Donate to help Botticello Farms!

Hi, my name is Heidi Luck, Owner of Luck of Bolton Farm in Bolton, CT. My family has been friends with the Botticello's for years. I am also a fellow farmer.

Please HELP!

ANY $ will help. Funds will be used to meet immediate payroll for the farm's employees and help pay bills. These people are members of our community and we need to support them in their time of need. Thank you, Please donate if you can. Thank you, Heidi

Hre is a video link about the flooding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBkfylufqck

Here is a little history of Botticello's.

Botticello Farms, located on the borders of the Glastonbury/East Hartford town lines, is the only operating vegetable farm left in Manchester, Connecticut.

Botticello Farms has been in operation since 1971 but Butch's' family owned, and operated, their vegetable farm on Spencer Street, in Manchester since 1927. The farm started in a time of hippies, the Vietnam War, free love and with the drug scene starting to bloom on the horizon. Butch wanted to keep his 13-year-old daughter from getting involved with all of this so he offered that if she would take care of his garden in the backyard, whatever our mom didn't freeze, can or pickle could be sold on the picnic table in the front yard. Within a few years, the farm started growing. Loyal customers came by season after season supporting local and getting fresh vegetables on their way home from work. By the time Shelly was 16 she had saved enough money to purchase her first car, and as the farm grew Butch started buying land to plant more vegetables to offer to our loyal customers. Eventually, he built a "stand" in the front yard with built-in coolers, and we bought local fruit and kept adding local products to offer our customers. By this time the whole family as well as our friends were involved in helping us grow our own. It takes a lot of friends and family to continue to grow a farm, you cannot do it on your own. Soon we put up a greenhouse and were offering hanging plants, annuals and vegetable plants in the spring and pumpkins and mums in the fall and Christmas trees and wreaths at Christmas. By 1987 we had outgrown the front yard, back yard and side yard. Butch wanted to grow more and offer more but needed to maintain our location. He purchased the Cobbs' property across the street from his home, and this is where he built his new farm Stand. We have approximately 20 acres on the Stand site, but Butch continued to buy land in the rich, fertile Glastonbury meadows, along the beautiful Connecticut river-where we now grow 90 percent of our product.

Soon after building the new stand, Butch brought his son Tony and son-in-law David, and daughters Shelly and Ellery into the business. We have an obligation to our family our employees and our wonderful customers to keep working to stay in business. Farming is hard and not a "job" it is a lifestyle you have to love it, live it and breathe it. We have had many hard seasons working with Mother Nature, and have suffered losses before, but never in our history have we lost everything just when the season was starting, normally the river floods in the early spring before it is planted or in the late fall, after the season has just about ended. But we hope to weather this storm and keep offering fresh, local products on the farmstand through this season and as we all say "There's always next year". Farming is stereotyped as a no-brain job that requires only the ability to get dirty. I have learned so far that there is so much more to farming than that. The people I am working with are amazingly gifted in their field of study and can easily prove their years of classroom work, through their endless facts about the farm, and extensive knowledge in the many different tasks given to them. Agricultural students have to combine science with nature to maintain what the rest of us take for granted. Without them, we would not have fresh fruits and vegetables, meat or dairy products.

“The human race depends on farming to survive and to prosper into the next century." - Samantha Docking -FAS

Botticello Farms has lost 90% of its crops this season due to the unprecedented rain that caused devastating flooding on its farmland. Please donate anything you can to help the farm make Payroll and keep the lights on.

NO FARMS, NO FOOD.

Thank you!