About Us

At Tuckaway Farm, we aim to satisfy our family’s requirement for the fresh, healthful food necessary to maintaining an authentic Italian kitchen, and to create a surplus for sale to the local community.  All of our produce is raised using environmentally sound methods, and our animals are reared on sustainable maintained pastures. On our ten acres, we produce high-quality vegetables, as well as free-range poultry and eggs. We plan to expand our small flock of Icelandic sheep to provide meat and wool. Our young orchard will begin to produce apples, peaches, pears, apricots, plums, and cherries in the next year or so.

We grow a wide variety of vegetables, many typical of the area, some not so typical, like radicchio di Treviso, San Marzano plum tomatoes for canning, and wild arugula. Using our knowledge of Italian cookery, we preserve some of it as arugula and parsley pesto, as tuna and red pepper conserve, and as dried zucchini for risotto and soup. We intend to offer some of these products for sale to you.

Linking Sustainable Agriculture in the United States and Italy

Before acquiring Tuckaway Farm in 2005, we lived in Città della Pieve, in Central Italy, where we operated a bed-and-breakfast in Molinella I, a rural farmhouse that we had restored. We produced organically grown olives in our 363-tree grove, which were pressed into organic extra-virgin olive oil in Macine del Trasimeno, a mill with a traditional stone press. We also grew wheat, sunflowers, and alfalfa for the Italian market.

When we moved to Massachusetts, our last crop of olives remained to be harvested. Two friends picked them, and Eros Mercuriali, the miller, brought them to his mill every day and pressed them (you’ll find the mill’s website listed on our Related Links page). In addition to our last seventy liters, we imported a little more from Eros and sold it to friends and relatives who had visited our bed and breakfast and loved the oil.

The small success we had encouraged us to repeat the process, on a slightly larger scale. Since we no longer own the grove in Italy, we decided to import oil directly from Eros, who together with his partner Gianluigi Matturri, have a total of 10,500 olive trees, spread out in three groves that cover 163 acres. This may seem like an awful lot of olive trees, but the large commercial growers in the south of Italy have groves that are vast by comparison.

Eros and Gianluigi have won international prizes for their oil, and they are both devoted to producing oil of exceptional quality. They also share our dedication to sustainable agriculture. We know their groves, we know their mill, and we know their informed passion for good olive oil.

Our relationship with them has allowed us to link our little farm in Massachusetts with a small farm in Italy that runs on the same guiding principles.

The experience of living in rural Italy gave us the taste for the agricultural life. And that is what brought us here to Conway, Massachusetts, and Tuckaway Farm.