Transcription of Love Maine Radio #331: Birch Shambaugh and John Weston
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine, and acupuncture, and tops. Show summaries are available at LoveMaineRadio.com.
Dr Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio show number 331, airing for the first time on Sunday, January 21st, 2018. Today’s guests are Birch Shambaugh, owner of Woodford Food & Beverage in Portland, and seventh generation farmer John Weston of Weston Farm in Fryeburg. Thank you for joining us.
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Dr Lisa Belisle: Birch Shambaugh, who along with his wife Faith are the husband and wife team behind Woodford Food & Beverage, a neighborhood bar and restaurant in Portland. We attempted to have both here with us today, but we to have Birch by himself representing Fayth, so thank you for being here.
Birch S: Thank you very much for having me.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I am fascinated by the fact that you brought an eatery to the former Valle’s Steakhouse in the middle of Woodford’s Corner. It’s not something that in this day and age often we think of. Retrofitting a chain restaurant to be a more intimate bistro type setting.
Birch S: Yeah. It’s been, well it’s been a long and pretty fascinating undertaking for us to date. One that significantly pre-dates our actually opening of this restaurant. My wife and I moved to the neighborhood almost a decade ago, and both had worked in hospitality for a goodly portion of our lives. About the first week that we bought our house in the Oakdale neighborhood, we were heading out Forest Avenue to the big box stores to start fixing it up, and we saw for the first time, this amazing or amazing to us building sitting in the middle of Woodford’s Corner. It had the peaked roofs and the mid century architecture that strongly suggested roadside dining.
At the time, it was kitted as a mortgage company, which it had been for many years. It lept out to us, as places often do for people who’ve worked in hospitality a lot, we turned to one another and said, “That should be a restaurant.” Of course with a little bit of digging, we realized it had been and that’s precisely what it was purpose built to be. It was one of those moments where this space really thunderstruck us and we couldn’t get it out of our head. Life continued apace in all of our other pursuits, and our fixing the house, and we got ourselves excitedly into a family and all manner of stuff, but once the idea lodged in our heads, we couldn’t shake it. We started thinking about it more and more, and the idea became something a little more full fledged.
We realized that not only had it been a restaurant at one time, Valle’s Steakhouse. In fact, the first Valle’s Steakhouse. While Valle’s grew into a chain, this was where it started and when Valle’s started, it really was a foundation point in the neighborhood. That neighborhood at the time, in the 50’s, Woodford’s Corner, was a neighborhood epicenter. It had its own specific gravity. It served all the surrounding neighborhoods in a different way, perhaps, than it has since then. It was dense with the neighborhood businesses, there was a move theater there, there were one, possibly two neighborhood drug stores. It was really a thriving little community epicenter.
Obviously a lot of things have changed in the intermediate decades, but this idea of vitality in that amazing old space, and the idea of trying to bring a restaurant back there that could be a central part of the community and help drive that narrative, hopefully, a little bit of change back in the direction of there being a great neighborhood feel there, was something that was really interesting to us in our own neighborhood. None of that is to suggest that there aren’t a lot of great neighborhood businesses there now. There have been businesses, hospitality and otherwise that have been holding it down there for really long time. Artisan Craftsman, and the Bear a further out on Forest, and Bayou Kitchen. There’s the seafood shop, Merle’s across the street. A lot of fantastic neighborhood businesses, but there’s also been a seat change in terms of Forest Avenue as a transit corridor and I think it’s fair to say that it suffered a couple of generations of commuter based policy blight along that section.
We got this idea in our head that there was not only that that building really should, in its highest and best use because a restaurant again, but that there was an opportunity to try and bring a great neighborhood place back into that space, and at the same time, drive a meaningful plot in terms of helping increase momentum towards Woodford’s Corner being a little bit more of a neighborhood epicenter again. That’s what lodged in our craw, if you will. That was … Geez, we’re coming up on our two year anniversary now. That was probably six, seven years ago. We reached out to the owner of the building and tried to see if he had any interest, and never heard back from him. We continued in the rest of our life and moving along through various work and what have you, but we kept digging at the idea.
Then flash forward, I guess three years ago now, we had just welcomed our second child into the world, and I got a phone call out of the blue on my cell phone. The voice on the other end said, “Well, you are persistent. Are you still interested in the building at 660 Forest Avenue?” It was a pretty remarkable question to get out of the blue after maybe five, six letters sent without response over the years. I had my son Wayland in one arm, and he was colicky and howling, and this phone with a voice reaching out to respond to a question that we’ve been asking ourselves for years now. Ultimately while life was a pretty complex as it stood, it was probably not more than a 10 or 15 minute conversation between Faith and I before we realized that there really was only one answer to us, that you don’t get the shot, the window to try and take a crack at a dream of yours all that often.
