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How a feminist became a farm wife

I invented the iPod. I was walking past an antique store and saw a jukebox, and thought: “how amazing, to own a personal jukebox – you could have all your favourite music in it. If only it were portable, so you could take it with you around town.” And then I realized: the iPod. It was 2005 – the iPod had been launched four years earlier.

Once we started our farm Brock and I began to (re)invent all kinds of things. We planted our fruit trees in aesthetically-pleasing locations. When they died from lack of watering, we decided it made sense to plant in rows for easier irrigation – or “orcharding” as this strategy is commonly known. We mourned our rusting tools and exposed equipment, and concluded that what we needed was a very, very large shed. Oh … that’s called a “barn.”

And then I invented the farm wife.

First: some context. At university I read feminist theory and chose the courses that studied women’s writing. I use birth control, work full-time and use the word “wench” subversively. At twenty-five I chose a partner who considered me a partner, and we’ve lived together for six years. Whoever is done work first makes dinner and gets a head start on housework. This arrangement balanced out quite well when we lived in the city. Then we bought ten acres of land.

When Brock and I started our farm in 2007, we began it as equal partners, quite literally – the business is registered as a 50/50 partnership. We built our temporary home together, installed a fence together, and wandered the farmers’ markets hand-in-hand, scouting out best practices.

The one summer I spent working alongside Brock as a farmer looked like this: we worked until dark, then stumbled wearily indoors, stomachs aching with hunger. We fantasized about having a personal chef who would transform our vegetables into decadent, satisfying meals. Too often we settled for delivery pizza and nachos. Our bodies and home were filthy with dirt, but there was no time to clean.

I wondered, exhausted, how on earth other farmers managed to feed themselves and vacuum their floors in the hectic summer months.

Even more importantly, I did not like farm work. Farming is hard, physical labour, requiring a series of routine tasks: till until it’s all tilled, plant for months, weed for months, then harvest until you discover oversized zucchinis in your nightmares. Then keep harvesting until frost euthanizes most of your crops and you weep with relief.

There are gorgeous moments of happiness and peace and satisfaction sprinkled throughout the process, and although I enjoy sharing those moments with Brock, I learned I am not a farmer. I much prefer to make my living staring at a computer screen all day, drinking tea and looking up words in the dictionary.

Eventually we sorted ourselves out and Brock reveled in full-time farming while I worked my day job wearing kitten heels in an office. Brock worked thirteen-hour days in peak summer, seven days a week: I was home by six pm, with statutory holidays and weekends off.

But I felt a little guilty drinking crantinis and reading in the hammock while Brock sweated in the fields. After my experience working on the farm I understood the hunger that comes from non-stop, physical work, and the importance of “making hay while the sun shines” – Brock could not spare time to cook meals. So I took on the challenge of making our dinners using the food Brock was growing.

I fell in love with our farm again once I started “grocery shopping” in our fields with a big bowl and a knife. I pull fresh garlic, snap off a head of broccoli, cut some Swiss chard leaves with their neon, multi-coloured stems, pull a few plants’ worth of new potatoes, and spend some quality time in the strawberry patch tasting the different varieties. During my grocery shop I track down Brock, usually on his tractor or picking vegetables, to give him a kiss and an ETA on dinner.

Our summers have worked this way for four years.

At first I was self-conscious about this arrangement, because I never wanted to be a woman who worked full-time, then made dinner while her husband lolled on the couch, seven days a week. When I mentioned to my girlfriends that I came home from the office and made dinner every night, I felt I also had to explain how hard Brock worked, or assure them that he did his share in the off-season.

I still carried the baggage of my urban perspective, from university and living in the city, that sees no reason for dividing labour: in the city, men and women can do pretty much everything equally well, from writing briefing notes to making lasagna.

But on a farm there is a natural division of work, depending on your inclination and ability. Someone needs to work the fields, and someone needs to keep the home running. On our farm, Brock likes to do the physical work and has the strength and endurance to do it. I love feeding us zero-mile meals and perfecting my crunchy pickle recipe.

I’m a natural farm wife. I’ve had a passion for learning practical skills since I was eighteen, when I learned to quilt. If we had stayed in the city I would be making soap on our balcony and buying flats of organic strawberries to boil into jam. Instead, I learned to can because of necessity: I came home to a tub of beets and Brock said, “Do you want these? Or should I compost them?” So I Googled a sweet pickled beet recipe and we stayed up until 11 p.m. listening to jars “ping.”

