Karen Wasson has been selling fruits and vegetables at Iowa City-area markets since the mid-80s. Though she grew up raising tomatoes on her parents’ farm, she never expected growing produce to become a decades-spanning career for herself.
Wasson Produce started, she said, because her young daughter didn’t want her to go to work. It was a way to make a living from home, but ended up being something she loved to do. For years the Conesville, Iowa farm offered pick-your-own strawberries, in addition to diversified market crops. Today, the farm serves up to five local farmers markets a week, with Wasson’s now-retired husband working alongside her and her daughter lending help on the side.
Through bad weather, pests and weeds, Wasson Produce manages to harvest a vast diversity of fruit and vegetables year after year. The family trio does their best to harvest fresh produce ahead of every market.
“We try to have a variety, and not everything makes it,” Wasson said.
The key to a consistent and bountiful harvest is diversity, she said, both in variety and timing. Take tomatoes, her favorite thing to grow as an example. She staggers planting different varieties throughout the season so she can harvest juicy red and yellow fruits for months. If frost or other pressures kill off one type, a hardier back-up variety will likely survive.
Her farm typically has some of the earliest tomatoes and cucumbers in spring thanks to greenhouse growing methods, and an abundance of strawberries in early June. In the summer, she sells watermelon, squash and a full suite of warm-season fruits and veggies. In the fall, Wasson Produce offers a wide variety of squash, gourds, sweet potatoes and other storage crops, too.
Wasson said the operations scales back little-by-little each year, but nearly forty years after getting started, she still loves to farm.
“I guess I just grow what I like to eat,” she said.