The first asparagus spears of the season tentatively poked their green-purple tips from the soil at Pomykala Farm in Grand Isle early last week. But Ben Pomykala wants everyone to know that almost all of this year’s harvest is already spoken for.
“I’ve got to ration this stuff,” the second-generation farmer said as he plucked a spear and took a bite. “It’s so sweet out of the ground,” he marveled.
Pomykala, 48, was standing in one of three asparagus fields on the family farm that is one year his senior. That specific plot won’t be harvested this spring, he explained, because the 3,500 asparagus crowns planted last May need to mature.
The field tops a small hill on the farm’s 40 production acres. The family cultivates about 24 of them each year, rotating annual crops such as basil, sweet corn, leeks, herbs and cantaloupe around perennial asparagus and strawberry beds. At the hill’s base, below 60 peach trees, five greenhouses were nurturing flats of tiny seedlings, and six unheated high tunnels protected neat rows of cucumbers and tomatoes.
On April 28, in one high tunnel, new crew member Oli Ramming was learning to trellis cucumbers. He’d found out about the farm from friends who cook at Frankie’s in Burlington. “They’re always talking about these folks,” Ramming said.
Restaurants accounted for more than 70 percent of Pomykala Farm’s $463,000 gross revenue last year, Pomykala said. Every May, his phone pings with texts from chefs eagerly asking about the vegetable herald of spring.
“It’s the most beautiful asparagus I’ve ever seen,” said longtime customer Tim Elliott, co-owner of Zabby & Elf’s Stone Soup in Burlington, “and it starts the season.”
Although asparagus is no longer the farm’s top seller, it remains identified with the Pomykalas in the public mind. Ben’s dad, Bob, began growing it from seed in the early 1980s — when most farmers bought plants, or crowns — and his mom, Jane, doggedly peddled it to chefs door-to-door.
“It’s such a unique crop,” said Vern Grubinger, University of Vermont Extension vegetable and berry specialist. “They put the energy in to figure out how to do it successfully and became a big fish in a very small sea.”
The first week of harvest often overlapped with Jane’s May 8 birthday. But this spring, for the first time in its 49 years, Pomykala Farm is gearing up for the season without Jane, who died on March 19, at age 77, of lung cancer.
At a celebration of life on April 4 at the Grand Isle School — where Jane was a substitute teacher in the offseason for many years — a crowd of at least 250 overflowed from the auditorium into the gym. A poster-size photo of Jane holding an armful of farm-grown tulips hung behind a basketball hoop. Two long rows of tables held a potluck parade of dishes brought by about three dozen chefs and a number of local farmers mentored by Jane and Bob.
The gathering demonstrated the family’s deep connections in the restaurant and farming community and testified to the impact of Pomykala Farm as a quiet, steady leader of the farm-to-table movement for almost half a century.
Lahi Ibrahim, chef de cuisine at August First in Burlington, listened to the service while occasionally stirring a massive pot of soup. “All for Jane,” he said, gesturing at the feast.
‘An Arrangement of Equals’
Jane and Bob met at a UVM blood drive in 1971 or 1972. Bob can’t pinpoint which, though he vividly remembers his surprise when she spoke to him. Jane was a graduate student in education, and he, an undergraduate studying civil engineering. While chatting, they learned they were both vegetarians, and Bob mustered the nerve to call Jane a couple of weeks later.
The two had strikingly different backgrounds, but they clicked. “It was not infatuation,” Bob, 74, said of the couple’s relationship. “It was an arrangement of equals. It was a person that you could confide in and enjoy life with. We loved each other.”
Jane had grown up in Old Greenwich, Conn., “in a family of means,” said Ben, the elder of the couple’s two sons. Her father, a Yale University graduate, sold architectural aluminum. Her mother taught art. Jane and her three siblings attended private schools and had ponies.
The family spent summers in Quogue on Long Island, though their cottage was not fancy, Ben said. Jane loved the outdoors and, as a teenager, worked at the Quogue Wildlife Refuge, where she got her first taste of teaching. After graduating from the University of New Mexico, she moved to Vermont to pursue her master’s.
Bob came to UVM from West Rutland, to which his paternal grandparents had emigrated from Poland in the early 1900s. His father had one shriveled leg due to childhood polio, but “that never stopped him,” Bob said. Money was scant, and Bob remembers running the family shoeshine stand during grade-school summers.
Encouraged by his Catholic school teachers, Bob was the first in his family to apply for college and had to convince his parents to sign loan and grant paperwork. He also paid his way by working on dairy farms.
Bob proposed to Jane on Church Street in Burlington with a ring he bought on layaway. In 1975, they married in Quogue, where Bob said he always “felt like a fish out of water.”
