As a participant in last year's Victory Garden Initiative Food Leader program, I was asked to share my "food story". Since it is tightly intertwined with the story of Paradise Farm, I thought I'd share it.
The place began calling to me twenty years ago.
We drove by this property in West Bend that had an original log cabin on it – built in 1849 – with the original barn still standing. It looked like a page right out of my favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I was drawn to it in a really strange way, and I began taking relatives past it on drives through the countryside. The family got so used to my obsession over the years, they started calling it “Mary’s farm.”
When the place became available for sale, we grappled with the question of buying it. It was ridiculous. We needed a little farm in West Bend like we needed a hole in the head. We live and work in the city. We had three kids either in college or on their way there soon. The notion of buying a farm was absurd. Our 18-year-old son sat us down to talk some sense into us. “It seems like a really bad time to buy a farm, Mom and Dad,” he counseled.
And yet, we couldn’t walk away from it. My husband has his own reasons for taking the plunge, but since this is my story, I’ll share that for me it was not something I could articulate at the time… I just had to have the place.
So we bought it….a year ago in January. With it came all the demands and rigors of owning a 160-year-old property ; bats, crumbling foundation, faulty wiring, bats, entire colonies of chipmunks, finding renters that wouldn’t trash the place, and – oh, did I mention – bats. By the hundreds. Living in the attic and walls of the house.
And then there was getting the garden started. Besides a drought, a sizeable deer population and more rodents than I ever knew existed, one of the biggest challenges was the hard, compacted clay soil. All of the glorious topsoil that had once existed there (and all over Wisconsin) was now gone due to years of poor farming practices, and what was left was hard clay subsoil that only seemed to support a healthy crop of goldenrod. Would anything grow in this garden?
As I penetrated the garden, enrolling in the VGI Food Leader program to learn everything I could about healing the soil and growing food, reading every gardening and farming book I could get my hands on, and inviting every friend who knew anything about organic gardening to come and help, I slowly began to realize what drew me to this place so strongly. It finally hit me when I was talking gardening with my Texan sister-in-law, and she was lamenting that their soil was nothing like the rich Midwestern loam of her youth. The Midwest was made for growing vegetables, she said.
This old farm in West Bend lured me in because it was a place where I could honor my agricultural roots, reconnect with what makes this America’s heartland - and in my own little way – stick it to the man. As big industrial agriculture destroys our environment and our food supply, this was a way that I could do a little healing of my own. I could make this a place where children could come and be introduced to the ideas of healthy soil, clean agriculture, and what it takes to care for a plant from seed to harvest.
I have so much to learn. A few of the lessons I learned in my first year:
Weeds are not your friends, especially if you let them go to seed.
There are messy moral issues involved with growing food. How many chipmunks is too many, for example.
An early frost feels more devastating than just about anything else.
Home grown vegetables taste better than just about anything else.
Good tenants (like Jay, Kelly and their beautiful boys who live at our farm) are worth their weight in gold.
Thank you, Gretchen and Jessy from VGI and everyone who has shared their wisdom, encouragement and inspiration. It's going to be a great year on the farm.