Our farm lifestyle depends on both of us: Brock can’t work if he doesn’t eat, and I can’t have a seven-acre garden if he doesn’t grow it. I suspect that our great-great-grandparents’ farming families understood this synergy, and valued the farm wife just as much as the farmer. The problems came once society began to restrict the individual’s right to choose their role, and women who weren’t interested in making pickles were told that was their job.

I’m a feminist farm wife, and that’s not an oxymoron. I am contributing to our farm life in the way I choose, which is what feminism fought for. I don’t have to make pies and can salsa – I get to.

Just like I “invented” the iPod by following the logic behind it, I am discovering why “the farm wife” makes sense, and is a role worthy of respect. Every time Brock thanks me gratefully for a meal before racing back to the fields, or apologizes for not doing more to keep the house clean in the summer, he reminds me that we are partners.

And in the winter, when Brock works normal-people hours indoors, drinking coffee and planning his next season, he also keeps the house tidy, makes dinner and does laundry. One day, when I came home from work, he took my bags at the door and handed me a martini.

I can be a farm wife to a man like that.

Originally published in The Winnipeg Review on February 21, 2012.

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How two government yuppies found their way back to the land

In the spring of 2007 we decided that our city life would not be enough, no matter how many karaoke parties we hosted.

Brock and I were renting the penthouse of a twenty-second storey building on the West Coast: if there was a perfect place to be, this was it. Our balcony was the size of most city dweller’s condos, with an uninterrupted view of the Georgia Strait and Beacon Hill Park.

We were in our late twenties, had university degrees and good government jobs, and had found each other: we’d done everything we’d been told to do, and were living the dream.

Or at least, the dream we thought we were supposed to have.

That winter and spring our pastimes included:

preparing decadent breakfasts of bacon, eggs, potatoes, fried tomatoes and toast;
topping one another’s record Tetris scores on our old-school Nintendo Entertainment System;
bottling wine at the U-Brew in Cook Street Village and then drinking too much of it; and,
hosting music jams with left-leaning friends, then picking fights with them over Victoria’s homelessness problem and how it should be dealt with.

We were high-income government yuppies with time to kill until our thirties and, presumably, parenthood.

For me, the warning sign was my constant napping. Saturday morning, breakfast eaten, I would wander into our bedroom and lie down in the early sunshine, then sleep away hours at a time. I had nothing better to do.

Brock, meanwhile, spent his weekends rescuing sickly houseplants that our neighbours routinely left by the green garbage bin in the underground parking lot. He bought fifty-pound bags of soil and fish fertilizer and lugged them via elevator twenty-two stories up to our balcony. On weekend afternoons he attended dying poinsettias, amputating diseased limbs and shuffling them into and out of the shade.

And then everything changed

One March morning, with twenty-four hours of nothing looming ahead of us, Brock said: “I think I want to be a farmer.”

I immediately agreed. We began stalking real estate listings. Brock’s poinsettias died while we spent hours reading aloud issues of Harrowsmith, noting which artichokes grew best in our Vancouver Island climate. I became passionate about bees. Over dinner one night, after great debate, we decided we were emotionally strong enough to kill our own turkeys.

An early model of what became Makaria Farm (not to scale).

Meanwhile, Brock’s dad noticed a ten-acre piece of farmland for sale just south of Duncan, about fifty minutes north of Victoria. We made an offer, and took possession on June 1. We spent that first day wearing a trail around the fence line. From decision to ownership, it took us five months. Brock quit his government job to be a full-time farmer a year later.

10 acres of undeveloped land in the Cowichan Valley. We started our farm here in 2008.

Farmer Heather gets freaky

I should clarify that I’ve never much liked dirt, bugs, or physical labour, so when I imagined myself as a farmer the fantasies usually involved me supervising chickens with a glass of sauvignon blanc in hand. Maybe I’d bake an apple pie on the weekend and sell it at the farmers’ market, where some discriminating chef would sample a slice and offer to pay our mortgage in exchange for my pastry crust recipe.

Brock, on the other hand, had worked a few summers on a dairy farm and grew up on his parents’ hobby farm: to some extent, he understood the work ahead of us. He eased me into our new life with a casual suggestion: “Hey, maybe you can be in charge of growing freaky plants.”

I was sold. The seed catalogues were full of Purple Haze carrots, pink popcorn, neon green peas in violet pods, metre-wide pumpkins, and loofah, to name a few. I imagined a produce revolution. “Kohlrabi” would become a household word. Children would eat their vegetables.