The Asparagus King
Bob never completed his degree and decided that he wanted to farm, though not dairy. In 1977, the couple scraped together a down payment, mostly from Jane’s teaching pay, on a ramshackle hired man’s house with two acres in the Champlain Islands. It cost $25,000 — “all we could afford,” Bob said.
They had Ben the following year, and Bob began working for Sam Mazza’s in Colchester, where he helped manage the egg and vegetable operation for six years. After working full days, Bob tended his own crop of peas on three-quarters of an acre that the younger Sam Mazza, known as Sonny, let him use.
Although he had never tasted asparagus, Bob noticed that no one was growing it locally and “figured I could sell it,” he said. The young farmer did it the hard, slow way by growing his own crowns. “Asparagus seed was cheap, and crowns were expensive,” Bob said. “Remember, I didn’t have boo.”
I was the asparagus king.
Bob Pomykala
Over three years, Bob nurtured his asparagus and transplanted it to the Grand Isle property with borrowed equipment. In 1980, the couple’s second son, Jon, was born, and Mazza helped Bob apply for a $15,000 loan to buy another 18 acres.
With 3.5 acres of asparagus, plus a smattering of annual crops, “I was the asparagus king,” Bob said with a grin.
Building Trust
Even though Jane’s family had money, the couple never asked for help. “We would run out of gasoline for the tractor, go pick up bottles on the side of the road to cash in, go buy some gas and then keep going,” Bob recalled.
While working for Mazza, Bob plotted his own path. He and Jane decided to try to build a business on direct sales, instead of selling wholesale to stores. They also resolved to keep the operation relatively small, both because they wanted to stay hands-on and because they couldn’t afford much equipment.
“Being dinky,” Bob said, “you could get by with a seed, a piece of dirt and a fork if you had to.”
Throughout their farming careers, Bob and Jane “exemplified the best of Yankee frugality,” Grubinger of UVM Extension said. He pointed to their modest farmstand and a small caterpillar hoop house Bob built from low-cost pipe and scrap lumber, which functioned as well as a kit tunnel “for a fraction of the cost.”
When the Burlington Farmers Market launched in 1980, the Pomykalas signed up. Bob remembers being wowed by their first market take of $15. Jane would remain a fixture at its various locations for almost 40 years.
As the farm grew and Jane left full-time teaching, the couple started to show up unannounced at local restaurants with crates of veggies. Jane described her approach as “pleasant and persistent,” Ben said. “She would just keep going until she sold everything,” his father added. Their early Burlington accounts included Leunig’s Bistro, the Daily Planet, and the now-shuttered Déjà Vu Café and Ice House Restaurant.
Stone Soup’s Elliott worked for Origanum Natural Foods on Burlington’s Main Street in the mid-1990s, when many farmers didn’t yet understand what chefs needed. Elliott recalled receiving dirty lettuce, beets with wilted greens and mismatched carrots that doubled prep time.
Chefs trusted Jane.
Vern Grubinger
By contrast, he said, “Jane would come in with our case of broccoli crowns beautifully cleaned and on ice. The professionalism was way ahead of its time.”
Jane cultivated her relationships with chefs as carefully as she cultivated the flowers that became her farm domain. Restaurant accounts “require really good communication and trust,” Grubinger said. “Chefs trusted Jane.”
A Surprise Next Generation
Much has changed over the decades since Pomykala started, such as the rebrand of kale from salad bar décor to superfood. In the old days, Bob quipped, “You would bring three bunches of kale to the farmers market and bring five home.”
While chefs still eagerly await Pomykala’s six-week asparagus harvest, the vegetable has gradually slipped to No. 10 on the sales list, as old crowns have petered out before new fields reach full production.
The biggest change, however, was Ben’s return to the farm in 2013 — something no one anticipated, least of all Ben.
Ben and Jon grew up helping on the farm and at market. As they got older, their parents gave them responsibility for tending a specific crop from start to finish and let them keep the sales dollars. The brothers bought soccer balls and a VCR. Their pinnacle purchase, for $1,000, was a beat-up powerboat they named Snoopy.
Ben said he had “zero thought” of following his parents into farming and admitted to being somewhat embarrassed by the farm through middle school. “There were a lot of really lean Christmases,” he said. “The farm was struggling, and it seemed like extremely hard work.”
Both Pomykala boys left Vermont for college and said they never felt pressure to farm. Jon now lives in Alexandria, Va., and works in legal consulting. Ben earned a degree in communications from American University in Washington, D.C., and landed a two-year Peace Corps post in Lesotho, where he met his wife, Susan.
Back in the D.C. area, Ben started a landscaping business, creating and managing vegetable gardens on suburban lawns. He also worked in management for FedEx. When the couple’s daughter was around 2, they came home for vacation. After seeing little Maggie “helping” the farm crew, they decided they needed to move back. Ben transferred with FedEx but soon found himself spending all of his free time at the farm. “It just drew me back in,” he said.