Dr Lisa Belisle: It has been interesting to watch, I guess, the rise in the food culture in the Portland area. There aren’t as many people who are working on food culture off peninsula in Portland as there are on peninsula in Portland. You and Faith are among those people. Have there been specific challenges associated with not being right in the middle of the Old Port, let’s say?
Birch S: Yeah. I think there … Well, every challenge is also an opportunity, right? If you frame it correctly. I will say that there are a lot of things that are different about doing what we do where we do it. Obviously there’s an incredible density of amazing offerings in the downtown on peninsula area in Portland. That said, we never had any interest in opening a restaurant downtown. The only thing that was interesting to us was doing something out there in the community that we lived in and trying to make a neighborhood place. That’s a long way around answer a part of your question, which is that a neighborhood restaurant, a good neighborhood joint is substantively different than a restaurant that is dependent on tourist traffic.
A lot of the strength of the hospitality industry downtown is supported, and that amazing density of options is supported by the incredible tourism we enjoy here. That is not something that you can reasonable hope for, at least in the near term, in an off peninsula location. In some ways, it’s an entirely different business approach. When we opened a couple of years ago, there were less options than there are now. There are increasingly month in and year out more and more options out our way, off peninsula, and that’s a great thing. We live in these neighborhoods and more options is better for everybody who lives out there.
Ultimately, if you do your job well and you’re lucky, you start to create something that’s interesting enough that it becomes a compelling jaunt for people who are in town visiting from away as well. A couple of years in we’re starting to see more and more of that, but certainly you have to have a different goal to open a restaurant or a bar, what have you, out there, than you have down here. Our goal has always been to forge long term relationships with our customers, the people who live and work around there in surrounding towns and environments that are interested in trying something a little bit different and coming our way rather than going downtown.
Dr Lisa Belisle: My family and I live in Yarmouth, and the first few times we talked about going into Woodford Food & Beverage, it was like, “Well, that seems like that’s really far out of the way,” but then we went there, and we’re like, “Well, it’s actually not that far out of the way.” The perception is very different than the reality. If you’re gonna drive in from the suburbs, it’s almost equidistant really.
Birch S: You can loop around the back cove and be at us just as easily when you’re coming from the north as you can be downtown. Certainly perception is a huge thing in our business, in any business. We have kept our eyes squarely on just concentrating on trying to be the best version of ourselves that we can be in the belief that our appeal and our ultimately the strength of our business would reflect how effectively we were creating these lasting relationships with people. That starts in our own back yard.
What’s going on right now with the construction in Woodford’s Corner is a perfect example. It’s safe to say it is doing no favors to us or anybody else, but ultimately you’ve got to take the long view on this stuff. It’s part of the civic contract, and if it’s even incrementally successful, it would be a real difference maker for the livability and the walkability and the overall experience of both living in and passing through Woodford’s corner, which a notoriously lousy intersection. That said, in the midst of this maelstrom of construction, there is understandably a perception of wanting to avoid the hassle of choosing to drive into the corner. Of course, I totally understand that.
But the flip side is that all of our local customers, our guests who live in the neighborhoods around us have been incredible supportive and have been regularly coming in and supporting us through this and telling us that they really appreciate us being there and they want to see the continued health and viability of this momentum that’s afoot in Woodford’s Corner. As a result, they’re coming in and helping support us through the midst of that. That’s the type of relationship, I think, that I critical for a neighborhood business to be compelling enough and to be enough a part of people’s lives that they are interested in continuing to support you and to continue making sure that that is a meaningful interaction and an experience for them. If you could do a good job of that, I strongly believe that the rest will follow. People come to visit us from downtown regularly and people from neighborhoods like Valmouth and Yarmouth and what have you, find that it’s worth the trip.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Well, the food is delicious.
Birch S: Thank you.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I think it’s worth the trip just for that alone, but it’s also a very friendly atmosphere. We’ve been really impressed with the number of people that we’ve seen, especially older couples, that we’ll see walking from other parts of Woodford’s walking through the door. They’re clearly well known by people on your staff, and they find a place at the booth, they’ve been there more times than we have. It just feels very homey and-
Birch S: Thank you very much. That’s actually incredibly meaningful to me, to us. Clearly you’re offering the food and drink in a place like ours is super important. It’s a huge part of the equation, but it’s by no means all of the equation. It’s a little bit of a cliché, I suppose to say, but for us in the hospitality business, you have to keep in mind that hospitality is your product, it’s not just food or drink or the caliber of your service. It’s this hopefully synergistic combination of all those things that delivers an experience and ultimately a feeling, how you feel about a place. That starts with the people who work there, and we are immense fortunate to have an incredible crew of people who we get to work with every day. People who also genuinely enjoy being there and genuinely care.
