutten’s hands, and a $300 rototiller. One Saturday, Hutten’s sales at the market were more than he made in a week at his other job. He gave his two-weeks’ notice that very afternoon. In 2003, Hutten bought the farm he had been raised on from his mother. Hutten jokes she will outlive him, and gives a nod to where his work ethic comes from. “She is 73 and she still chainsaws her own firewood.”
A flair for the unusual
Around the same time that Hutten began selling his wares, Fanny Chen was serving market patrons traditional Chinese food at Cheelin, not far from Hutten’s stand. One day she approached him with a packet of seeds for Shanghai pak choi, a vegetable common in her native Zhejiang province in China. Now, Hutten supplies her with vegetables. “He supplies lots to me, sometimes 20 boxes a week. All kinds of nappa cabbage, gai lan, Chinese eggplants, snow peas and beans, very good quality,” says Chen. “In the fall, 100 per cent of my vegetables come from Ted.” Chen’s voice rises as she describes the fresh peanuts that Hutten provides to her. She starts to talk quickly, explaining how she boils the fresh legumes, and then lightly salts them to eat as a snack. “Oh my God,” she says, her voice full of wonder.
But it’s not only Chen who is happy with Hutten’s produce. Andrew Farrell, chef de cuisine at 2 Doors Down on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax, recalls a bar snack he made last year with Hutten’s baby beet greens. “I washed them, put them on a plate with goat cheese and people just ate it,” he says. “Right out of the ground.”
Hutten’s name is featured on the menu at 2 Doors Down, with “Ted Hutten’s baby kale” listed as an ingredient in the kale Caesar salad. Farrell plans out his menu weeks in advance, based on what is in season, and every Saturday, 2 Doors Down gets between 18 and 30 boxes of vegetables from Hutten. “He is the most productive person I know in Nova Scotia,” says Farrell. “He knows what grows here and he’ll know how to grow each thing. He is a walking encyclopedia of vegetable knowledge and a dirt wizard.”
“If I find a seed that I think I can grow, I plant it,” Hutten says of the less-than-common vegetables growing in his fields. “I will plant things on a small scale, not knowing if I can sell them, and it always seems to sell because someone knows what it is.”
Learning to grow varieties of vegetables that aren’t native to Nova Scotia, let alone Canada, can be a bit of a learning curve. A few years ago, Hutten had been growing varieties of Asian radishes such as mu and altari, two radishes commonly eaten in Korean cuisine and often used in making of kimchi, a staple of Korean pantries. Hutten had a loyal following of Korean customers, but the radishes often went unsold. It wasn’t until Chris Bigelow—one of Hutten’s farmhands and market workers—came back from Korea after spending a year teaching English that Hutten discovered what was off. Bigelow has worked for Hutten for 14 years, ever since he was 18. “I got a chance to learn about Korean food customs,” he says. “Having this knowledge, I was able to help Ted know when Korean customers would likely be looking for certain foods. Korean Thanksgiving, or Chuseok, for example, is time where Korean customers are interested in buying large quantities of nappa cabbage and radishes.” Hutten’s radishes didn’t come out of the ground until after Chuseok, so he changed his planting dates to harvest before the holiday.
Bigelow also helped Hutten when it came to growing perilla, a herb that was previously difficult to find in Atlantic Canada, even in the region’s specialty and Asian grocers. Known as kkaennip in Korean and shiso in Japanese. Hutten’s plants looked identical to the ones Chris had seen in Korea, but the leaves were tougher in texture than the ones he had eaten there. Tenderness was key as the leaves are often wrapped around pieces of meat as part of a dish. Together, the two realized the plants needed to be coddled in greenhouses, rather than out in the fields. They also learned that the Korean and Japanese varieties needed to be grown and harvested in different ways. Hutten has successfully been selling his perilla leaves ever since.
Hutten tells of a recent experience in which a Bhutanese ex-pat showed up at his market table, wide-eyed at seeing amaranth, a green found in parts of South Asia, as well as Tongue of Fire beans, both common in Bhutan. “One guy came one week and the next week, 28 of them came,” he says. “They’re coming to the farm to visit.”
Although many plantings have become successful, some crops he has tried to grow just didn’t work out. Malabar spinach, a tropical vegetable, was a flop. “It’s beautiful, and it grows like a vine in a greenhouse, with thick fleshy leaves that you cook,” he says. But when cooked down, the leaves take on a mucilaginous texture, which was not appealing to most who tried it. “I did it one year, and said I would never do it again.”
A farmers market model
Back at the market, Hutten is immersed in his Saturday morning ritual—talking, selling, explaining, greeting. It’s a ritual that’s been 20 years in the making, and he takes it very seriously. “Changes in farmers markets in the last few years have impacted most small scale producers,” he says.
Hutten has noticed larger and larger farms entering those venues, bringing in the same crops that the little guys are selling. “My business’ reputation survives on interesting crops,” he says, “but they are not the ones that make my income.” His sales of Asian and international vegetables have held steady or increased over the past five years, while sales of his apples, carrots and beets have dropped over the same time period. “I think part of it is that those crops are readily available everywhere and so it’s made it difficult.”
Hutten says that if it weren’t for farmers markets, his operation would be very different. “My business is by definition a farmers market model… so I am dependent on that model. I feel there is increased pressure on that.” But he’s optimistic about his vegetables, and the diversity of his customers.
“People are exposed to other cultures and they come back with the knowledge and a taste for the food,” he says. “Some of the Asian greens have become very much mainstream products. A very typical customer would buy a pint of blueberries, a bunch of broccoli, a bunch of carrots and two bags of pak choi. And it could be someone who grew up next to me in Lakeville.”