SWANSEA — A long day’s work is a labor of love for Almeida’s farm owner John Almeida Mello III and his wife, Irene.
At age 76, the third-generation owner of the farm and Almeida’s Vegetable Patch farmstand isn’t pining over the day when he can retire. In fact, retirement is nowhere in sight. The day starts at 4 a.m. and even in the midst of a global pandemic and a drought like he hasn’t seen in years, Almeida Mello III’s love of the family business shines through.
“The bottom line is you’ve gotta love it to do it,” he said as customers scooped up bags of corn from the bins in the front of Almeida’s Vegetable Patch farmstand at GAR Highway. "I love it."
Typically in a drought like this one, the ears of corn don’t fill in all the way up the cob, he said, but somehow the corn this season came out perfect. It’s a small miracle he credits to the farm’s rich soil that he cares for as lovingly as the mother of a newborn baby.
That same sense of pride is evident in every corner of the farmstand too, from the spotlessly clean floors and carefully curated boxes and bins of produce, to the generations of family photos lining the walls and the latest addition inside: a television screen with a continually looping video of the farm’s operation and produce.
The video and another new addition, Almeida’s Earth Bar food truck featuring grilled hot dogs, fruit cups and smoothies made from the farm’s produce are the innovation of their son, fourth-generation owner John Almeida Mello IV. Like his parents, he inherited the love of farming while his younger brother, Joe opted to go into the construction trade, said Irene Almeida Mello.
The 22-acre family farm runs along GAR Highway and Gardners Neck Road and for locals, seeing Almeida Mello III traversing the busy four-lane road on a tractor is a common sight.
Mello III’s grandfather, John Almeida Mello Sr., started the family farm. In 1915, at the age of 16 he left Portugal and headed off on a ship to a new life in America with $10 in his pocket.
After working at area vegetable farms, Almeida Mello Sr. bought land and started his own farm with dairy cows. His son, Almeida Mello Jr., stepped into the family business, renting more land and converting it to a produce farm. He sold the farm’s produce wholesale in Boston originally at Faneuil Hall then the Chelsea Market. “My dad was a very big grower,” he said. ‘He grew everything: we’d start off with lettuce, cabbage, peppers, tomatoes and then butternut squash, string beans and then we used to trellis all the tomatoes.”
Nowadays the farmstand is especially known for its tender, sweet corn, but back then they didn’t grow it on the farm because it wasn’t financially worth it in the wholesale market. Hubbard squash, a gigantic bulbous squash was a popular crop then, but it fell out of fashion with consumers.
Almeida Mello III used to take those trips to Boston’s wholesale produce market with his father as a kids. He started working on the farm when he was 10 years old. It’s a year he wouldn’t forget, he said as he pointed to a second floor picture window in a raised ranch house across the street. “I remember very well; 1954 Hurricane Carol. I was here with my dad and my grandfather and the water was up to there,” he said pointing to the bottom of the picture window. “I was crying and all the cucumbers from the hill (on the farm) were floating.”
Almeida Mello III worked alongside his father and grandfather, who gave him the wisdom that guides him to this day: “’Money can’t buy your health; Live an honest life; If you love farming then do it.’ And that’s what we’ve always done,” he said.
In 1973, his father and mother, Evelyn, opened Almedia’s Vegetable Patch, to meet the demands of locals who would stop in asking to buy produce from the wholesale farm. It was just a little two-stall shed and they originally planned to just sell vegetables from the farm but then customers started inquiring about fruits, which aren’t grown on the farm. “I remember I had a box of cherries in my refrigerator and my dad had a box of grapes and we started from there,” recalled Almeida Mello III.
When they brought their produce up to the wholesale produce market in Boston to sell, they bought the fruits fresh off the trucks and ships to bring back to sell at the farmstand. They still get their produce fresh off the ships and trucks in Boston twice a week.
The biggest change over the years, said Almeida Mello III was going from wholesale to strictly retail, which he did when his dad retired in the 1980s. Then in the mid-1980s some kids set the farmstand on fire, which resulted in them building the current structure at 110 GAR Highway. Their son, Almeida Mello IV, brought the farmstand outside, adding the awning and outdoor bins. In fall, they sell mums, sugar pumpkins and display pumpkins and they close at the end of October before opening up again late November for wreaths and Christmas trees.
For a time, they did Halloween corn mazes, but stopped because it turned out to be too labor-intensive in a time when it was tough to find labor, they said.
Irene Almeida Mello, who met her husband in high school in 1959, used to work on the farm in the summers. They married in 1967. These days, she manages the farmstand operation with her son making sure every bit of produce that makes it into the store is just right. “She goes through everything before it goes out for retail. We try to make sure that everything that’s out there for the public is the best we can do. And it’s picked fresh every day,” said Almeida Mello III.
The payoff for all their hard work, said the couple, is the loyal customers who appreciate their quality fresh-picked produce and their clean and tidy farmstand. “We get compliments galore,” she added.
Even today, well into his senior years, Almeida Mello III works on the farm alongside the farm workers seven days a week. “I do all the plowing, all the harrowing, all the planting and then all the feeding and all the site dressing to the plants. I do it all,” he said. “I don’t want to retire. The day I retire I’ll be in the cemetery. I love what I do. I look at the stand and I say, ‘this is what I’ve accomplished.’ I take pride in that.”