That’s the first foundational block of great service, of being able to consistently deliver a great product, and ultimately being able to make people feel good about being in there, whether they work there or they’re electing to come and spend their time and money there. That’s been incredibly important to us. Faith and I spend, and Courtney I should say … Courtney, who is our executive chef and long term friend. She’s amazing. It’s been a really profound creative experience between the three of us to try and figure out how to realize these hopes and visions that we had for this idea and this business. She’s one of the rare chefs that I’ve ever met who really believes also that a great restaurant is so much more than just great food, that it’s a great room and great service, and that softer science of a great vibe, but those are very difficult things to do put your finger on. You say you want to make a great neighborhood place, well, what’s that? It’s a super subjective thing.
We spent years even before we opened the doors, it was an ongoing conversation between the three of us on how to realize that. It’s not to suggest by any stretch of the imagination that we’ve got it all figure out, because far be it, but I’m reasonable pleased and super proud of how much progress we’ve made to date on it. I do think that that feeling that you talked about, that feeling of conviviality and a great vibe and friendliness within a place, that’s the hallmark of a great neighborhood place, and trying to figure out what the components are to be able to actually coax that into life has been our really fun project to date.
Dr Lisa Belisle: When I was in London and Dublin, I noticed the pub culture is so very different than what we have over here. It’s very much a third space atmosphere. It seems as though what you are trying to offer is that third space, where a lot of people now in this country are gravitating towards coffee shops. You’re offering, this is a restaurant, is a dining experience, a place where people … It’s not work, it’s not home, but they’re going to gather, and maybe they’ll get to know each other and maybe they’ll have a different element of their day that they might not otherwise have had if you’d just gone home.
Birch S: I absolutely agree with that. We think about hospitality in some meaningful way, an extension of the familiarity or comfort of home and hearth, without the direct responsibility for that. That level of comfort and casualness that people have in space they’re familiar with is something that we’ve always felt is really important. Those are the kind of spaces and restaurants that we gravitate towards. We have definitely seen over the past couple of years, we’ve seen this amazing things that’s happened at our place where people have gotten to know each other under our roof who wouldn’t have otherwise, and we’ve gotten to know them.
Ultimately, as much as we are welcoming people into our restaurant, they’re welcoming us and one another into their lives when they’re there regularly. It becomes this, again, this synergistic thing that almost has a life and breath of its own. This feeling of familiarity and comfort and relationships born. It’s a profound and pretty humbling thing to be a part of, and to be able to do it in the community that we live in is incredible how often do you get to do something that you love in the community that you live in, and be able to forge these relationships with people that grow into something that it’s not two dimensional, it actually is deeper than that and meaningful. Like I said, that’s really a humbling thing.
Dr Lisa Belisle: When you and Faith were growing up, did you know that hospitality would be your ultimate separate goals, and now goal as a couple, I guess?
Birch S: Well, Faith is probably the more died on the bowl hospitality veteran of the two of us. We both cumulatively probably spent 35 years in hospitality in one form or another. I don’t know if we knew it growing up, but certainly we’ve always known in our relationship and our dynamic that it was not so much a question of if we would ever open a place, but the where and the when. Certainly, the hospitality is something that is just inside people. It either is or it isn’t, and that’s fine. That extends from how interested you are in welcoming people to your home and having dinner parties and things like that, which is something that has been a part of our life together since the beginning.
We had a cooking club in New York when we lived there that we were in for a decade and change, every Tuesday night with a couple other friends. We would routinely have round robin dinner parties and the like. That’s not that interesting to some people, but for those that it is, it’s certainly one of those fundamental groundwork elements that can contribute to making a decision so harebrained as to wanting to open a restaurant. Yeah, we always knew that we wanted to, and the question of where and when obviously answer itself when we found ourselves here. Faith has worked in hospitality since the very beginning, I took a 10 year break in technology, but ultimately realized that I was much more of a people person and got sick of sitting in front of a computer screen all day.
I think it’s something that there are also some people who decide that they want to open a restaurant and then find a couple years in, that it turns out maybe they’re not so much of a people person, and that can be a profound shock, I think. For us, it’s been something that’s just a part of our lives and our DNA, and has been a very natural extension of that to open a place of our own, and now to have a young family in it as well. It’s incredible to be running essentially a family business, and have two young children who are growing up in a restaurant. I’m acutely aware that we are also sowing the seeds for this life potentially in both of them.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I think each of the times that we have eaten at your restaurant, because we always tend to eat early, your family has been there as well. You’ve been there with your young children. It’s interesting to see their comfort level that they obviously enjoy the food, but they also enjoy the interactions with other people, and the staff, other patrons of the restaurant. I think that’s important because it seems more and more that we go off to work, our children go off to daycare or school, or separate lives. Come back at the end of the day, you have a few hours together, everybody goes to sleep. You wake up, you do the same thing the next day. I think we miss out when there’s not enough intersections between what we do as adults and what children do as children.
