A never-ending love affair with the land

James Janiszyn, a Springfield High School graduate who is now a teacher there, enjoys growing crops for a farm stand started by his grandfather more than 50 years ago.

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SLICE OF LIFE: A never-ending love affair with the land


Posted: Sunday, June 19, 2011 9:00 am | Updated: 7:35 am, Sun Jun 19, 2011.

By Steve Gilbert

WALPOLE — James Janiszyn is covered in dirt, from the bill of his baseball cap to the toenails on his bare feet.

His blue jeans are light brown, caked with layers of farm-rich soil. They’ll never come clean, no matter how many wash cycles. He is crawling on hands and knees between rows of beets and carrots, just like his father, mother and grandfather ahead of him.

James is 10 months old.

He may be too young to weed effectively, but he’s already got the idea.

Someday James may take over Pete’s Stand, named after his great-grandfather and founder of the popular family-run vegetable stand on Route 12 in Walpole, less than a mile north of the North Meadow shopping plaza.

Someday soon James may ply the same cultivator his father stood behind when he was a small child, the handles at eye level. John Janiszyn, 31, says that’s his first memory of the farm.

Maybe James will follow John to the city and try his hand at carpentry, returning every summer to help out on the farm.

Maybe, like his father, one day he’ll breathe in the sweet-smelling late-afternoon air as thunder rumbles across the Connecticut River in the west. He’ll peer at the rows of green, hand-planted crops peeking above the deep-brown soil, and declare he belongs to this land.

“I was out plowing one spring, cutting that first furrow — it was the smell of dirt that got me,” John Janiszyn says with a wide smile. “Right then and there I made the decision that this is what I wanted to do.”

Pete Janiszyn opened a farm stand in the Walpole area more than 50 years ago and nothing has really changed. Crops are still planted, weeded and harvested by hand, no herbicides are used and the only irrigation comes from the sky. The Planet Junior seeder they use is about 100 years old. Save for a tractor and truck or two, it could just as easily be 1911 as 2011.

“It’s really about a family tradition — that’s what we’re up to here,” says 59-year-old Mike Janiszyn, Pete’s son, John’s father and James’ grandfather. “They raised beets and that’s where I am right now — weeding beets.”

Sweet corn is the biggest seller, with beets, carrots, tomatoes and cucumbers among the mainstays. They don’t own the fields, not even land for the stand. They lease about 45 acres spread out in different parcels, pulling it together one season at a time, even as urban development eats up more farmland every year.

“It’s a miracle, if you ask me,” Mike says. “We don’t own any land, have to put it together every year, but the community is very supportive.”

Pete died at the age of 81 in the fall of 1997, just three weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. He worked in the fields all that summer, shrugging off cancer’s life-sucking pain.

“He was a tough guy, I’m telling you, a rollicking old farmer,” Mike Janiszyn says. “Kind of a hard-bitten cuss.”

Mike, whose sun-bleached hair falls to his shoulders, says that with love and respect. Mike and Pete worked the fields together from 1974 until Pete’s death, with John pitching in as he grew into his teenage years.

“Not long enough,” Mike says of the 23 years he worked next to his father. “I still could have learned more.”

Pete Janiszyn was born in 1915, his family emigrating to the U.S. from Ukraine. Fluent in Russian, he joined the U.S. Army in 1931 and served as an interpreter in the European theater during World War II, earning the rank of master sergeant.

He worked various jobs, including farming, after the war and moved to Walpole in the late 1940s.

Mike Janiszyn is a journalism teacher at Springfield (Vt.) High School. He and his wife, Barbie, moved to Springfield in 1992, so their children could attend high school there. He speaks as highly and proudly of the school as he does of Pete’s Stand.

Mike, a 1970 Fall Mountain Regional graduate, earned a master’s in American studies from New Mexico Highlands University, but left the Southwest and moved back home after his mother died and his father was left alone. Mike and Barbie have three daughters and one son, John, who runs the farm today with his wife, Teresa.

John Janiszyn loved Pete, never tiring of his grandfather’s old war stories as they sat on the tractor together. Pete, for instance, told him how his older brother was killed when he fell into a pig pen. “At least that’s the story. With Pete, you never really know,” John says, smiling.

John graduated from Springfield High and learned carpentry at Southern Maine Technical College. He got a carpentry job in Burlington, Vt., but says “every summer I was still helping on the farm one way or another.”

Then came that fateful day 10 years ago when he decided he belonged to the farm. Mike says he knew all along his son would take over; he could see the three Janiszyn generations shared the same love of the land.

John’s wife, Teresa, is an Indiana native, raised among the mega farms of the Midwest, where she tended a garden with her father. Teresa moved in with John’s sister, Marguerite, in 2006, after they met during a study abroad program in Malta.

Teresa has a teaching degree from Keene State College, yet says after one trying day in a class of 32 juniors and seniors, “I just decided that wasn’t for me.”

But she loves New England, loves the idyllic small-town farm, and knew John was the one shortly after they began dating in 2007. John, employing Pete’s sense of humor, hesitates. “I had to see her work first,” he says as they both break out in laughter.

They were married on Dec. 31, 2009, and James was born last August. Their first stop after leaving the hospital wasn’t their house in Bellows Falls, but the farm, their home.

The couple acknowledges that farming is a tough life, and John does carpentry work on the side off-season, working with a furniture-maker. James comes to the fields with them almost every day, crawling in the soil and taking naps in his car seat.

“There’s kind of a rhythm to the season and how it works,” John says as he and Teresa treat themselves to some ice cream from the nearby Walpole Creamery.

Mike Janiszyn gazes at the rows of beets and carrots, and figures he’ll be here until he dies, just like his father before him. He doesn’t want it any other way.

“We’re crying out in our country for community, for a sense of place, and this is it,” he says. “People are dying for this around the country. ... It’s priceless — you just don’t find it anymore.”

Steve Gilbert is a columnist for The Sentinel.