His parents were grateful for the help. They had anticipated slowing down as they aged, but, Bob said, “We found it wasn’t in our body to slow down.” Even after Jane’s 2017 cancer diagnosis, Bob said, “she never complained about anything. She would just get up in the morning and work me under the table.”
We want to keep our hands in the dirt.
Ben Pomykala
Ben focused on growing sales “to prove that the farm could support my parents and my family,’’ he said. He inherited his mother’s talent for building relationships and helped her with the books. From 2015 to 2025, revenue jumped 65 percent, to just under half a million dollars, a sweet spot that works for the Pomykalas. “We want to keep our hands in the dirt,” Ben said.
Bob remains owner for now, with Ben his only year-round employee. “He’s making most of the decisions,” Bob said. “I never wanted to get involved with any monetary stuff. I just wanted to grow crops.”
Pomykala is not certified organic, although Ben and Bob said they use many sustainable practices, such as cover cropping, and apply chemicals only when absolutely necessary. “We’ve found that it’s oftentimes easier to outwit the particular problem than to try and bludgeon it to death,” Bob said.
From the start, he said, “The most important thing for me was to keep the farm, and if that meant that I would have to do something which was not certified organic, then, by golly, I would do it.”
Not being organic has become a business advantage, too, Ben said. On average, Pomykala prices are lower than organic local equivalents. “Restaurants are always looking at their bottom line,” he said.
The farm’s current biggest challenge, Ben said, is saying no to new restaurant accounts, especially when devoted chef customers move to new spots.
Henry Long first called Ben about buying tomatoes for his Burlington catering and pop-up operation, Good Grocery, in summer 2021. “He allowed me to put in laughably small orders sometimes, like $80,” Long said. “Most people would have told you to piss off.”
When the young chef went on to become a partner in Café Monette in St. Albans, Ben recalled saying, “I love you, man. I’m so happy for you. We’re not driving to St. Albans.”
These days, Long commutes to work from Burlington via Grand Isle twice a week to pick up his produce orders. It’s worth it for Pomykala’s “unbeatable” quality, price and service, the chef said. “His watermelon really changed my life.”
Legacy of a Teacher
Despite the deeply felt loss of Jane, Pomykala Farm goes on. There may be fewer flowers, but the asparagus will come up, the cucumbers will vine up their trellis lines, and Ben and Bob will zip between fields on Club Car golf carts with Ben’s French bulldog, Moona, riding shotgun.
“I have two great loves of my life, and I lost one of them, but I still have the farm,” Bob said. “I don’t think Jane would want me to just fold up and die.”
Jane’s legacy lives on, too, in the many young people she mentored. Crew members fondly recall her joyfully silly jokes, her delight in filling the workshop with birthday balloons, and the back-of-the-cocoa-box brownies and blueberry-corn muffins Jane baked for daily crew coffee break.
At heart, though, she was a teacher.
Tunbridge sheep farmer, shearer and butcher Mary Lake grew up in South Hero and met Jane in her first-grade classroom. Unlike other substitutes, Lake recalled, “She held the room and had complete control. You didn’t want to disappoint Mrs. Pomykala.”
Lake later worked at the farm for several summers, and she credits Jane with helping her see farming as a viable profession for a woman. “I channel her more than anyone,” Lake said. “She showed me how you could be strong but extremely gentle, stern sometimes but also open, understanding and generous.”
It takes a lot of really hard work to make the magic happen.
Jackie Major
Amanda Gervais worked for the Pomykalas for eight seasons before starting Savage Gardens in North Hero with her husband in 2005. Every day brings reminders of Jane’s wisdom, Gervais said, from her way of sharpening her hoe to her use of clamshells when planting to hold the tiniest seeds without static.
Gervais tries to manage her crew like Jane did, she said. “She was just always a teacher. She took time to explain things, to make sure we knew why we were doing it.”
When chef Jackie Major came to work at the farm in 2022, she was going through a rough personal patch, which included closing Butch + Babe’s, the Burlington restaurant where she had cooked for seven years. The Pomykalas, Major said, “wrapped me up in a cocoon of growth.”
Major worked there until she landed a chef job at Shelburne Farms last year. Initially, she said, she “sucked” at farming, but Jane took her under her wing. “She said, ‘Come right next to me. You’re gonna figure it out.’”
When she was a customer, Major said, Pomykala’s pristine produce seemed to come from a magical place. As a crew member, she realized “it takes a lot of really hard work to make the magic happen.”
But as they worked, Major recalled, Jane always made sure that the crew paused to watch a monarch butterfly in flight, or to marvel at a bird’s nest in the middle of the asparagus field. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Asparagus Days | In Grand Isle, Pomykala Farm starts its 49th season without a beloved cofounder”
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