Matt Salvaterra at his gardens

Years after a successful football career, Matt Salvaterra '03 has transformed his 10-acre property into an organic garden selling wholesale, to local restaurants and shares of CSA.

From the Lehigh Gridiron to Salvaterra's Gardens

Matt Salvaterra ’03 made headlines playing football at Lehigh. Now, inspired by an 1800’s Parisian style of gardening, he’s tackling organic farming.

Story by

Stephen Gross

Photography by

Christa Neu

At Lehigh in the late 1990s, early 2000s, Matt Salvaterra ’03 was synonymous with football. Look no further than the bobblehead the university had created in his likeness—the only one ever made for football and one of four ever made for any sport at the university—for evidence of his popularity in the Lehigh community.

The four-time member of the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll was the first-ever two-time captain in Lehigh’s modern history. His list of accomplishments also include 2002 Patriot League Scholar Athlete of the Year—one of only four Mountain Hawks to ever receive the award—and All-Patriot League twice. Not only was Salvaterra a member of three Patriot League Championship teams, but the squad advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament twice during his time at the school.

Matt Salvaterra photo in football uniform from playing days

Matt Salvaterra’s list of accomplishments include four-time member of the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll, first-ever two-time captain in Lehigh’s modern history and 2002 Patriot League Scholar Athlete of the Year.

Today, Salvaterra is still making his impact felt on the field—just not one that football is played on.

With his wife Jessica, he established and operates Salvaterra’s Gardens, a certified organic farm growing over 100 different types of vegetables on their 10-acre property in Longswamp Township, Pennsylvania. Inspired by a 1800s Parisian style of gardening, he makes the most of the farm’s relatively small footprint. Salvaterra operates a farmers stand on the premises, about 40 minutes southwest of Goodman Stadium, and another at the Easton Farmers Market, and he sells wholesale, to local restaurant owners and shares of CSA (community supported agriculture).

Salvaterra says he never thought gardening would turn into a career that now supports his family of four. He never even envisioned it as a hobby, which is how it started.

“I thought I would be coaching football,” Salvaterra says with a chuckle.

Yet there are no reminders to Salvaterra Garden’s visitors of his playing days. No evidence of his interest in football, which still remains. He says he doesn’t even own the bobblehead Lehigh made in his likeness and handed out to the first 1,000 fans who attended a Nov. 16, 2003, contest against Bucknell. Only if you broach the topic will you learn of his love of sports—he admits he could talk about sports, including Lehigh football, all day.

But to Salvaterra, his current lifestyle reminds him of his football days. It’s one of the reasons he believes he enjoys it so much.

“This fits my personality,” Salvaterra says. “It mimics a lot of things football was, like where you're on a schedule. There's a goal. I’m competitive, so there's competition because you own a business. In your head, you think, ‘If I work harder than everybody else, …’ you know it's that kind of thing, so it fits [the football mindset].”

THE GARDENS

A stone’s throw from Bear Creek Mountain Resort, Salvaterra’s Gardens sits across from two-story homes along a back road overlooking Alburtis, a borough of approximately 2,500.

Turning onto a long paved driveway to enter the property, visitors pass his ranch home, about 75 feet from the road, and his children’s outdoor play equipment to their left. Past the house, where the path turns to gravel, is his farm stand and a parking area.

On this day early in the growing season, Salvaterra works with one of his employees in a room on the side. The back wall is lined with freezers that include his produce as well as local breads and meats, such as chorizo, sausage, chicken and steaks, which he sells especially when his own offerings are limited out of season.

This fits my personality. It mimics a lot of things football was.

Matt Salvaterra '03

His short hair and chin stubble from his playing days have been replaced by a full beard and long hair, pulled back into a man bun.

As he walked toward his field of tunnels sprawled out across almost the entire east side of the property, he says it was tough to estimate exactly how much land is used for growing because his gardens are not a typical, square growing area. Despite having 10 acres of land, Salvaterra does not grow on all of it.

He will never compete with a full farm, he says, and grows produce to fill the void of what big farms don’t always grow.

“A lot of your bigger farms that have more land are going to be much more aggressive growing things like corn, potatoes, broccoli, things that are going to take up a lot of space,” he says. “But things like lettuce mix become too labor intensive for them. And in the dead of the summer, to get it to germinate and then to harvest it in between thunderstorms? They're not going to have enough tunnels, so they just don't do it. We kind of fill that niche, but in order to fill it, you have to protect the crop or else it's too up and down.”

Two photos of Matt Salvaterra in his gardens

There are 100 tunnels on the property, one of which is heated and can be used to extend the growing season for some vegetables, such as tomatoes.

Most everything on the property is grown in tunnels—long rows with a half-moon structure over top covered in plastic—using a no-till farming method because he has found that it leads to less weeds. And with their setup, they have to pick weeds by hand and paying staff only to weed, he says, wouldn’t be profitable for them.

The tunnels are covered, but not closed on the sides in the summer. They’re covered to keep water off the leaves of the plants and regulate exactly how much water they get using his irrigation system using groundwater. A particularly heavy thunderstorm, hail or wet summer can wreak havoc on their crops without the cover.

Salvaterra says they first started without tunnels, because the yield was too unpredictable and not up to the quality he prefers when selling.

In the first small tunnel, one 100 on the property, he had dill growing on May 1, with space for eggplant to be planted. He also had three medium-sized tunnels, and in the only heated tunnel on the property, just behind his house, Salvaterra had tomatoes growing; he expected them to be ready to be picked the second week of the month.

Despite having a heated tunnel, he says he’s still careful about what he grows in there. For instance, he doesn’t grow tomatoes year-round; he’d need supplemental lighting for that, which wouldn’t be cost-effective. Instead, he uses the heated tunnel to extend his growing season for tomatoes.