Birch S: Yeah, I think so. We don’t have those hard delineations in our life, both by design and necessity these days. Of course opening a restaurant is a notoriously challenging and stressful undertaking, and doing it with a young family is even more complicated, but we always also by design, wanted this to be a very porous memory in our lives between work and our life because ultimately that’s the way that it feels to us. That also has permeated into the type of restaurant that we made. Hopefully you make the kind of restaurant that you yourself want, and the type of restaurant that we want is the type of place that is very comfortable to be in as a family. The type of place that can be a bunch of different things to the same person.
It’s the place you’re thrilled to go with your kids and have a meal, that they can find something to enjoy, and perhaps you can have a semblance of an adult meal and proper cocktail at the same time. Also the type of place you would go alone and sit at the bar and read and be unbothered by anybody or that you might step out and want to celebrate something. To try and be all those things, means that we’ve had to live all of those things ourselves as well, and both verify that the place could be that for us, as well as validate our assumptions on that level. Consequently, we have created a restaurant that I think is very comfortable to dine in with kids. We do it regularly and there are certainly times when the place is lousy with little kids, but we love that ’cause ultimately that’s life. It’s an honest look at what life I like, and there’s vitality in being able to look around a room, whether it’s our restaurant or any other and see an older couple having a meal alone and enjoying a moment on one end of the room, and a young family with two or three squawking kids at another end of the room, and everything in between. For us, that’s vitality and that’s an honest look at life, and that’s the type of place that we want to have.
Yes, we dine in it regularly and occasionally, I am reminded that there are many children who are more refined and better dinners than ours are. I’m constantly amazed at what incredible young diners regularly are in our doors, and I don’t count ours those, as ours can be unrepentant heathens at times. All parents, of course, do their best to control that situation impact on their diners as much as possible, but I’ll apologize right now for the fact that I’m only marginally successful sometimes in our own restaurant.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I’ve never noticed that your children were heathens. From my standpoint, they’re doing just fine.
Birch S: Thank you.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I think that’s also, I don’t know if you on purpose, or inadvertently raised the idea that one of the ways that we learn how to be with others in a group setting is by being in a group setting. There’s not really a way to become a refined diner or a diner of any sort unless you actually are in a restaurant with other people. If you’re a small child and you get to be there enough, you maybe will development behaviors that will …
Birch S: Yeah, agreed.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Yes.
Birch S: It is fair to say that anybody raising children in this particular environment in life also exposes them to things that other kids may be less exposed to. Faith and I were at a restaurant not long ago with the kids. Somebody was making a cocktail behind the bar in the far off distance behind the restaurant. My elder child, Cordelia, heard the sound of the cocktail shaker and said, “Papa, is Todd here?” He’s one of our bartenders. Which I thought was pretty cute.
Dr Lisa Belisle: So not every child has that kind of experience. You’ve not just showed your children very specific sound effects that they will be able to relate to for the rest of their lives.
Birch S: Perhaps some of it will effectively firewall for a period of time, but it was one of those light bulb moments where it really made me sit back and consider just what an interesting thing it is to be growing up in this environment.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Birch Shambaugh, who along with his wife, Faith, is part of the husband and wife team behind Woodford Food & Beverage, a neighborhood bar and restaurant in Portland. Thank you for coming in today, and my best to Faith. We will be back in your restaurant again soon.
Birch S: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
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Dr Lisa Belisle: John Weston is a seventh generation farmer who grows 60 acres of fresh vegetables, and two acres of them are certified organic. He also coaches Nordic skiing at Fryeburg Academy. Thanks for coming in.
John Weston: Good morning.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in the fact that you’ve been doing the work on your farm for seven generations. Well, not you personally, but people have been on your farm for seven generations. Is that a normal thing a far as you can tell?
John Weston: Well, no, I think that what? In 2000, we were recognized as a century farm by the USDA. At the time, I think that we were the third one in Maine. So no, it wouldn’t be, I think, something that happens every day. We’re proud of that.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Seven generations, and you still have three of them that are affiliated with the farm, is that right?
John Weston: Now we’re down to two. My grandmother, who was 104, who passed a couple years ago. No, now we’re down to two. My father and myself. Yeah, obviously we’re very proud of all that, bu the struggles of working with family and all the fun that goes along with that creates its own challenges above and beyond the fact that we’re in agriculture as well.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Tell me about your family. Tell me how they first came to be in Maine working on this far in western Maine.
