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11/14/2006: "Who are we, anyway?"

If you've stumbled onto this blog, and you're not related to us, you're probably wondering who we are and what the heck is going on. In this posting I will talk about who I am, and how I came to be hooked up with Nate and Channa and Rebecca.

I grew up in Illinois, mostly in a small town that had yet to be swallowed up in the march of Chicago exurbs. We were surrounded by corn fields for the most part, in fact. My grandfather had a ritual that I can even still remember: we would drive up to Sonny Acres farm stand on North Avenue, and he would badger someone to go out in the field and pick some corn, then we would drive straight back to Grandma K's kitchen where the water was boiling on the stove. We'd shuck 'em and pop in the water, wait a minute for the water to return to the boil, then shut off the gas and wait 3 minutes. Pluck them out, and eat hot. The best corn, and the best way to cook corn, that there ever was.

My childhood home came with a backyard that had a number of Italian prune plum trees in it. In the early years of living there we picked a lot of plums, and made a fair amount of plum jam. The trees were ancient, however, and output was declining. Grandma K's yard had better plums: green gage plums that could only be picked with a fairly tall and rickety folding ladder. Her yard also had a grape arbor, from which the grapes had mysteriously disappeared; we always hoped that they would somehow come back, but they never did. Grandma also had a small raspberry patch next to the garage that I would watch eagerly in the summer months, but the fruits were small and rare. The knowledge of how to care for raspberries appeared to have been lost from the family.

My mom was bitten by the gardening bug at some point, and I was enlisted as "coolie labor" to prepare a garden bed at the rear of the property. The truth is that I wasn't much enthused by the prospects, and my care of the garden varied between seldom and never. It didn't help that the garden was adjacent to the untended field that stretched out behind our property, and the garden was exposed to a large variety of weed seed invasions.

When I got married after college we rented a house with a side yard, and we took a run at having a small garden. The owner, however, had stipulated that the garden had to be at the back of the side yard, which put it partially in the shade. We weren't especially successful, and we didn't even put a garden in at our next two rental houses.

It wasn't until we had gone back to school, graduated, moved out to the Pacific NW, and bought a house in Vancouver that we took another run at gardening. It started innocently enough when my wife planted some marigolds around the perimeter of the patio slab; they grew well, and watering them gave us something to do in the evenings. She began to really take an interest in gardening, and thus we put in a 15 x 40 foot vegetable garden, four fruit trees, a dozen blueberries, and an enormous raspberry patch. She started a lot of plants in pots, and I put in irrigation systems to keep them all happy during the dry Northwest summers. Somehow everything thrived! Soon we had beans and tomatoes and potatoes and zucchini coming out of our ears.

This photo shows the wild exuberance of that first real garden behind the deck.


We used to go out to farms in the area for u-pick afternoons; one time we arrived at a blueberry farmlet not far from our house and had a conversation with the new owners, who I learned had just purchased their property. It kind of put an idea in my head that some day I would like to own some agricultural property (that farmlet has since been completely paved over by suburbia).

When we sold that house to move to Portland, the new owners put a shop on the garden to house the husband's train set. Oh, well. Our new house in Portland had a side yard, but by then I had lost my gardening partner; our marriage didn't survive the conflicting expectations we had from the move to Portland.

The side yard of the house on 30th Ave. was a tantalizingly blank canvas: it was on the north side of the house, so only half of it was reliably sunny, but there was quite a bit of space. There was also an old pear tree against the garage, a failed espalier apparently. However, it gave shopping bags of pears, which I dried or gave away to friends. There was a grape vine along the back fence that seemed indestructible, and bore sweet purple fruit every September. Gradually, over the seven years that I lived there, I changed the yard to make it my own.

I paid to have a retaining wall put in (there was an adventure in itself). With the help of a trying-to-go-straight drug user I cut down all the arbor vitae that ringed the yard. My friend Jon helped me put in a lovely fence. I paid to have the disease-ridden McIntosh apple tree and stubborn ash tree removed. I put in fruit trees: a cherry that seemed bent on forgetting its dwarf designation, and a couple of exotic apples.

I tried to keep my hand in the vegetable game. I put in six 4 x 10 foot beds. Living alone, working full time, with a social life in post-divorce overdrive, my gardening was hit or miss: one year I had good tomatoes, next year not much. Beans were usually a reliable performer. Most years I had peas. I used to joke that I was the midnight gardener: on late spring nights I would be out in the garden working the soil, or planting seeds. Some people plant by the light of the moon for luck; I did it because it was usually the only free moment in the day.

This picture shows one of the early vegetable gardens, before I had even fully excavated the areas around the boxes. I think that the front box has potatoes, and the rear box has peas.


The peas at an earlier stage of development, with some over-wintered brassica that has gone to bolt behind it:


One thing that I always took care of was the raspberry patch. I put a lot of love and time into the raspberries. During the peak of the season in mid July I would come home from work, grab my picking bucket, and head out to the yard. I learned that if I kept up with the fruit the plants would maximize production. There was usually a week in the middle of the season when I picked an astounding gallon of berries every day.

