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Donna Frantz is At the Farm Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Agri News staff writer
WACONIA, Minn. -- Donna Frantz sits under a white and yellow patio umbrella, busily writing in a notebook.
Blooming flowers in baskets surround her and a picturesque red barn provides the backdrop.
She looks up as soon as a visitor arrives, eager to answer questions and share her farm.
Frantz spent her childhood on a farm near Madison. Her parents, Henry and Olga Quale, didn't make much money, but farming made an impression.
"I always wanted a farm," Frantz said.
She left the farm and married Leon Frantz in the city. The couple raised two children and Donna ran a floral shop in Waconia for 21 years, all the while searching for a farm she could call her own.
In 1991, her wish came true and they moved to a farm along busy Highway 5 east of Waconia.
"This place is just a gift," she said. "I'm still excited when I drive in."
A few years later, around the time she turned 65, Frantz started raising a few vegetables to sell At the Farm -- so named because her employees at the store in town used to say she was "at the farm."
"A lot of people think you can't do anything when you're old," said Frantz, now 73. "That's dumb."
She had a vision for turning the farm into a bustling marketplace. She had the barn disinfected and whitewashed and Leon poured a new floor.
Leon wasn't as excited about moving to the farm and she had to work on him quite a while before he gave in.
"My husband's a fixer and he could see all the work," Frantz said. All the buildings looked like this, she said, tilting to the right in her chair.
Leon made many repairs before he died last July 21. It's been hard without him, but Frantz is determined to make her business work.
She inherited her sixth sense to be able to see an opportunity and make it work from her grandmother, Sophie Seivers of Marietta, said Frantz, who speaks with the authority only a grandmother can muster.
Seivers sold feathers, butter, lard and garden produce.
"She had the most gorgeous gardens, but she wouldn't let me step in them," Frantz said.
Frantz doesn't want people stepping in her gardens, either, but she loves to show them off from the seat of the Gator.
"You can't farm without these Gators É mercy," Frantz says, as she starts the tour past gardens filled with lettuce, carrots, rhubarb, beets, raspberries, grapes, beans, peas, potatoes, cabbage, shallots, tomatoes and weeds.
It's been too wet to get in and weed the gardens, she said.
Frantz is an organic gardener, relying on mulch and tilling to keep weeds under control.
"I've been an organic farmer forever," she said. "I like the fact that you don't have to worry about poisons on your food."
The vegetables are sold At the Farm and at the Chanhassen Farmers Market. Frantz also sells fresh cut flowers, jams, jellies, eggs and antiques.
Her focus is on the "big and wonderful." Her claim to fame are tubs of potted lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, perfectly suited for apartment patios or decks.
Frantz is capitalizing on her rural setting in a rapidly urbanizing area.
People can tour the barn, built in the center of Carver County, where popcorn hangs drying from the ceiling. Some may stop to watch jams and jellies being made in the corner of the 1890s German bank barn. They can stroll past the gardens and perhaps Henrietta the hen will make an appearance.
In the wintertime, she sells products on ebay.
"It is just simply a fabulous business," Frantz said. "I should be 20 years younger."
On the web:
www.atthefarmwaconia.com |
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