UMMERSTON, Vt.

WHEN Jack Manix showed up at his grandfather's farm here 31 years ago, the 200-year-old homestead was headed for ruin.

"The roofs leaked, the fences needed fixing, the cider shed had broken down," Mr. Manix recalled. "Grampa had to give up his cows because he couldn't take care of them."

	Grampa Walker

Mr. Manix, who came to say hello to his grandfather John Elmer Walker and fell in love with the farm, was standing in one of his 17 greenhouses one day last month, surrounded by vines full of ripe red tomatoes. "We start selling our Buffalo tomatoes in mid-May, two months before they're ripe in the home garden," he said. And a second crop keeps bearing right up to Thanksgiving, when the farm closes for the season.

Before that summer visit, Mr. Manix, now 55, thought he would eventually become a lawyer, but he was not in any hurry. He and his wife-to-be, Karen Jensen, who met at Boston University, arrived at the eight-generation homestead, called Walker Farm, on their way to Cape Cod.

"Jack was going to be a fisherman, and I was going to do crafts," Ms. Manix, said, recalling her macramé bikini. "We were hippies."

Ms. Manix, 53, spoke while standing in a field, cutting deep red dahlias, yellow snapdragons and velvety blue-violet lisianthus. A blanket of dove-gray mist lay over 30 acres of organically grown vegetables and flowers. The sugar maples were starting to glow orange on the hills to the east, in New Hampshire. It was 7:30 a.m., and crews were cutting heads of green and red ruffled lettuce; picking peppery arugula; washing fat onions, leeks and beets; and arranging eggplants and potatoes at the couple's roadside farm stand like works of art.

"We just kind of fell into it and never left," Ms. Manix recalled. Before they knew it, they were helping Grampa fix the fence. A week slid into three as they repaired the roof and painted the house. That fall, they were married in the pasture. Their children, Kristin and Dustin, are now 29 and 26.

"My idea of paradise was helping my gramma and grampa on their farm in Nebraska," Ms. Manix said. "And here, we got to have all the animals, the calves and the chickens and the goats."

But full-time farming was not as simple as helping out. Grampa bought them a brindle cow and a Holstein calf and taught them how to milk. He also taught them to start tomatoes and peppers early, in a hot bed of manure on the south side of the pig house. He showed them how to cut timber and hay and to make cider with a press powered by a 1942 Farmall tractor.

But there was no money in it. So Mr. Manix worked as a carpenter and tilled gardens and cut hay for other people. Ms. Manix used to pick a whole field of Lincoln peas by herself.

"We worked for 20 years, making about $15 a day on our vegetables," Ms. Manix said. "It was the flowers that saved us."

Today, gardeners drive the two and a half hours from Boston, or farther, to load up their S.U.V.'s with hundreds of dollars' worth of potted plants. They can choose from 30 kinds of heirloom peppers and 50 kinds of tomatoes. But mostly they want flowers: Verbena bonariensis, with tiny lavender flowers that dance in the breeze; Ammi majus Green Mist, which looks like a minty green Queen Anne's lace; and amsonia, a grass that covers itself in sky-blue flowers in spring then turns orange in fall. (For information, http://www.walkerfarm.com/.)

Walker Farm keeps 35 gardeners busy in the high season, and it reaps about $600,000 in annual sales.

On this September day, the old hit "Sugar, Sugar" was playing, and customers, arms full, lined up in front of Betsy Bates, 61, who has worked here for seven years and knows the regulars (and their children) by name.

"I think of myself as the mayor of Walker Farm," Ms. Bates said. "I used to drive my old VW beetle up here to get milk for 30 cents a gallon." Back then she would put a dollar in the cookie jar for pansies. Now Walker Farm has 30 varieties of pansies and 1,200 other annuals and perennials started from seed, as well as 700 other plants, including 60 kinds of salvia, grown from cuttings.

Daisy Goldschmid, 28, takes charge of propagating the tender perennials. "Daisy could root a broomstick," Mr. Manix said, nodding in her direction.

These fall mornings, Ms. Goldschmid is busy moving plants into greenhouses, where they will be dormant until their first shoots appear in February.

It took the Manixes years to master the basics. They now know that customers will pay 59 cents a pound for four-inch zucchini, not 19 cents a pound for baseball bats. They know that customers buy with their eyes, which is why produce baskets are lined with colorful cloth.

Like most beginners, they overextended themselves.

"We thought 24 chickens were good, so why not 124?" Ms. Manix said. When they sold one calf for $1,200, they decided to raise 20 more, and could not get half the price. They got the old sugar shack working, but tapped too many trees and had to stay up three nights in a row to boil sugar.

That was the winter the basement flooded and drowned the hot water heater. The washing machine died. And both children got pneumonia from the drafty house.

"We sold our 1964 T-Bird that winter for grocery money," Mr. Manix said. "We would go through the attic for antiques." The children wore hand-me-downs, and Kristin, who was born in April, when farmers are spending every penny on seed or fixing equipment, never got birthday gifts.

But as the Manixes learned, they saved enough to send Kristin to Middlebury College and Dustin to the University of Vermont. And they never pushed them to be farmers.

"I went off to San Francisco, but I soon learned I didn't want to live in the big city," Kristin said. "I missed the farm. I missed my parents. I missed working outside." Now, she lives nearby and manages sales.

Dustin returned this summer to help manage the fields. "As a kid, I felt like, `Man, my friends don't have to clean out the barn,' " he said. "But then I realized how lucky I was. Most people can't wait to get out of their little town. But I've got a reason to be here."

As Jack Manix put it, "The pluses outweigh the minuses." There is a deep sense of continuity here, from the 1770 house, where, according to town records, Ethan Allen slept in the attic, to a new post-and-beam barn of native hemlock and pine.

In 1993 the surrounding waste district announced that it wanted part of the farm for a landfill. But Dummerston, population 1,800, turned down the plan in a referendum by a vote of 600 to 60. Mr. Manix ran for selectman and won. An environmental lawyer took their case pro bono. A hydrogeologist, who had worked on the farm as a girl, came back to spar with the waste management engineers.

After three years, the dump proposal died. And the farm stand started doing more business than ever. "It was a boon," Ms. Manix said.

Maybe that's part of the joy here, and part of the power of these well-tended fields. When you take emotional possession of a place, it belongs to you. And you belong to it.

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