Abenaki Springs Farm, Walpole, NH

There are places where the land seems to remember.

At Abenaki Springs Farm in Walpole, that sense of history is never far from the surface. Years ago, while weeding a row of carrots, farmer Bruce Bickford uncovered an ancient arrowhead in the soil. The discovery was a small but powerful reminder that people had been living, gathering food, and tending this fertile landscape for thousands of years before the farm took its present form.

Bruce founded Abenaki Springs Farm in 1997 on land overlooking the meeting place of the Cold and Connecticut Rivers. The farm takes its name from a nearby spring once important to the Abenaki, the People of the Dawn Land. With rich soil, abundant water, wildlife, and the rivers close at hand, it isn't difficult to understand why generations of people have been drawn to this corner of New Hampshire.

Today, Bruce and his wife, Kirsten Anderson, continue that long agricultural story by tending five acres of certified organic vegetables and berries. Their fields produce a changing harvest through the seasons, grown with close attention to the health of the soil and the surrounding landscape.

The farm is also home to pastured turkeys, chickens, and pigs. While the livestock is not certified organic, Bruce and Kirsten raise their animals according to the same organic principles that guide their vegetable production.

Abenaki Springs Farm's harvest reaches the community in many ways. Customers can find their produce through farmers markets, CSA shares, the farm's roadside stand and online store, as well as through a local food hub, area restaurants, and neighboring farm stands.

More than twenty-five years after Bruce first began farming here, Abenaki Springs remains a place where past and present meet in the fields. Each season brings another planting and another harvest, but also another chapter in a much older relationship between people and this remarkably fertile stretch of the Connecticut River Valley.

Primary Season: Vegetables, Farm Stand, Farmers Market