Mike and Judy Catlin believe that fresh fruits and vegetables should be on anyone’s dinner table as much as possible. Since they bought the Mountain Home Berry Farm 7 years ago, they’ve been working hard to provide seasonal fruits and assorted veggies to homes in the Baxter County, Arkansas area.
The Catlins first came to north-central Arkansas on vacation. They ran across the berry farm, it just happened to be for sale, and bought it. Mike said they had been living in southwest Florida, and the Mountain Home area seemed like a good place to raise kids. “It wasn’t about making a bunch of money or anything. I’ve taught my kids what work looks like and what sweat feels like,” he said.
And what they do certainly does take a lot of work. Mike and Judy work full time at Mountain Home Berry Farm. They are either in the fields or in the country store, where they sell homemade products. Mike said, “In early April we start with asparagus, and of course we plant onions real early – Texas sweet onions. Our next crop up is raspberries.”
Raspberries run from late May through June and again in October. After the spring raspberries come the blueberries, blackberries, green beans and assorted vegetables from May through July. Right now they’re gearing up for what they call Fall Festival, which began Sept. 25.
The Catlins raise pumpkins of all sizes, and ornamental, birdhouse and apple gourds. All of them will be available when parents, kids and students from local schools visit the farm this fall. The Catlins offer a kids program that features a farm tour hayride, a pick-your-own pumpkin patch, a kids’ corn maze, petting zoo and “mulch mountain.”
Mike said, “We’ve been told (by the University of Arkansas) we’re the biggest raspberry farmer in Arkansas, which sounds really good, but what it means is they’re extremely hard to grow here and nobody grows them.”
Their cultivated land is irrigated. Mike said, “We pretty much irrigate everything. Every time we don’t, we’ll lose a crop.” The irrigation system is manual. Mike has improved the system that was in place when they bought the farm, but he hasn’t modernized it. The water comes from one well and an irrigation pond.
Mike said, “We never spray our fruit. That’s very important to our customers. The fruit is never sprayed. We spray for weeds, we spray our pumpkins for bugs – you have to at least once but nobody wants pesticides on their fruit. We’re not organic, though.”
During the summers, Mike and Judy’s two children, Alex and Austin, return from college and help them harvest and sell the crops. Mike and Judy said over and over again, “It’s been a great place for us to raise our kids.”
