BOWDOINHAM — Nate Drummond and Gabrielle Gosselin were in New York, looking to start a vegetable farm somewhere in New England when they found land for lease through the Maine Farmland Trust’s Maine Farm Link program.
That worked for a while, and successfully. Then, Drummond said, came the, “Now what?”
“We’ve developed these really great markets in the Brunswick area, we have this very nice farmland in Bowdoinham, but, like, where are we going to live? How are we going to make this permanent?” he said.
A house came up for sale down the road and the last piece of Six River Farm fell into place.
Drummond, 33, grew up outside Bangor, and Gosselin, 33, grew up in western Massachusetts. The couple met in college and were living in New York when Gosselin, tired of office jobs, started working at local farmers markets.
In 2006, they both apprenticed at a vegetable farm in New York and found the land for lease in Maine, a former vegetable farm, in 2007. The house and more property came along in 2011.
“It was a funny thing. There wasn’t an ‘aha!’ moment,” Drummond said. “We both came from small, rural places and wanted to end up in a small, rural place. We were attracted to the lifestyle component of it — outdoor work, working with food. It seemed more intriguing of a way forward than maybe some more traditional careers.”
Six River, featured in the new book “Unique Maine Farms,” grows up to 50 crops, “from arugula to zucchini, we like to say,” Drummond quipped.
But that wide range, a selling point at farmers markets and for restaurant clients from Brunswick to Freeport, has been one of the new farm’s challenges.
“Each crop, even though we think of them all as vegetables, has a lot of different requirements, whether it’s pests or nutrients or weather,” he said. “So you’re trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, and that extends beyond the growing of vegetables to the managing of employees, the business side of it.”
Winter is the slowest season for the farm, allowing more time for planning and back-office work while the spinach, Swiss chard, parsnips and garlic grow in unheated hoop houses outside.
“What started out as a somewhat romantic vision, I’d like to think, hasn’t lost all its romanticism,” Drummond said.
kskelton@sunjournal.com
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- Nate Drummond of Six River Farm in Bowdoinham shows off some of its summer harvest.
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- Workers harvest winter spinach in a hoop house at Six River Farm in Bowdoinham.
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- Nate Drummond and Gabrielle Gosselin started Six River Farm in Bowdoinham in 2007 with leased farmland and added to it in 2011 when they bought a home and more property up the road.
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