BRUNSWICK

Jenn Legnini, chef and owner of Turtle Rock Farm craft cannery in Brunswick, was raised on a Pennsylvania farm, where her Southern grandmother and Italian grandfather would hang handmade pasta on the backyard clothesline to dry.

Although her grandmother, Ruth, understood a hardy and self-sufficient way of life — where you grow and preserve your food throughout the year, Legnini recalled that despite being surrounded by a strong food culture as a teenager, it wasn’t something she always recognized as important.

Her grandfather, Romolo, was from Italy, and Legnini explained for him too, cultivating and preserving food was a natural order. One of the first things the family established when they emigrated to the United States was, “who grows what, and where,” she said.

“I didn’t learn it all then, it wasn’t my job, and like most kids on a farm, I was trying to go to the movies, not can things,” she said laughing.

A trip to her ancestral homeland of Italy at 18 began to expand her awareness.

“I didn’t know that it was, but it was influential,” she said of the tiny Abruzzo Province town with a thick and specific dialect. “We really couldn’t really communicate. Instead, we ate — we ate all day and were looking at photographs with a 106-yearold great aunt who just kept bringing out more food. It was just incredible what a connection it was.”

Studying art and geology in college, Legnini began to explore more education around canning, and in her mid-20s, while working more in restaurants that were small and buying food from local farms, she had opportunities to work with supportive chefs who encouraged her to learn from others for weeks at a time. She said she pieced together knowledge and took any opportunity to learn from people, including enrolling in online food science courses.

After college, she moved to Maine and started working in fine dining, although her mind was on taking steps toward working in agriculture. Settling in and starting the business in Brunswick was a natural evolution of things, she said.

Picking up part-time work on a farm eventually snowballed into an apprenticeship and, later, living on the farm in Freeport. For that year and a half, Brunswick was sort of her town for that time, she said. The community aspect evolved from there naturally, and Legnini relocated to Brunswick.

While working at a farm in Bowdoinham, Legnini said the land produced more than had been expected, and she started preserving the extra produce. She stepped into it with some ideas in mind, as she had been thinking about how to transition into a value-added market.

She knew what crops were planted, had recipe ideas, and started taking the canned goods to various markets and the annual Common Ground Fair in Unity.

As Legnini continued with the processing, she engaged in mini-contracts with four farms and rented kitchen spaces when local markets were closed to expand her ability to can and preserve fruits and vegetables.

Last year, the growing business began demanding her full-time attention, and she settled on the name Turtle Rock Farm, a nod to the swath of farmland she grew up on in Pennsylvania, about an hour outside of Philadelphia. Legnini had been thinking for more than a decade of a name.

“I thought, I have one, it’s always been there,” she said.

Her childhood home is no longer a farm, and she said she has difficulty recognizing the area as it was when she was a child.

Leasing acre of farmland

This year, Legnini is leasing an acre of farmland on Pennellville Road, and this is the first summer the land has been worked for the business.

The certified organic kitchen for the business is located on the Bath Road, where they have set up shop for about a year and a half.

Her favorite fruit to can is easy to name. “I love tomatoes. I love to grow them — and we don’t do anything fancy with them. We have whole-peeled tomatoes and diced tomatoes. But being able to open a jar and smell the summer in the middle of January is really important to us. It’s my favorite and one of the most important parts of a missing piece of the local food scene. It’s my favorite for so many reasons,” she said.

Last year, Legnini canned 4,800 pounds of tomatoes, with the goal of 10,000 pounds to be preserved this year.

Legnini said she has been surprised by the response and demand for canned goods. “It really seemed like it was asking me to continue to do it, rather than asking myself if I should,” she said.

She said the demand highlights a missing piece in our local food system. “We have frozen fish, meats and great root crop diet, but there is that little missing piece,” she said of canned fruits and vegetables during the winter months.

Turtle Rock Farm also preserves spreadable fruits, that are really low in sugar. Legnini explained she and her crew work so hard to preserve nutrient-dense produce in that state as much as they can.

Legnini said the vision for the business has never changed, focusing on wanting to be growing varieties they want to process. Varieties are chosen based upon nutrient density, production of the plant and the quality of preserves.

At the Pennellville Road farm, they grow tomatoes, cucumbers and winter squash. Legnini said they grow many heirloom varieties, including a green cucumber, the “Boothby Blonde,” named for a Livermore family. “They are delicious, beautiful and really productive plants,” she said.

“What I’ve been able to do here and want to be able to do is build a kitchen space that’s accessible to other farmers,” she said, adding she would like to provide space for freezing produce, or preserving it.

Legnini would like to own a farm eventually and have a place for people where transparency is a goal, explaining she wants customers to come and get winter tomatoes next to the field where they came from. She is focused on the fluidity of the processing.

“We’re taking cucumbers off the plant and into the jar, they don’t hit the freezer. They are crisp as crisp can be and all those nutrients are held there,” she said.

“A lot of it I didn’t realize that I was experiencing, including on the trip to Italy, is our diet used to be more based on food from the farm, so you really would buy bread from people who were growing the grain, and what I’m experiencing is that it makes so much sense on the business end. And it makes sense on the consumer end, with that connection in the local economy. For small towns all over the world, this is normal life,” she said.

Legnini sells her products in Portland through the Midcoast up to Mount Desert Island, including Rosement Market, Lois’ Natural Marketplace, and Morning Glory Natural Foods. She also attends the Crystal Spring Farmers’ Market and the Brunswick Farmers’ Market.

Her hope is to inspire people to try their hand at canning.

“I’m always giving people recipes and spending a lot of time talking to people at markets about preserving. Of course, I want the business to flourish, but it’s awesome there’s a lot more home preserving going on these days,” she said.

Legnini’s in the process of planning what she calls a tomato day, where the kitchen space is made available for home gardeners to come in and use the canning equipment.

“How fun would it be to have a whole community day, with more hands in the kitchen, where everybody can peel and pack,” she said.

jlaaka@timesrecord.com