Response 5: Eden Hall Farm

Our trip to Eden Hall Farm on Sunday was interesting for me.  I am not a morning person at all, but I was excited to see it, and the property, trails, and soil preparation brought back a lot of memories for me.

I grew up in a house surrounded by farms.  We lived in the country outside the Fort St. James city limits, right on the edge of the woods.  On Kalau Road, we were the last driveway--but we had by far the largest house and the biggest, most wide open lawn, which wrapped around the house (which was set away from the road, one third of the way into the property) and stretched beyond to a garden, fields, a lagoon, and the tree line of a dense pine and spruce forest.  All in all, our property was five acres, but seemed larger given that it stretched into all the field and forest beyond.  It would have been the perfect land for a farm, but it wasn't--our house was the newest on the road when we moved in, the rest of the land populated by ten other families in log houses and trailers.  Every family seemed to keep animals and a garden of sorts, and two of the other families kept horses--including our next door neighbors, who also kept pigs, rabbits, geese, ducks, cows, and a bull (which, at a young age, got loose and wreaked havoc on our front lawn).

That was what I considered a real farm--although we did keep rabbits, a fairly large vegetable garden and greenhouse, apple trees, and various flower plots.  I got my fill of the "farm" lifestyle by traipsing through tall brush with my dog and cats collecting wildflowers, hiking forest trails, tending the rabbits and their hutch (and baling their hay), and helping with the flowers and gardening.  The garden itself was home to lettuce, potatoes, carrots, onions, peas, and other things I can't remember.  My mom kept it up mostly, and after a few years didn't have the time or energy, but while it was there I loved digging for potatoes and earthworms with my bare hands and shovels, eating all the ripe peas I could find, and watching things grow.  The three apple trees produced small green apples in late summer, and were wonderful even just for sitting underneath, ruminating.  We also had a raspberry patch, which was actually an extended growth of wild raspberries around which a metal guard was built to keep them contained, a patch of rhubarb and chives, a greenhouse full of tomatoes and cucumbers, and a strawberry patch overgrown with dandelions which produced so few berries it was pitiful--but the ones it did produce were the biggest, juiciest, and sweetest I have ever tasted.  And if I walked out into the tall grass, there were hundreds of tiny wild strawberries hidden among the wildflowers.  My mom kept so many garden flowers: hanging baskets, barrels, and four small gardens around the house.  Petunias, Begonias, Roses, Day Lilies, Pansies, Tulips, Morning Glories, Daffodils, Gladiolus, Sunflowers, Sweet Peas, Carnations.  But I was even more interested in what I could find in the wild: Indian Paintbrush, Fireweed, Buttercup, Honeysuckle, Wild Rose, Goldenrod, Bird Vetch, Wood Aster, White Yarrow.  I loved collecting them, gifting them to my mom in little jars, appreciating the quest.

These are the kinds of things I was thinking of as we toured the grounds, the organic garden, the trails.  It was interesting to see the site of the old skating pond, as it reminded me of the (smaller) vegetable garden at our previous house, which my dad transformed every winter into a skating rink--sort of an odd overlap of experience.  My favorite part, though, was preparing the soil.  I'd never had much of a part in the making of any of our gardens, but I always loved the feeling of digging my hands into the moist garden soil, whether or not I found anything underneath.  I was reminded of the simplicity of dirt--something so ever-present in my childhood, but something I so seldom encounter anymore (at least, not willingly).  It was nice, though, to spread the dirt around--to get it under my fingernails, squish my boots into it, hold a shovel again.  There's something very calm and peaceful about that--focusing on a simple task and a simple thing, not trying to create something complex out of it (like nearly every other thing in every area of my life).  It was nice to have time to think and imagine what something so simple could become, to think about cultivating the wild, rather than the domestic.  I'm excited to see which wildflowers will go into the garden, and whether or not I'll recognize any of them.  Either way, it was nice to get cold, get dirty, have time to wonder, for once.