This place has history. You can see it in the trees.
Growing around the property that is now Milkweed Farm in Chilmark, the trees are spread wide, massive and elbowing the air. Fir, oak, sassafras, cedar. This means they grew in an open field, without the competition of other trees that would push the limbs straight into the sky to seek light.
I spent a morning at Milkweed Farm last week with Mallory Watts, who runs the farm, and as of this year Merry Farm in West Tisbury. The two farms have almost five acres under production together, share a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and a farmers’ market booth, and Mallory’s seven-member staff split their labor between the two properties.
It’s one of many collaborations that make her operations quintessentially Island, laden with a sense of new and old history as Mallory raises her young family alongside her farm.
“I feel really attached to the land ever since I’ve been here,” Mallory told me. “Year on year, we’ve added to it....I’m now building my life here with my partner and our daughter.”
Like many of us, Mallory came to farming from a different career.
She was a pre-medical student in college, and worked in a plastic surgeon’s office in New York after she graduated, with the thought that she would go to medical school. But she kept delaying her medical school admissions test, and eventually quit her job to do an intensive urban agriculture program in Brooklyn.
She told her parents about her change in career trajectory over the phone.
“They were like, ‘This is crazy. You’re crazy,’” Mallory recalled. “And I was like, ‘It’s gonna be fine, you know?’”
Mallory moved to the Vineyard in 2018 to help turn the property into a farm. Her mom came to help her put down silage tarps — used to kill weeds before planting a field — and build the first growing tunnel.
“She called her boss and said ‘I have to stay for another couple days, like I have to help her, she’s the only person here,’” recalled Mallory.
Her parents came around quickly.
“My parents love to come here and they love to see that this is something I’m doing,” she said. “I think they feel as rewarded as I do, and I love that.”
How could you not, walking around Milkweed farm? The beds are neat as a pin. The soil is flecked with white shells from the compost, a component I had never seen but Mallory said helps with aeration. She planted cup plants by the barn, massive native sunflower-cousins to attract pollinators, and the property is filled with pollinator rows.
As we walked out to the garlic, I pointed out the pink pompom flowers of the milkweed plant. A monarch butterfly danced around us. How lovely a farm is, how teeming with life, I thought. It’s a challenge Mallory enjoys — seeing farming as a system, and caring for all parts of that system.
We looked out at her 25 beds of garlic behind temporary deer fencing, flipped after tulips this spring. Beyond the garlic is prairie, protected from new building by a deed restriction. Under a massive, open field oak is where Mallory and her wife got married in 2023. This is Ceremony Field, Mallory said.
A quick detour for the history of the property, which Mallory has collected from newspaper archives and stories from locals. Their house was built in 1865 and later inhabited by Priscilla Hancock, a chocolate maker, and her partner, Lucy Wiig.
“We are proud parents and a proud same-sex couple, and...I feel really connected with Priscilla on that front,” said Mallory.
And continuing on the chocolate front, the farms have Salt-Rock Chocolates in their CSA this year.
Over the past eight years, Mallory has been building up Milkweed to its current two acres of production. She has a propagation greenhouse, multiple tunnels and a wash station. She planted a small orchard with pawpaw trees — North America’s native tropical fruit — and American persimmons. There are chestnuts, hazelnuts and blueberries in the prairie beyond the house, and pear trees.
This is prospective perenniality: Being in a place for long enough to nurse an orchard to its first fruits and beyond. Watching the field trees stretch out, giving bits of the land names, imbuing it with a new, personal history.
In April, Mallory’s daughter Goldie was born.
“That’s been the light of our world this year,” she said. “I want this to be a place for Goldie to grow up, and to understand where her food comes from. That’s a big goal of mine, and it’s what the world of agriculture is,...being so connected to this place. I hope I can pass that on.”
Expanding her operations to Merry Farm means more beds, tunnels and greenhouses. It’s a West Tisbury property with that beautiful, fertile West Tis soil, deposited from the glacier recession thousands of years ago. Mallory can do more successions with more space, meaning new summer squash plants at Merry Farm will be ready to pick when the Milkweed ones slow down. Scaling is important in an industry with such thin margins and such high cost of labor.
“It allows us to have a more consistent supply of all the crops that do well and sell well,” Mallory said.
Her farm is a testament to collaboration in other ways. Jo Douglas, who runs Fork to Pork and Leaf to Beef, keeps cows on the extensive prairie, where planting is difficult in the absence of a deer fence. A staff station and little office was built by architect Keith Moscow and his college students, constructed from repurposed materials in a single week.
Some of Milkweed’s staff live in Paul Jackson’s old house in Edgartown, leased in a partnership with the Agricultural Society. Mr. Jackson was a longtime farmer on the Island who after his death bequeathed his home to the Agricultural Society.
“I love camaraderie. I love figuring out ways we can work together. That’s a big part of what I love on Martha’s Vineyard,” Mallory said.
The last eight years have been building the farm to where it can run sustainably and smoothly, and Mallory can step away more often to spend time with her family. She eats lunch with them, and is leaving her ice hockey coaching position to spend the holidays in Michigan, where her and her wife’s families live.
I am excited to see what she does, how she’ll innovate and collaborate on a property so cared for. That place has history. It’s in the trees, and on her farm, and in her family.
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