Can These Salad Evangelists Persuade America To Finally Eat Its Vegetables?

AT WARD’S BERRY FARM, 30 miles south of Boston, the first day of May dawns cloudy and cold, with a spitting drizzle that renders an umbrella more annoying than helpful. It’s a bad day to plant tomatoes.

- Sheila Marikar

“Tomatoes really don’t prefer to be below 50 degrees very often,” says Jim Ward, the farm’s proprietor, who has a hardier constitution than his plants: He’s wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no jacket; his ruddy cheeks are the only indication that he might be cold. But Ward’s crew is improvising, putting “row cover”, a biodegradable tarp, over the seedlings as they go from the warmth of the greenhouse into the damp chill of the ground. “There’s compost down there that will give us a little heat,” he says. “You’d be surprised, when you trap it in with the row cover, it’s pretty nice down there.”