About Jolly Pond Farm
We are a multi-family run farm founded in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with a northern outpost just south of Lake Ontario in Rochester. We are a group of passionate growers with decades of failure and just enough experience. We are veterans of this game—a collective mix of individuals boasting wide backgrounds: marine combat veteran, software developers, graphic designer, market gardener, sushi chef, carpenter, and electrician. At first, our focus was breeding for the southern outdoor climate, and now we are putting focus on indoor and fast-flowering northern cultivars too.
We grow the majority of our own food, which led us to stockpiling over 3,000 canned jars by 2023. We use what is naturally abundant to us from the land mixed with modern biologicals that fall within the certified organic realm. We don't believe in any one ideology, yet the one proven method over the past few years for ease of production (allowing for heavy travel) has been laying faith in hugelkultur mounds.
We are recreating the lay of the land with swales, surrounded by raised hugelkultur mounds, as we convert to drought-resistant dry farming systems. We're focused on creating a positive impact on our land using sustainable practices with respect for nature.
We are focused on feeding the land and our plants with what is available in abundance around us. Over the years, we have started to build hugelkultur mounds. We move from one farming style to another, utilizing techniques from all ideologies to achieve a diverse polyculture environment throughout the land. We use big implements on the tractor and work our way into little-to-no-disturbance areas as we mold clay into sand. We don't practice any one ideology, yet we take from them all—creating our own system that works for us and our situations while utilizing modern-day organic standards.
The main part of our farm is a one-acre fence made completely of cedar and black locust posts that were harvested on-site. Inside the fence, we have multiple greenhouses for year-round food production. Our field has swales, flower hedges, grapes, and blackberries, plus multiple annual and perennial pollinator gardens. Outside the fence, we plant large-acre plots of sunflowers and corn to feed "Goose Squad" and the wildlife. We also have a sawmill and lumber yard; all our buildings are created from the land using our prime pine and eastern red cedar.