John Weston: Well, like most people from Maine, the roots came from Massachusetts, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts. That was in the winter of 1799. We took ownership of the property in March of 1800, but we always say we were established in 1799 ’cause it sounds better. Yeah, it was the typical family gentleman’s farm, doing the things to sustain a family and sustain the farm. Throughout the generations, there were livestock dealers, cattle dealings, hemlock bark was a big industry for a while. More the current generations, my grandfather was a livestock dealer, so when all the number of farms that were in the area, you could think of it almost as a grocery store for animals. If you were going to start your spring and needed some piglets, or if you had a beef animal to sell, or you needed a replacement heifer for your dairy farm, you would see my grandfather.
He bought and shipped cattle throughout New England. There was a period where he shipped them from the Fryeburg train station to Boston on train cars. As that industry began to slow down, and the number of farms began to dwindle, that disappeared. My father’s generation transitioned from … He still did some of the livestock dealing. We always had cattle on the side. Excuse me, a dairy farm on the side. Then my father went more into a dairy farm, and my early years growing up through grade school, we still had the dairy, and then as that industry began to change and transition, we moved into crops. Most of my adult life has been dealing with crop farming.
Dr Lisa Belisle: When you say that most people in Maine came from Massachusetts, when your farm started out, Maine was Massachusetts. There was no Maine because that wasn’t until 1820. How was it that your family decided, “Oh, we’re gonna go up further in Massachusetts and connect with this plot of land.”
John Weston: Well, I can’t say what exactly brought us up here, but because everything was so mixed throughout. The survey lines were not set, grants of land were just being given to people. Obviously military generals and military personnel were being given chunks of land as compensation. I think it was Colonel Frye who started Fryeburg. Actually, so when my family came here, or part of the reason they came here was where our homestead is now, the man that was credited for the town of Brownfield, his name was Henry Brown, was living there and they re-ran the survey lines from Maine and New Hampshire and found out that he was actually living in Fryeburg, so he wasn’t about to stay in Fryeburg. He was gonna live in his own namesake town, so quickly left and my family capitalized on that by purchasing the property for, I think it was $743. A roundabout way, but that’s how they got started.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Your farm is right next to the river. The river that many people travel, in the summertime especially, on inner tubes and canoes and things like that.
John Weston: It’s a floating circus.
Dr Lisa Belisle: It’s a floating circus, yeah exactly, exactly. This has been an interesting thing for you over the years because it also means that your farm is part of a flood plain.
John Weston: Yeah, which is obviously part of the reason why agriculture’s a big part of Fryeburg. It’s not just our farm, but a number of others. The Saco River divides our property, and 95% of it is low lying river bottom ground, which makes it excellent for agriculture, but very flood prone. Then, of course, as you say, there’s the newfound recreation parts of it with the canoe liveries, and the frat party that can happen on weekends on the Saco River. We’re not affected by that too, too much, luckily. We get to hear the noise from it on occasion, but otherwise we’re fortunate to have such great ground to grow crops on.
Dr Lisa Belisle: This also means sometimes that when you’ve had weather extremes, that you’ve needed to adjust things a little bit. Most recently, we had the wind storm that affected us on this part of the state with tree down and power outages. You were mentioning to me that you got a lot … There was a lot of rain up in the mountains and came down and impacted your Christmas trees.
John Weston: Sure. Well, the Saco River starts in Crawford Notch in New Hampshire. All of that watershed winds up coming down through Fryeburg, and so a lot of times we have to watch the weather in New Hampshire, we’ll watch the New Hampshire forecast a lot to see what’s coming our way because locally, the wind storm that you talked about locally, Bartlett, New Hampshire, got between five and six inches of rain. All that’s going to be consolidated coming our way, and it did. We had some power outages, but the flood waters came up. Otherwise, it would be a good time of year for us ’cause we don’t have any crops. We don’t have any equipment or pumps in the river, or anything like that, other than Christmas trees.
We did have debris, and the biggest culprit is actually silt, the muddy water, as it recedes, just sticks to the needles. Now you have a dirty looking tree that we’ll have to wash off. The good part is it’ll still remain growing and still be a viable crop for another year. We haven’t lost the income from it.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Christmas is a big part of what you do with your farm story. When we visited there this summer, we could already see the pre-seeding, I guess, decorations, evidence that this was a big season.
John Weston: Yeah. It’s part of the business model. If you’re in agriculture, we have a very narrow window that we can operate for the crops on a yearly basis, so our yearly cycle is we start officially in March, we make maple syrup. That’s the early spring income, and we transition into some greenhouse crops. Then summer and fall aren’t a problem because there’s all the harvest of those seasons. Fresh vegetables and pumpkins and squash and all that. Christmas trees provide that winter income to bridge that gap a little bit. I never grew up knowing much about Christmas trees or thinking I’d be a Christmas tree farm in any stretch, but it’s part of the pie that you have to create to have your business model. It’s been a good one. We were fortunate to have some abutting tree farms that we could learn from as they transitioned out. We have people that come from across New England now to cut a tree and make it their family experience. No, it’s a nice time of year.
