Kitchen Garden Farm is a 65-acre, certified organic vegetable farm in Sunderland with a truly special array of products. Owners Lilly Israel and Max Traunstein, longtime employees who bought the farm from its founders in 2024, sell fresh vegetables during the growing season and their own sriracha, salsa, giardiniera and other shelf-stable products year-round.
During the summer months, the Kitchen Garden crew cranks out a wide array of specialty vegetables, which are sold wholesale to grocery stores and restaurants throughout New England.
“We grow a lot of specialty Italian crops, which comes from the original owners of the farm who both did some farming in Italy,” Israel said. “It’s good as a business to specialize in something and to grow unique things.”
Their unusual offerings include fresh fava beans, a kale-broccoli hybrid called spigariello, radicchio and an array of Asian greens — all in addition to more common crops like carrots, tomatoes (heirloom varieties), peppers, eggplant and more.
This time of year, the farm is selling cabbage, radishes, carrots and other storage crops. Customers might still be able to find the last of their winter radicchio on some local store shelves.
“We do this old-timey Italian process called forcing, so we can keep selling it into January,” Israel said. “In the fall, we harvest it from the ground with the roots still on it and keep it in the cooler until we’re ready to force it. Then we put it in tubs full of water with a timed system that drains the old water and gives it new, fresh water. They grow these inner new leaves that are beautiful and crunchy and way less bitter than normal radicchio.”
Aside from continuing sales of storage crops, the primary work of winter revolves around making and bottling sriracha, salsa and other non-perishable products in the farm’s on-site commercial kitchen. Really, though, this is the tail end of a process that began months earlier.
“We’ve got a limited growing season in New England, and our products are made almost exclusively with our own produce. So from July through November, we spend every moment we can getting produce into a stable form where it can sit and wait for the growing season to end,” Israel said.
“For our giardiniera, which is made from carrots, celery, cauliflower and peppers, we chop and pickle those ingredients in a vinegar and salt brine, where they can stay until we’re ready to bottle them,” she said.
Israel continues, “For our salsa, we blanch and puree tomatoes and tomatillos and freeze them — we have pallets and pallets of tomatoes frozen in five-gallon buckets right now. For the sriracha, we take our peppers and grind them up and then mix that with salt and sugar and leave that to ferment in 55-gallon drums, and when they reach the right pH we move them into a cooler. During that time of the year, we have very little time for bottling and we only do it if we’ve run out of any products from the previous season.”
Israel says, “Then from January through May, which is how long it takes us to get through processing everything we’ve preserved, we’re just combining and bottling. We combine the pickled giardiniera ingredients and add sunflower oil. We put the pepper mix for sriracha through a mill to separate the seeds and skins and then we add vinegar and xanthan gum for thickening and we bottle it. That’s how we turn seasonal produce into year-round products that can also employ people year-round to process them.”
Balancing a farm selling fresh produce alongside a prepared-foods business is no simple feat, but for Kitchen Garden Farm, the two sides of the business complement each other well.
“Farming is a really volatile thing — one season can be terrible, and the next season can be great. So if we have a great pepper year, we sell lots of fresh peppers and make a lot of sriracha. Then if the next year isn’t a great pepper year, we sell fewer fresh peppers, but we still have the sriracha from the previous year to sell so it can kind of make up the difference. It’s kind of like two sine waves going opposite each other, and they balance each other out,” says Israel.
Israel and her business partner, Traunstein, were uniquely well-equipped to take on the complexities of this business, having been employed at Kitchen Garden Farm for eight and 10 years, respectively. The original owners, Tim Wilcox and Caroline Pam, who started the farm in 2006, were ready to move on.
“They came to us and asked if we’d be interested in taking over the farm,” Israel said. “And we said, ‘yes.’”
The foursome started discussions about the transition in the summer of 2023 and completed the sale on May 31, 2024. “We decided to do this by December of 2023, and then it took until the end of May to get all the financing secured and the paperwork completed,” Israel said.
Traunstein and Israel ran the farm for the entire 2024 growing season, although the late-spring timing of the farm sale complicated that year’s financial picture. Last year, which was the first year the new owners ran the business and had full control of the financials, has them looking at 2026 with optimism.
“Last year, the growing conditions were really good for us, and we had a great crew,” Israel said. “We’re feeling really good going into year three.”
Look for Kitchen Garden Farm produce and specialty products — not just their sriracha, salsa and giardiniera, but also dried whole peppers and pepper flakes and powders — at local retailers including River Valley Co-op’s two stores, Long River Produce Market in Deerfield, and Green Fields Market. Local restaurants, including The Upper Bend, Little Truc, Daily Operation, and Paul and Elizabeth’s , often feature their produce on their menus.
Visit kitchengardenfarm.com for their online store, which ships nationwide.
Claire Morenon, communications manager at CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture). To find local farms and locally sourced, locally produced specialty food products, visit buylocalfood.org.
