I’D ALWAYS WANTED TO LIVE ON A FARM. I never understood this, since I grew up in Seattle; you’d think I would be a confirmed city girl. My twin sister and I were born in Champaign, Illinois, a university town in the heart of corn country. When we were about three months old, my father, who had just received another post-graduate degree from the University of Illinois (go Illini!), got a job as a computer engineer at Boeing, so we moved to Seattle. And although I lived there all my life until David and I moved to our farm, I had always felt more at home in small towns. Even when traveling, I tended to gravitate toward country settings. My mother grew up just north of Chicago, and used to tell stories of farm life and the pigs she raised. I remember feeling a twinge of envy now and then, wishing I had been able to grow up on a farm. But for various reasons, I had stayed in Seattle, most of those years right in the heart of the city.
David had dreamed of living on this property since he was a young boy. He was born in Indiana, and his family moved to the Seattle area in the mid-1950s, when David was five. He and his four sisters often spent part of their summer vacations here with their grandparents. David remembers loving it and hoping to live here someday. Eventually he made firm plans to move here as soon as he retired from driving city buses in Seattle. Long before that time arrived, he had discovered that no one else in his family was as interested in living here as he was; it was too far away from the city, too inconvenient a kind of life without electricity and had no neighbors nearby. So David made his plans, and continued working.
After his grandmother died in the early 1990s, David bought the property from the estate. Since he was still working in Seattle, the house was unoccupied for a time. He tried renting it out, but it was difficult to manage from a distance, and renters usually wanted to be there in the summer but not in the winter. Later he arranged for a tenant/caretaker, who stayed here for the last twelve years before David’s retirement. In the meantime, David came up fairly often on weekends.
After I met David in 1999 (yes, we met on a city bus; that’s a book in itself), he told me about his “country place,” and brought me here occasionally to visit. I didn’t even know what “off the grid” meant; all I remember noticing was the lack of electric lights. By the time we married in August 2000, with nearly six years to go before David was due to retire, I was not just looking forward to moving to the farm; I was doing some planning and dreaming of my own.
Meanwhile, David was working a lot of overtime; his pension would depend on how much he earned the last two years before his retirement. I appreciated that he was doing all he could to provide for our future. So although we had talked about it and I knew more or less what to expect, the reality was a little hard to take. He was coming home later in the day, so we had less time together. Also, he was understandably more tired; even when we were together at home, he often simply wanted to relax, look at his e-mail or whatever.
The last year before David retired was especially difficult for me. He was working six days a week and didn’t use very much of the vacation time he was entitled to. I sometimes rode around on the bus with him, just to see him a little more. I have to admit that, about two years before he retired, I began to be concerned about the transition from this life — where we didn’t have much meaningful time together — to a life where we’d not only be going through two transitions (his retirement and moving), we’d also be around each other much more. In fact, to me it really seemed like going from one extreme to the other. Somehow, knowing all this well ahead of time and thinking about it and planning for it didn’t seem to make that much difference. I realized that you can’t always anticipate everything, especially when it’s a totally new experience, and we would no doubt make mistakes and have to learn as we went along. But still! The move being spread over a few months should have made things easier, but in the end, it was more stressful than we’d expected. By September, I was tired and so ready to be done with the moving process. And in my heart, I was definitely no longer in Seattle.
Ready to Grow
Certainly one of the things I took for granted about living at the farm was that I’d be doing a great deal of gardening. I’d always loved gardens, and even as a kid, I looked forward every spring to helping Mom with starting the seeds, digging, transplanting, watering, weeding and, of course, harvesting. As a young adult, for years before I was married, I hadn’t done much gardening at all, except for a few potted plants on the little deck of my central Seattle apartment. Even after we were married, there wasn’t any gardening to do other than mow the lawn, rake leaves and occasionally cut back the invasive blackberries and trim a few shrubs.
I do remember planting flower bulbs once or twice. Our backyard, although good sized, faced east and was largely surrounded by trees, so nearly all of it was in shade most of the day. We had a few pots on the east-facing deck, but somehow I never managed to grow much besides a few herb plants and bulbs. (The feral cats who hung around because our next-door neighbor fed them also tended to use our flower pots for their personal Sanikans, which didn’t help the plants.) David always felt it wasn’t worth putting much effort into gardening there anyway, since we already knew we would be moving in a few years. So I tried to be patient in those days, spending a lot of time thinking about all the plants I wanted to grow once we had the space and the time to do it.
You probably won’t be surprised to know that, the first year at the farm, I pretty much went crazy with the gardens. I was dazzled by the relatively huge plots that were suddenly available to me. David and I both put in time with the rototiller that spring and early summer. I had gone a little overboard with the seed-buying, spending around $200. But virtually all of those seeds did get planted that year. We had talked at length about trying to raise a significant percentage of our food, and although I had spent a many hours planning and organizing, I did make some big blunders.
First of all, I was trying to do way too much the first year, considering I was also cleaning, painting and furnishing the house. Oh, and we were moving, too! Ugh. Needless to say, even though I worked hard at getting the seeds planted and was fairly consistent with watering, it wasn’t very long before the weeds took over and I quickly lost control of the situation. I had planted the kitchen garden (about 1,400 square feet), the lower garden (about 3,000 square feet) and the potato patch (another 1,000 square feet) all at the same time. It was exciting, it was exhilarating, and I truly enjoyed being able to have a garden for the first time in years. Obviously I didn’t account for the fact that I was completely out of practice and not very realistic about managing all that was going on. We did, however, harvest a lot of food that year in spite of all this.
The first frost of autumn (we didn’t yet know when the cold season began or ended here) came sooner than expected, in early October. I ended up having a great amount of produce coming out of the gardens at once, including large harvests of cabbage and green tomatoes. I really had no idea what to do with it all, but I was determined to not let anything go to waste. I’d had years of experience with canning, and I planned to use some of the cabbage to make sauerkraut. But all those green tomatoes! I started looking through my canning books, hoping to find a recipe that used both cabbage and green tomatoes. And guess what, I found one! Piccalilli, something I’d heard of but didn’t actually know what it was. I was pretty sure I’d never eaten it, and positive I’d never made it before.
Well, I made and canned a fair amount, and it was delicious. With lots of green tomatoes left, I put up quarts and quarts of green tomato pickles. I still have a couple of jars of that pickle; I like to add a jar to the pot when making chicken broth. But I didn’t waste any of that cabbage or green tomatoes, so I felt good about that.
Growing vegetables was just one of the big ideas we’d had about becoming more self-sufficient. We weren’t aiming to separate ourselves from society or anything; we really just hoped to become less dependent on grocery stores, fossil fuels and Big Ag in general. At that time, we hadn’t talked about issues like doing this all organically. Terms that are commonplace now, like “sustainable,” “green” and “locavore,” were rarely heard even a few years ago. So in spite of all our talking and planning and daydreaming, we did many things in the early days without knowing if they would ultimately fit in with our long-term plans for the farm. And we hadn’t even gotten to the point of raising animals yet.