“People generally are going to bring cherry tomatoes [to markets] in July,” Salvaterra says. “You're going to get a lot of months where there's not a lot of them, so you're not competing with anyone, but you're not going to pay to do that in the winter.”

In the winter, he limits what he grows to produce that doesn’t need as much light and can freeze and thaw, such as kale, spinach and swiss chard.

‘I WOULDN’T CALL IT FARMING’

Salvaterra got the idea for his process from a book he read when he first started gardening about farms on the outskirts of Paris in the early 1900s. Those farmers used methods to grow crops effectively on small plots of land, much like what Salvaterra is doing, to provide those in the city with vegetables year-round. They used cloches—Salvaterra describes them as glass carboys with the bottoms cut off—to protect the plants and extend the growing season. At night, the plants would be completely covered, and during the day, the cloches would get tipped up to let air underneath.

They also timed everything out so that while one type of produce was being harvested, others were already growing. Salvaterra noted how labor-intensive it was, which is why he made modifications for his own use.

“Everything out here is more gardening, but it's like a standardized form of gardening,” Salvaterra says. “I wouldn't call it farming. It's farming, but it's not like a farm when you’re driving by cornfields. If you see romaine growing in California, it's not like that. It's more like a standardized form. And the beds are constantly rotating. They always have something growing in them. To make enough money, you have to have a plan that you’ve worked on for years where the timing’s all right.”

I wouldn't call it farming. It's farming, but it's not like a farm when you're driving by cornfields.

Matt Salvaterra '03

His plan for what to plant when, and how much of it, to make the most of his limited space took years of trial and error. With each part of the country different due to light and temperature, he couldn’t talk to anyone outside the area for tips on timing. He set out a schedule, wrote down all the dates, saw what worked and what didn’t, and tried again the following year.

“If you plant spinach, you have to know exactly when you're going to plant it because it can't be too big going into the winter, but it can't be too small,” Salvaterra says. “If it's too small, it's not going to actually be harvestable. When the light conditions drop, it won't be harvestable until the next February. If it's too big, it actually just causes disease problems.”

Salvaterra even has a strategy for field mice. Knowing they’ll snack on the crops, in one tunnel he plants more dill than he plans to harvest on the outside and then the eggplant goes in the middle. He says the field mice eat the first thing they find and leave the eggplant alone.

GETTING INTO GARDENING

Matt Salvaterra with 2000 Rivalry MVP award

Matt Salvaterra recorded two interceptions, both of which led to points for Lehigh, in the 136th edition of The Rivalry. His performance helped the sophomore become just the third defensive player to earn the MVP award for the 2000 regular season finale.

Salvaterra excelled both in the classroom and on the gridiron while at Lehigh. But it’s his memorable moments on the field that make him well-known to many Mountain Hawk fans, including a Rivalry game MVP and one of the most dramatic comebacks in recent history.

With the Lehigh football team trailing Lafayette 10-7 in the 136th edition of The Rivalry, he recorded his first of two interceptions on the day, both of which led to points for Lehigh and helped the sophomore become just the third defensive player to earn the MVP award for the 2000 regular season finale.

Two years later, after switching positions from cornerback to strong safety, Salvaterra picked off a pass and returned it for a touchdown after suffering a slight concussion and delivering a pep talk to his teammates, who were down 17 points at halftime. The play was part of a 24-point fourth quarter that rallied the Mountain Hawks and extended their regular season win streak to 26 games, the longest in the nation at the time.

After graduating from Lehigh with a degree in education and psychology, Salvaterra taught fifth grade in the Bethlehem School District. His wife worked at Wegmans, a regional supermarket chain. They lived in Allentown, and looking for something to do during his summers off from school, Salvaterra put in a garden while redoing things around the house. Enjoying it, they rented pieces of land to expand their hobby.

Matt Salvaterra bobblehead

On Nov. 16, 2003, Lehigh gave away Matt Salvaterra bobbleheads to the first 1,000 fans in attendance as they faced Bucknell. It was the only bobblehead ever made for football and one of four ever made for any sport at the university.

The couple quickly realized they were yielding more crops than they could use and joined Easton Farmers Market to sell their excess produce. It was the perfect summer job for a teacher.

Wanting kids—they now have two—they decided Jessica would eventually stay home to raise their family. He would continue to teach and farm, so they bought the property that would become Salvaterra’s Gardens. When they bought their current home during the 2008 housing market crash, none of it was a farm.

“It was just fields and woods,” he says.

They kept their full-time jobs and farmed until Jessica became pregnant with their first child. Even then, Salvaterra continued to teach and farm.

“That was kind of a crazy idea,” Salvaterra says. “We did it for a while.”

In addition to the farmers’ market, they now operate a CSA. They were involved in selling wholesale, which they stopped during the pandemic, but Salvaterra says they’re getting back into it and plan to do even more. They also have supplied different restaurant owners in the area, such as the owners of Bolete Restaurant and Mister Lee's Noodles at the Easton Public Market.

Pausing wholesale sales when COVID-19 hit opened up another opportunity—a farm stand right on the premises that they sell out of all year long.

“They were shutting so much stuff down in March [2020], right when you’re starting [to grow],” Salvaterra says. “Basically what happened was all the farms that are the same as us, going to markets, things like that, we just all sold to each other off our property. So I would buy their stuff and bring it here and I'd sell them stuff.”

In addition to Salvaterra, the Gardens have two full-time employees and one part-time worker. Homeschooling their children, Jessica no longer helps in the field, but assists with the CSA, the farmer’s market stand and their website.

Matt Salvaterra at his gardens

After graduating from Lehigh, Matt Salvaterra became a teacher and began gardening with his wife as a summer hobby.

Story by

Stephen Gross

Photography by

Christa Neu

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