Dr Lisa Belisle: When you were growing up, did you know this is what you wanted to do? Did you know that you were gonna stay with the family business?
John Weston: It was always in the back of my mind. I went through high school always being interested in architecture and construction, so had that in the back of my mind, but was still always thinking about how do you carry on the farm. It’s there and it’s present, and I was never pressured to do it, I will certainly hand that to my parents. They always let me choose my own way. Certainly, you can’t not feel that pressure a little bit. I wound up going to University of Maine Orono, and studying sustainable agriculture and quickly began to realize that most of the people that I was taking classes with didn’t have any of the infrastructure that I had waiting for me, and that that was incredible unique. It was there that I realized that yeah, I’ve got something that a lot of people wish they had, and I enjoy doing it anyways. Returned home, and started on the farm. My greater winter incomes quickly became being involved in Nordic skiing, and that’s been my yearly cycle ever since.
Dr Lisa Belisle: You and I had a conversation when I visited you on the farm about Nordic skiing because we were roughly contemporaries in high school, and Fryeburg Academy had a pretty great ski team, still does I believe.
John Weston: I’d like to think so.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Yes, of course, as the ski coach over there. Yarmouth also has traditionally had a very good ski team. It’s interesting for me to think that this is something that you’ve continued to do for all of these years. Some people, high school sports, they fade into their backgrounds, but for you, this has remained strong.
John Weston: We were just having a conversation about this at a coach’s meeting that Nordic skiing is a life sport. Not that other sports can’t be, there’s obviously pick up soccer leagues, and basketball, and things like that, but Nordic skiing is certainly something that you do for a lifetime. Also from a high school point of view, certainly when I talk to a lot of the kids that I coach, the social aspect of it. If you play a team sport, yes, you’re very close to your team within your group in your school, but you never really go beyond your comfort zone and know kids from other schools.
I still, to this day, have … I wouldn’t say daily, but monthly interaction with people that I skied with. You meet them from other parts of the start, other parts of New England. Nordic skiers are generally a pretty self motivated group, so they’re gonna go out and accomplish a lot of things there. Yeah, that’s always something that’s struck me, is the number of people that I know that I skied with before, or used to be involved with the sport. I certainly think it’s a wonderful part of the … It’s an aspect of Maine, it’s a niche sport. It can struggle at times in the state of Maine as interest change and school budgets change, but we like to say that a lot of the kids that we’re coaching are then gonna go on and support the industry, whether it’s through buying season passes or being a shop manager or groomer. I hope it can certainly continue to thrive despite the climate at times. We can’t make snow the way other ski areas can, so it’s been a struggle for certainly for some of the teams in southern Maine.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Yeah. Even back when I was in high school, many years ago, the climate still didn’t permit for snow on the ground consistently, every single winter. We actually would often travel to Fryeburg or Sacopee Valley, or other western parts of the state to ski. One thing that is interesting about skiing is that it keeps … Well, coaches and students outside. It keeps you in a time of year when people are generally wanting to just hunker down. My son played basketball, my daughter played basketball, my other daughter swims, but I was a skier. I was out there in those elements. It really does keep you connected to the seasonality of the state.
John Weston: Yeah, it’s an outside winter activity. It has those challenges. Certainly, a sport that has affected skiing in Maine is indoor track, which is another just indoor type of sport. No, as I said, it’s a self motivated group. A lot of times, the kids that I’m coaching or that we’re all coaching are the student council president or they’re involved in a lot of music and plays and all that. That drive helps overcome of that, “Yeah, I’m going out in the winter and putting on a race suit and going through those challenges.” Locally here, I think the Portland area certainly enjoyed Pineland. They’ve done a wonderful job of keep that sport local and not having to travel quite so much. From Fryeburg’s point of view, we’re just on that cusp of the snow belt, so a lot of times … In fact, today was a couple inches on the snow this morning when I drove down here and drove out of it fairly quickly. It’s nice that for our league, an hour away, we can have pretty much guaranteed snow.
Dr Lisa Belisle: This self motivation that you’re describing, I would imagine this would be fairly important if you are going to be a farmer, if you are going to work with your hands in an industry where there’s some built in uncertainty with things like weather, for example, or market forces. How have you used this internal motivation to continue to work in this business?