To find the truly freaky vegetables, I sought out the heritage section of the seed catalogues. Here, I learned that carrots originated in Afghanistan, where they were red, purple and white. The white ones were most common, since they stored the best. In the seventeenth century the Dutch introduced orange carrots and encouraged their production as a patriotic act.

That went against everything I had believed, carrot-wise.

During this kinky affair with the freaks of the veggie world, I discovered I liked growing things. On my 28th birthday I did what I have done every April 12th: exactly what I wanted. In 2008 that meant mixing potting soil with my bare hands in our front yard and transplanting my 75 growing tomato babies into gallon pots.

My tomato addiction

Ah yes, the tomatoes. Perhaps the most obvious result of my newfound love for farming was the very, very large family of tomato plants I produced our first year. The six starter flats of seeds hadn’t seemed unwieldy by our kitchen window in February, and once they’d graduated to four-inch pots Brock just built me a shelf to keep them on. But by April they were gallon-pot sized, and needed more light than our windows provided.

One weekend, like other expanding families, Brock and I built an addition onto our house. The four-by-six space was wrapped with greenhouse plastic, with two levels of shelving and hay bales on the bottom for insulation. With my tomato plants inside, we no longer had to shuttle them into and out of our home every morning and night. We continued to water them frequently, and soon found bright yellow blossoms and even some small green tomatoes.

Then it was May, and Brock said it was time to plant them in the ground.

I’d forgotten about this stage. I wasn’t prepared. We’d spent months protecting the vulnerable plants from cold snaps and window drafts, carefully maintaining ideal moisture, light and nutrient conditions. It seemed cruel to launch my babies into the cold hard reality of the fields. Compromising, I agreed to plant out the token hybrid variety, Early Girl.

I was tired that day after a week of office work, but I resisted Brock’s offer of help and carried ten pots out to the designated row, where I pruned off their bottom leaves and buried them up to the neck – a handy tomato trick I’d learned from Brock’s dad, which encourages root growth along the buried stem. Tucking my young plants into their cold spring beds seemed like a significant act, at the time.

Eventually I cut the apron strings and planted out the rest of my tomato herd. They survived two frosts, a windstorm and some trespassing slugs. The months passed. One Saturday, using the tomatoes I had grown from seed, I taught myself to make salsa and can. (We have yet to die of botulism.)

Black Krim tomatoes were my favourite variety. I loved their smoky, full flavour.

Finding happiness on the farm

That summer my love affair with freaky vegetables continued. I ate purple carrots, my banana melons blossomed, and I coveted the lemon cucumbers a farmer friend sold at the market. I made a few apple pies, and the neighbours raved about my pastry crust.

Eventually I learned that, to unwind on a Friday evening, all I had to do was pour a glass of sauvignon blanc, wander outside, and watch my tomatoes grow. I no longer spent the weekend napping: there was too much to do.

And now: it’s been almost five years since we walked onto our farm. Instead of a twenty-second storey view of ocean and sky, we look out on acres of tilled soil and the brightest stars I’ve ever seen. The other day a friend’s Blackberry vibrated: I thought it was a cow mooing. For fun, we visit the organic produce section of Duncan’s grocery stores and compare prices to our farm stand.

After moving to the Cowichan Valley we’ve met many people who grew up on farms and chose a desk job to escape the unceasing labour and the unpredictable weather. I laugh at our decision to give up our lazy days, our willingness to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and our naivety. And I envy those who benefited from 4-H clubs in their adolescence: they know how to properly care for a chicken, when I had to learn from Google and library books.

Brock recycles old boots to amuse the neighbours.

What if this doesn’t work? If we’ve misjudged the need for a new generation of farmers, or the hard work required, or simply can’t make our mortgage payments, we can reevaluate and move on. Until then, we routinely share the best days we’ve ever had, with Brock slowly transforming our land into tilled rows of delicious organic vegetables, and me spending my evenings and weekends learning how to make cheese, bread and jam, pickle beets, wash eggs, and perform the unlimited other tasks that contribute to our farm lifestyle.

These days, when we eke out time for the occasional party there is no karaoke. But there is often a bonfire, and a sky full of stars.

Some of the amazing tomatoes we grew at Makaria Farm.

Originally published by The Winnipeg Review on January 18, 2012.

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Heather McLeod

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The Reluctant Farm Wife