Community supported agriculture - 'the essence of homestead farming.'

It's been two years since we moved from a large city to our modest rural spot in the hills of Wisconsin. We moved to be "green," but I was not green in the sense of not knowing what we were in for, having lived in the mountains of Ireland for a few years. (That was a green experience for me, for sure.) But not having a family, the move was definitely an escape to greener pastures.

After a two-year search, our dream of 20 acres and a barn was reduced to the realistic two acres, a trailer and a falling-down woodshed. One has to start somewhere. Our payments are minimal so the pressure of earning the greenbacks for the bank isn't hanging over us. Looking back, it was the wisest decision we made--to build our dream, not buy it.

Since we do live in a tin can held together with gaffers tape, and have two growing kids, we will be forced into alternative housing soon. We are taking our time to get to know the land--its runoff, its slopes, its sun and shade spots. We have been able to help build a straw bale house and my partner is building a tire rammed retaining wall to explore the possibilities of a recycled house. He has moved and leveled much soil around this valley property, slowly becoming acquainted with this piece of Earth. Being homesteaders means taking our time on these large scale decisions and looking at all the options because we won't have the resources to fix mistakes that we will make: we will be living with them.

I practiced being a homesteader in the city by reading and researching all I could, practicing many skills such as canning and food preservation, bulk buying, home remedies for health care, and perfecting second-hand buying. I collected items I knew we would need so I wouldn't be pressured into purchasing new items once we moved. All the preparation paid off in a smooth transition for our family. We reveled in the green, green grass of our new home.

I grew greener with the move and a job change. I went from working in the theater to working in the fields. We had been members of a CSA in the city, and now I was working for one. Community Supported Agriculture is the essence of homestead farming to me.

The farm I work at, Dog Hollow Farm, is a family-run (grandparents included), organic operation. They grow a bounty of vegetables on three acres and also raise chickens for meat and eggs. From May until October there is a weekly harvest divided into seventy shares which are delivered to a site in the city for pick-up, each share paid for at the beginning of the season. They hire five people to work with them, and it is as much an apprenticeship as it is a job. I hesitate to call it work (although picking all those beans comes close), because I have received as much from the fields as I have put into them. The health benefits are marvelous. I can take out any aggressions I have on the soil and it appreciates it. I can confide any concerns I have to the vegetables and their answers are usually quite wise.

At the beginning of the season I was a novice, familiar with about four types of lettuce. Now I know gourmet greens intimately, having planted and harvested four of the five salad mix plantings on the farm. Each bed is six to eight feet long with one type of lettuce hand sown thickly in rows. It is harvested young by clipping the top portion, leaving the base to grow back for the next week's harvest. Each variety is then put in the bulk tank for a hydra-cool and a wash. Then it is transferred to an apartment-size wash machine (adapted for this purpose) and spun dry. It is then bagged and packed for delivery.

Each mix is beautiful in its varieties of colors and textures (so many different colors of green), and each cutting would differ by the quantity of each type of lettuce used. It is a whole new way of experiencing salad for me--the combination with a little dressing is almost an aphrodisiac. The vegetables can stay in their own bowl, I want those lettuce greens alone.

Alone isn't the right word. Here's a list of the ingredients in a salad mix: simpson, romaine, red sails, waldmans, spinach, red mustard, arugala, Russian kale, tai soi, mizuma, red oak leaf, buttercrunch, sesam. I love the red mustard and the arugala for the spicy and bitter flavors. The sesam wins as the most interesting as it looks like a piece of deep red sea coral. It's quite a nice touch to the mix.

This season was a good lettuce one because of the cool weather. We got lazy once and didn't cover the beds with remay and the flea beetles had a party. The mix was still edible, just full of holes. We decided we had grown salad mix lite!

The garden was a big part of our new life that I had little experience in. But now that I have just put my own second garden to bed for the season, like a proud parent, I can't wait to take what I have learned to create improvements for next year's plantings.

As we slowly work to build up our own homestead, we are lucky to live in an area surrounded by people who can provide us with the hands-on experience we need. We have a lot to learn yet, and sometimes the grass still looks greener on the other side of the fence. That's motivation. I would never trade it back to live on the sidewalk.