The raspberry variety that I planted was called Tulameen, and they bore large, sweet berries:


Looking back, the yard was a work in progress right up until I sold that property; it was only then I got the weed barrier cloth put onto the garden paths, the patio completed, and the final design more or less completed (the new owners replaced the garden beds with a children's play area - do you see a pattern here?). My one iron-clad criteria for the new house I was going to buy with my soon-to-be second wife was that it had to have a sunny exposure. The new house, however, proved to be a larger project than I had envisioned, and I have yet to have much of a garden here.

2004 was the most politically active year of my life. The events of 9/11, the subsequent wars, the electoral fraud, and some reading I had been doing on the American Empire all combined to cause me to question society and my role in it. I had the opportunity to hear Richard Heinberg speak in San Francisco, and I became aware of the imminence of peak oil and gas in North America. You can read my essays on this at my other weblog, Rototillerman; see, for instance, The Machine Parts 1 and 2. I decided that my personal response to all of this was prepare for an eventual retirement (perhaps early retirement) to a rural property in Oregon.

I spent several months combing real estate listings, and went out on some marathon outings with my friend Dorothy, the real estate agent. I came very, very close to buying property near some friends in Yamhill county; however, the decision point for making an offer came while my wife was out of town, and when I delayed to discuss it with her someone else bought it.

Eventually I stumbled on what at first glance appeared to be the world's most inept real estate listing for a property near Albany: the indistinct RMLS photo showed a couple of fowl milling around in front of a barn in the distance. It claimed to have two bathrooms, though when I visited the property I found one of the bathrooms was nothing more than a large closet with some bathroom fixtures flung into it. The house was in fairly rough shape, with leaky windows and other unfinished projects here and there. The barn leaked, and the shop was filled with junk. When we walked around the property line, Dorothy mostly talked about how park-like the back area seemed; I think she had sort of dismissed the property as being too much of a fixer-upper. However, I liked the bones of the house, and the orchard and pasture areas met my requirements for arable land. I bought it.

I hadn't had owned the farm very long, and had only blabbed about it to a few friends, when several people contacted me and offered to live there. One was a young man who had done some organic farming back in the midwest, and I eventually concluded a lease agreement with him. Although I had explained that I wasn't looking for a standard landlord-tenant sort of relationship, that is what it eventually devolved into; I found myself being called to travel 75 miles to fix things, some of which I felt were things that he could have prevented (opinions vary on this). Meanwhile I had begun to think about hooking up with some people who might have a more genuine interest in putting the land to productive use. One day while reading the day's crop of energy-related news stories at energybulletin.net I came across this Associated Press story about the resurgence of organic farming clubs at U.S. universities:

Students Flock to Campus Organic Farms
by Julia Silverman (AP)

CORVALLIS, Ore -- Plenty of college kids still subsist on a steady diet of ramen noodles, cold cereal and beer to wash it all down. Not Nate France. The crop and soil sciences major at Oregon State University here wouldn't dream of following the well-beaten path to the local Carl Jr.'s for cheap, mammoth burgers.

Instead, every Thursday afternoon until the sun sets, France helps till and tend to a pocket-sized, student-run organic farm on a couple of soil-rich acres just outside this western Oregon college town.


Nate France, a 27-year-old crop and soil sciences major at Oregon State University tends to his winter squash Thursday, July 14, 2005, in Corvallis, Ore. Every Thursday afternoon until the sun sets, France heads for the hills to help till and tend to a pocket-sized, student-run organic farm located on a couple of soil-rich acres just outside Corvallis. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Well, of course that was Nate written up right there by the Associated Press! However, what initially caught my eye in the article was a line about the fact that the OSU organic grower's club was looking to expand. I tracked down James Cassidy, the staff organizer of the club, and wrote to him to ask if the club was looking to expand in acreage - because I was willing to offer the club the use of some acreage on what was to become Living Green Farm. He wrote back to say that they had enough acreage, but he would mention my offer to Nate, who was one of the most enthusiastic members of the OSU Organic Grower's Club. A couple of weeks later, on a hot, sunny August afternoon, Nate and his friend Marshall met me at the farm and we took a walk in the pasture and talked. That summer of 2005 was a very, very bad year for weeds: there was tansy ragwort everywhere, and the uncut grass was knee-high. Nate was able to talk knowledgeably about weeds and pasture management, which impressed me. I explained why I was doing this, and what I hoped the farm would become, and Nate got it very quickly.

The whole scenario with the original tenant had not yet played out, however, so our original agreement was just to make land available to Nate and his wife Channa to use while they continued to live in Corvallis. By the end of the year, after the water system had frozen and cellar filled up with water, I made the decision to ask the original tenant to leave to make room for Nate and Channa to live on the farm full-time. That took a couple more months to happen, and that gave us time to do some fairly extensive emailing back and forth talking about what kind of relationship we desired. The precise nature of that relationship would probably take its own posting to explain, but the rough outline is that we have agreed to de-emphasize the economic nature of our relationship, and instead work on the sharing nature of it. Sharing food, sharing knowledge, sharing tools are the basic principles. And I have to say that it is going pretty well: we have gotten a lot of vegetables, cider, and beer in the past year, and I've been providing the tools and capital improvements to make the farm as sustainable as possible.

Comments:

Kurt:

I just love reading your blog. It is insightful and so well written. It gives us a chance to keep up with your activities, even though we are so far away. Keep up the good work and have a good Thanksgiving holiday. Looking forward to seeing you soon and discussing your ongoing project.

Uncle Jim

Thanks for your kind words! - Kurt