A Personal Farming History

Where my Pepere (grandpa) grew up

 If you want to go to the beginning, the plot of land my parents live on has been in the Ouellette family since the 1840s. It's in a small northern Maine town full of Acadians who fled the British and settled along the St. John River. Potato farming was the mainstay but, like many families, mine opted out of farming in the early 1970s.
 
My grandfather, who was also our neighbor, always had a large garden when I was a kid. My experience was quite simple and peripheral. I planted big seeds--cucumbers and peas--because I was small. He wouldn't let me walk barefoot in the soil because he said it would give me warts. I loved crawling under his bed to fetch more green tomatoes to put on the windowsill to turn red. And to bike over to his house and eat salted cucumber slices by the bowlful. To pull carrots from the sand-filled barrel in winter, to dump bucketfuls of potatoes into the trunk of his car. I planted, picked, and ate. It was all so easy then! In high school I also spent a few weeks each year commercially harvesting potatoes, as school was let out so kids could work.
 

At my kindergarten graduation I said into the microphone that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up. That soon vanished then resurfaced when I was 18 and sitting behind a computer writing essays for my college classes. My second semester I enrolled in science/agriculture classes and by summer I had a job at Rogers Farm, UMaine's farm site for sustainable agriculture research. I worked for a weed ecologist and a soil scientist for 3 summers collecting data. I decided I wanted to be a farmer but could do that without a degree. I kept working at the farm and changed my major so I could become a teacher "when my back wore out." I grew three crooked rows of produce my last summer there, but I never harvested it because I packed up and moved to Juneau on a whim after I broke a boy's heart.

I had a plot out at the Community Garden for my first two summers here. I cursed the ground saying, "This is just sand! How can this be called soil?" I added lots of spent brewers grain and composted manure to my plot, and I grew two bountiful gardens. Blessed was the sun those two summers!  

Enter and exit a few vagabond years of no gardening at all. I will say that I did pick berries, fiddleheads, and chicken of the woods though!

I've been living at my house for less than 4 years, and most of that time  has been putting up the actual garden infrastructure as there was no garden when we got here. I built a small compost bin, a chicken coop, and maybe 7 raised beds the first year. Since then I've built three rabbit hutches, a couple of rabbit runs, a small barn (my husband did quite a bit of this one), 7 more compost bins, a turkey coop, a smoker, various livestock feeders, stands, nest boxes, 3 greenhouses, and 54 raised beds of various sizes.

Huck on the Muck

Our first Chicks

I've come a long way from that first summer where literally not even weeds would grow. After that summer I looked back on my two years at the Community Garden and realized that the sand was what I was missing. The muck that got dumped out of the dump truck-- yes the entirely full dump truck--looked like soil but just packed into an impenetrable crust devoid of pore space and was inhospitable to all life. At least the chickens were fun and laid lots of eggs.


So the second year I decided I needed to build soil. I mixed the muck together with lots of sand, sea weed, ground up shells, horse manure, leaves, and chicken coop litter. I think I filled six raised beds for that second summer and built more as I had time that summer and fall. They take a long time to fill. I've hauled a dump truck load of "top soil" in buckets, 10 gallons at a time up the hill behind my house. All 20,000 pounds of it. 13,000 pounds of sand. 10 gallons at a time. Maybe 100 totes of seaweed and leaves. 100 gallons of rabbit poop. Hundreds of totes of barn muckings. Twenty cubic feet of finished compost. Everything up the hill, 10 gallons at a time. You'd think I'd have bigger muscles....I guess that year I did. I also added more chickens to our laying flock, started the meat rabbit thing, raised four "guard" geese (which we promptly ate), two Thanksgiving turkeys, two sheep for wool, and two goats for milk. We loved eating and sharing the 75  pounds of juicy meat we got from those zany turkeys. I liked the sheep okay, but sustainability was an issue, so we passed them on. The goats gave delicious milk, but, again, they rang the bell of unsustainability.  I also didn't like being so tied down to the milking routine. We ate one and passed one on.  It was a great year of sorting through what worked and what didn't in our our situation.

I had 40 roses on this tiny first-year plant!

My third season I focused on covering almost all my beds with hoop houses. I also planted perennials and flowers, which I had never done before. I wanted both so there would be habitat for birds and bugs. I want my garden to be a ecosystem, not a plot of annuals for part of the year and a barren wasteland for the other. I also did some experimenting with growing stuff in pots in greenhouses. Lots of stuff grew. Some things didn't. Some things were going well then went bad due to my own errors. Lucky for me, it's all in my logbook and on my map.

I look forward to a new season. I put together a tiered shelf and installed movable lights so I can start some plants--my first experiment of the season. My focus this year is on succession planting the crops that worked for me last year. I'm also going to try and get the kinks out of zukes, cukes, summer squash, and strawberries. I want it to be the year of spinach and cilantro. I am going to try potatoes. I definitely won't plant a single string bean or tomato as I need a break from those battles. I'm going to plant more kale, carrots, onions, and hardy micro lettuces later in the summer to really pump up the fall/winter volume. I could go on and on but I'd rather just go work on it!