John Weston: I can’t lie and say it’s a bit of a hardening process. It’s life. Life is a hardening process. Certainly, as I have had to go through some natural disasters and things that have affected our farm, it’s scary, you don’t know how it’s going to play out, but you have to have faith in your business and your family and that you can work your way through that. I certainly feel that from my point of view, that you’re better on the other side of it. You don’t like going through it at the time, but no, I think you have to have that toughness, that understanding that the hard work and you’ll get through it.
Dr Lisa Belisle: There’s also a very strong sense of being connected to the community that I think your farm participates in. Last summer, one of the reason that we went down there is that you reached out and invited us to your community dinner, which was delicious, all the local vegetables. I think you sent me home with an enormous bag of corn, which is probably the best corn I’ve ever had, by the way.
John Weston: Glad to hear that.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Wonderful there. Also really impressive was the number of people that showed up to sit and essentially break bread together.
John Weston: That dinner has covered a lot of … The one you came to was our fourth. It’s covered a lot of ground for us, both personally, as you say, to give back to the community, to have that feeling of bringing everybody together for a simple, easy cause. It’s been wonderful from a business point of view, because as you stated, it’s a time of year we can showcase our vegetables. We see a large bump in the preceding weeks when people are coming in to buy some of those products. That was an unintended benefit, but it’s been very nice. That all started when, I think there was a PBS show called Out Standing in the Field. I don’t know if you ever heard of that, but that, I think put farm to table dinners more in the forefront. Our local chamber decided that they would get together a few local farms and we would do one of those.
They were nice events, and it worked out very well, but what stuck with me was the pricing of it. Very expensive ticket, they were made to be very exclusive, and I think that that’s a formula that you see a lot of other people use now. That these are very, very high end events, which is fine, but to me, it’s sending the wrong message. It’s saying that local food should only be available to those that can afford it and that’s not what I wanted. From that, we did that for a few years, and then that peated out a little bit. Then we had Hurricane Irene in I believe, it was 2012, getting back to our flooding conversation.
That was a flood that came at the absolutely worst time of year, which was the end of August. That’s when we had our highest crop, all of our summer crops are in full harvest, we’re just getting ready for our fall crops. They were all underwater. Effectively, we had to destroy all of it. As much as that was a tough hit for us personally, there were a number of other farms that were affected the same way. What struck me was that there was a lot food lost for our community. 100 years ago, that would have been major, but in today’s world, you can just go to the grocery store. People otherwise wouldn’t really know that, they wouldn’t … Yes, you can go and get your tomato. It may not taste as good as the one that you’d get locally, but you can still have it.
From that, I wanted to try to do something that’s let’s say, “Let’s bring something back to the forefront here where we can just focus on this.” I’m fortunate to be friends and associated with Carol Noonan in Stone Mountain Arts Center, and we were out to dinner one night. Carol’s a forward thinker as well. We were just throwing things around, and we said, “Well, what if we did our own dinner? And what if we charged nothing? What if it was just free?” We said, “Well, what about numbers?” “Well, how about 500?” So the very first year, that’s what we did. We did a completely free meal. We provided the vegetables, and we brought in a few other like minded people. The Oxford House in Fryeburg, and people that could help us out.
Couldn’t have asked in any outside event like that, we had great weather. I’m sure that how many annual events have never happened a second time because they had bad weather. We had great weather, the event went great, and we just couldn’t have asked for anything more. People have really responded to it in a number of ways, not just being gracious towards that it’s free and you’re bringing the community together, but part of our formula was there’s no speeches, there’s no 50/50 raffles, there’s no silent auctions, we didn’t want that. We wanted you to just come and focus on one event. The first few years, we actually had some … I would say backlash, but people saying, “You’re not capitalizing on things. You should put out a donation box for this charity.” We’re like, “No, no, no, that’s not what we want.”
It sometimes is amazing to hear people’s reaction to that. They almost don’t know how to handle it because our world is so complicated and where do you go where you’re not bombarded? You can’t watch the news without things scrolling across the screen and everything else. The formula was just to be very basic and very simple, and it’s worked well.
Dr Lisa Belisle: One of things that I enjoyed about our meal is that we sat at a picnic table with people that we had never met before, who were nice enough to offer us a place at the end of the bench. We got to talk to them a little bit about where they were from and how they came to Maine, and how they came to the farm in particular. It struck me that that’s not an opportunity that you get very often in this day and age, to sit down with people for no other reason than that they’re next to you, that they offer you a place. We go to the restaurants, and we sit by ourselves often times, or we have these very self select populations that we work within. Has that been an unintended, or maybe an intended consequence of the dinners that you’re offering?
