REX OBERHELMAN: $27,000 (Net!) from Five Organic Acres

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PLOWBOY: What is?

REX: Weeds. Even though we have that black plastic mulch down and can tractor-cultivate between the rows, we spend more time out there pulling weeds than just about anything. We use a lot of good old "Armstrong Herbicide."

PLOWBOY: Do you do many other maintenance tasks, like staking tomatoes?

REX: Trying to stake 4,000 tomato plants would be very time-consuming, so we just let the tomatoes grow on the tires and plastic. We do prune the leaves to speed ripening — about four weeks before frost. Otherwise, 25 to 30% of the crop might not ripen in time.

PLOWBOY: Rex, you make the whole job sound easy. Now tell the truth.

REX: I work hard, but I like to work. Most people don't like to work because they don't feel good about themselves. They don't feel that they're producing great things for society or themselves.

I like what I'm doing. It's fun to watch things grow. It's fun to see people enjoy my products.

PLOWBOY: How many hours do you work each day?

REX: It varies. Many times, such as when we're grading and picking tomatoes at the height of the harvest, we work 20-hour days for a while.

SHARON: Sometimes we can't keep up with all the work. We'll be picking ripe tomatoes, for example, and by the time we get all the way down to the end of a row and look back around, it seems like all the others have turned red, too!

PLOWBOY: Is tomato harvest your busiest time?

REX: From then right through to the end of October. That's when we harvest squash and pumpkins. Picking, washing, and processing 20 tons of squash and pumpkins can be pretty time-consuming.

SHARON: We also work hard tending spring seedlings and putting out crops. It takes a lot of hours to put out 1,000 broccoli plants.

PLOWBOY: Do you ever get to take a vacation?

SHARON: I guess our vacation time is the winter months when we're tending plants in the greenhouse. We work only four or five hours a day then.

PLOWBOY: Tell me about your new greenhouse. It's pretty big — 30' X 50' . Wasn't it expensive?

REX: No. About all we had to pay for was the concrete for the footings.

SHARON: I'll never forget the day Rex came home and said, "Have I got a deal for you!" When he told me we were going to completely disassemble and rebuild a commercial greenhouse, I said, "We're going to what?"

REX: What happened was that a greenhouse operation in town went out of business. They were going to destroy the building to save paying taxes on it, so I made them a token payment of $100 for it, and we went from there. We started taking it down in October, and we'd finished attaching it to our home and were producing plants in it by the middle of February.

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