Salt Air Farm raises birds who always come home

While many farms from Riverhead to Orient raise ducks, chickens or geese, Salt Air Farm on New Suffolk Road in Cutchogue raises white doves that are released at weddings and memorial services across the East End.  

Farmers Dan Heston and Prudence Wickham Heston have been raising and training doves for more than 10 years. “It was a crazy dream,” said Mr. Heston. “We paid a lot of money for them, and we’re certainly the only ones to do this on Long Island as far as we know. We usually do two weddings a weekend. Keeping homing birds is considered to be man’s oldest hobby, documented as far back as stories from Noah’s ark, when he released a pigeon that found a fig leaf and it came back to the ark.”

Once in the air, the birds circle a few times above the wedding guests and then fly back home to their loft on the farm. The Hestons said that usually, the birds are back at the farm before they get there. The birds are actually a hybrid, whose ancestry dates to a cross between a rock dove and a racing pigeon. According to Mr. Heston, they look like a white dove with the homing ability, agility and speed of a homing pigeon.

Located behind the rows of the flower fields on the farm, the dove loft is a 12-foot-by-16-foot wooden home for the silky smooth-feathered white birds numbering about 40.

“Depending on who’s sitting on eggs, for our events we pick the ones that are free,” said Ms. Heston as she held one in flight position, her hand clutching the bird’s wings around its body as it cooed. “They pair for life, and they fly back to us because they know their mates and food are here.”  

She explained that it takes the doves about a year and a half to learn how to evade the cooper hawks that wait in the trees at Salt Aire. “Our birds are part of the highs and lows of life, weddings and memorials,” she said.

They combine the doves with the other facet of their event-based business — freshly cut flowers. Inside the two-story barn, built from the timbers of the old Presbyterian church in Cutchogue, were a dozen buckets of blooms — pastel pink peonies, purple and white spirea, blue bachelor buttons, and white mock orange. 

An old hay trolley hanging from the rafters was drying wheat, to be used in the arrangements for CSA members and brides. Many vows have been exchanged under the 6-foot-high arch made of vines and branches from the kiwi bushes growing on the farm. Mr. Heston planted the kiwis in his 20s and now beyond using the vines for the arch. Next to the arch is an old wooden boat, once loaded with decoys by duck hunters, that is often trucked to wedding ceremonies as well.

In the last few weeks, Ms. Heston picked more than 700 peonies for florists on the North Fork. 

Managing the CSA flower membership for five years now, Jill DeSantis, who is legally blind, had her seeing eye dog at her side. Two-year-old Hannah, a shiny black lab who was full of spunk.

“Right now, we have 15 to 20 people a week, but it’s double that in the summer,” Ms. DeSantis said.  She texts CSA members on Thursday that their flowers are ready. Every week, the batch is something different, depending on what’s blooming.

“People pull in and whatever kind of mood they’re in, once they go in the barn and pick their own flowers, it’s just peace,” she said. 

Eleanor, the Hestons’ white doodle mix, sprinted over to greet Kate Bertran, arriving from Jamesport with her Salt Air flower bucket in hand. A CSA member for five years, she said, “The quality is incomparable. The last bouquet I bought lasted six weeks. There’s always something new to beautify my home.” 

The Hestons have five part-time workers tending 135 acres. Since 1680, the farm has been worked by the New Suffolk Tuthills, and then the two families farmed side by side for generations. Ms. Heston said when the last of that line of Tuthills passed, the farm was left to Ms. Heston’s grandfather, John Wickham. His oldest son then purchased it, leading to two distinct farms that still run side by side. 

Climbing white hydrangea frame both sides of the white and grey pebbled driveway into the farm, which stretches between two salt marsh inlets along Peconic Bay and is protected by the East End’s longest dike system. The 1798 farmstead, with its four barns, is on the National Historic Register and is considered one of the best-preserved farmsteads in the country.  

The patch of butterfly bushes on the farm is where brides pose for pictures. And the farm is home to what Mr. Heston calls “probably the largest American chestnut tree on the North Fork.” An endangered species, this tree is pollinated by a “baby chestnut nearby,” according to Mr. Heston, who planted the bigger tree 28 years ago. Salt Air farm sells seedlings and nuts from the massive tree in the fall, one of the newest ventures on the farm helping to reestablish the American chestnut on the East End. 

The original house on the property now serves as the farm stand. Inside, farmer Otis Tuthill etched his name in one of the boards in 1858 before he accepted money to be drafted to serve in someone else’s place in the Civil War. He never returned home, but his name remains.  

Hydrangeas, numbering about 1,500 with 50 varieties, edge the farm along New Suffolk Avenue providing shade tunnels where other plants that don’t need a lot sun, thrive: lily of the valley, hosta, hellebore, white viburnum, and bleeding heart.

“It’s a lot cooler in here,” said Mr. Heston, walking under the tunnel of hydrangeas.