John Weston: Sure. We weren’t exactly going into it, we weren’t exactly how it was all going to play out. Just the logistics of it to start with, we weren’t sure what 500 people was going to look like. Where they going to come all at once? Was it going to get spread out? Where do you seat them? All those things. Part of also what we did, is it’s something that I would like to do for a while. I don’t like the concept of doing something like that as a flash in the pan. It’s something that I wanted to do for a while, so we wanted to keep it simple, but also not do it every year. I think that that’s a big part of it. We’ve been doing it every two years, and what that does it people can’t say, “Well, I’ll just go next year.” Well, you can’t go next year, you’ve got to come this year.
It puts a little higher priority on it. What we’ve basically been finding is that people will come, and we offer it for a two hour window. People will come and they’ll stay to have the experience that you talked about, which we wanted, but we weren’t sure what it was going to wind up being. They can come and they can talk to people. Some of the nice comments that you hear is, “I grew up with this person and we live in the same town, I never talk to ’em. We talked for a half hour the other night at your place.” Yeah, those are the small little victories that you like to see, the unintended benefits.
Dr Lisa Belisle: That’s also a nice reminder that the food can really shine on its own. That it was obviously very well and lovingly prepared by Carol and the rest of the people that offered the dinner. When you’re eating fresh corn, or when you’re having … I think my favorite part was maybe the maple syrup on the vanilla ice cream, which I don’t think I’ve had since I was a kid. You really can just taste the food in a way that’s different than when we go out places. It gets dressed up or made to feel fancy, I guess. Which is also good, it’s just different.
John Weston: Yeah. It can be over prepared, and that’s another reason for what we came up with. Yeah, and I’ll be the same way. I don’t want to eat that plainly every single night, but part of what we’re offering, sweet corn. Yes, we have butter, but a lot of people don’t even use it. Raw carrots, some basic salads and things like that. I remember we had a farm meeting once, and they just brought out a plate of fresh asparagus. You often forget about how good something is just on its own. If you’re gonna go out to a restaurant, yes, you feel like it has to be prepared a little bit more for you. I understand those formulas, but not, that was definitely a part of it, is that we want to have the focus be on the food. It’s easy when you get restaurants and chefs involved that they want to add their touches to it and increase that part of. That’s why I say with Carol at Stone Mountain, and Johnathon at the Oxford House. Like minded people. They understood very quickly what the concept of this was, and there’s never been any internal fight that way.
Dr Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I continue to hear about from people who have lived in Maine a long time is the necessity of having different things that they do as income streams. This is something that we have really never given up on. As a community, many of us are doing more than one job. This is certainly true in your case. You have a farm, but you have a farm that sells Christmas trees, and you sell sweet corn in the summer, and you also work as a Nordic ski coach. It seems to be the nature of it if you choose to live in a place like Maine.
John Weston: Yeah. I wish that that could translate more into a seasonal workforce. Like any small business, our number one probably is our labor source. If there was more of some sort of established seasonal workforce that could move from the farms in the summer, tourist industry, into the ski industry. A lot of that’s based on healthcare. People have to have those benefits. I understand that, but labor is a big problem for any small business, and especially for a farm, a seasonal farm. We close our doors for the first quarter of the year. We go from maybe a payroll at 18 during the summer to zero. That’s a big challenge for a rural state.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Maybe as we have these conversations, solutions will continue to bubble to the surface. We haven’t solved them yet, but it seems like maybe even you’ve already identified one. Ski industry, farm, there’s got to be some ways that this can be approached that maybe we just haven’t thought of yet.
John Weston: You would hope so. I’d be very open that we have two Jamaicans that come and work for us. They’ve been with us, the same men for 10 years. They’re like family to us that are part of a federal Visa program. This year, we had two girls from Romania as a part of the J1 Visa program. Both of those programs are being discussed in the bigger government, and so we have to watch that. The truth is, is that a lot of the Maine workforce, or a lot of the Maine businesses are dependent on foreign labor. That can easily get into a larger societal discussion, but no, those are the facts of reality. It’s something that we have to deal with, and you would never think that as a small farm, that I’d have to be up on the current immigration policies, but I do. It’s another ruffle of being a small business.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate the work that you’re doing.
John Weston: Thank you.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I know that it’s complicated, and I know that you have to think in small ways and big ways on a regular basis, but I do appreciate it and I appreciate your having us as guests this summer at your farm dinner. Hopefully we’ll make it down not next summer, but the summer after that. Two years.
John Weston: That’s right.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with John Weston, who is a seventh generation farmer, who currently grows 60 acres of fresh vegetables out in the Fryeburg area. Thank you so much for coming in.
John Weston: Thank you.
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Dr Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 331. Our guests have included Birch Shambaugh and John Weston. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit LoveMaineRadio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as @drlisa, and see our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. Please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are pleased that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr Lisa Belisle, thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music are by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Brittany Cost, our assistant producer is Shelby Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy, and our executive producers are Andrea King, Kevin Thomas, Rebecca Falzano, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at LoveMaineRadio.com.