My thirty-second farm was Gardenripe in Silverton, Oregon.

The Farm

The farmers are Bill and Janice Schiedler. The 137-acre property sits on a hillside in the Cascade foothills overlooking the Willamette Valley. Bill’s great-grandfather cleared the land in 1874 to start a farm. The property has been in the family for almost 150 years and is designated a Century Farm. Bill grew up helping his mother in the garden and found he enjoyed it. Grown up, Bill wanted to continue farming so he got a job at a nearby farm, and later at a seed plant. With the money he saved, he was able to pay off the family farm. At first, he thought he’d like to raise Christmas trees, but he found doing the same movements over and over on more than a thousand trees to be tedious. Then his sister suggested trying CSAs. Multi generations of the family came together to start Gardenripe. Bill’s three daughters and his mother helped at the beginning. Their CSA subscriptions took off and they soon found that 167 customers were too many. They cut the number of subscriptions in half to make it more manageable. Bill looks at what he is doing as gardening, not farming. He sees gardening as having variety and farming as single crop production. His ‘garden’ is six acres. Local farmers lease other parcels of the land, and about one hundred acres are wooded.

My Farm Experience

“It’s about efficiency!” Bill’s motto.

Bill has gardening in his blood. My goal was to glean as many bits of wisdom as I could in my short one week stay. At eight the next morning, I gathered in the barn with the other WWOOFers, two young women who had been at the farm for a few months and a newly-arrived married couple with two young children. Bill stood in front of a large whiteboard that listed the day’s tasks. The two experienced WWOOFers went out in the fields to harvest for the CSA. The new WWOOFers, the family and I, went to the greenhouse to pick cherry tomatoes.

Cherry tomatoes are like little gems. Yellow, pink, orange, black, deep red. Pear-shaped or perfectly round. The greenhouse was an organized tangle of tomato plants that were taller than I. Many varieties I had never seen before. Moving down the rows, I made sure to sample at least one tomato of each type. Some were sweet and flavorful, others were not. The young son found a large, plump, pink variety that he fancied. He moved down his row only picking that variety of tomato. When Bill came by to check on us and saw the bucket containing only one variety of tomatoes, he quietly explained one of his guiding principle of farming. “Customers want a variety of cherry tomatoes. If only one kind is in a bucket, we’ve got to mix them in with the others. That’s not efficient.” Until then I hadn’t been aware that only one of two plants of the same variety were planted together. That same variety would appear farther down the row. Going down the rows, the colors and shapes changed quickly. My bucket was a kaleidoscope of cherry tomatoes. If the varieties had been planted together, my bucket would have a layer of each type of tomato instead of a mix. With a mix, the tomatoes can be scooped out and put in a container. Efficient! Layers would require more work to give customers the variety they wanted.

The main project the next day was to clear all the remaining ripe cherry tomatoes off the plants. But these weren’t to sell. They were for the pigs. Bill explained that it’s important to have produce that is ready to harvest for the early and late market. Cherry tomatoes grown in his greenhouse would be ready to harvest earlier than the cherry tomatoes grown in people’s backyards, so there would be a demand for them. Right now, at the beginning of September, people were harvesting their own cherry tomatoes, so Bill’s were going to the pigs. He’ll pick them again in two weeks. It will be later in the season and people should want them again. All the ripe ones needed to go now so no overly ripe ones will be left on the plants. That will make it more efficient for picking in two weeks. Only perfectly ripe ones will be ready.

Bill has a trick for removing weeds in delicate carrot rows. Right before the seeds germinate, he burns the tops off the little weeds. That slows the weeds down and gives the carrot sprouts a head start.  Young carrots are difficult to weed around because they look like a blade of grass and they frequently come out with the weeds.

One afternoon I noticed the three fat pink pigs, who greet me in the mornings when I step out of the trailer, had what looked like giant plates of colorful jelly beans. Bill had finally given them the cherry tomatoes. Even the pigs seemed overwhelmed by the quantity of them.

One morning I was tasked with setting up the trellis for the fall peas. Tiny pea shoots were growing next to a low metal rod. Five feet higher was another metal rod. My job was to string twine from the top rod down to the lower rod, going along the length of the rods. Bill had efficiency tips on handling the dowel holding the twine. With everything there is a learning curve. Trying to be efficient had the effect of dropping the dowel on occasion which wasn’t efficient at all.

“I’d rather sell a lot of produce at a lower price than a little produce for a higher price and make the same amount of money. That way people get more,” Bill.

Bill’s firm philosophy on pricing is that all people should be able to afford farm-fresh produce. “It doesn’t cost me very much to grow it,” he said. He feels that farmers market and CSA produce shouldn’t cost any more than produce at the grocery, so he prices his produce the same or lower as the grocery. When I mentioned the city-slicker-turned-farmers, who were the typical people I’d met WWOOFing, and their comment that if they charged the actual amount it cost in labor to produce what they sell, it would be too expensive for anyone to buy, Bill said, “It’s about efficiency They aren’t efficient.” With Bill, it always seems to come down to efficiency. He has a good point.

The farm’s soil is fast draining red clay. The only amendments Bill uses are chicken manure and lime, if a plant needs it. He doesn’t have a compost bin, but he does rototill to kill weeds and bring up nutrients to the soil.

By using greenhouses, Bill is able to plant late season lettuce. For transplanting, Bill believes in the production method for efficiency, do one movement or task until complete. The first task was to measure the distance between each plant and market it with a hole. Once that was complete, we moved to task two, popping out the seedlings and placing them by a hole. Bill even recommended tossing the empty seed trays ahead of us so we could gather them up as we moved down the row. Finally, we returned down the row, making a proper hole with one hand and popping in a seedling with the other. Quickly the little lettuce plants were in their new homes.

One day rain was forecast to start at three in the afternoon. The morning was spend picking slightly under-ripe tomatoes for the farmers market on Saturday. If we waited until Friday to pick them, they would be cracked and unusable from the extra moisture from the rain. We also brought in the onions that had been drying outside. Bill now has restaurant customers he delivers to. When I mentioned that it’s nice to sell to restaurants because they pay good well, I was reminded of Bill’s pricing philosophy.

On my last day, we prepared boxes for the CSA customers. On the long chalkboard Bill had written out how much of each type of produce each customer would get. Most of the customers got the same thing, but there were a few who requested substitutions. For efficiency, a few of us harvested the remaining produce that was needed, and the others started preparing the produce for the bins. Some items just needed to be counted out-2 potatoes- while others, like cherry tomatoes, had to be weighed and put in a bag. I soon learned Bill had tips for efficiently weighing and bagging the cherry tomatoes.

Weekends are free for volunteers. When I asked about what there was to do in the area, I learned that one of the best Oktoberfest celebrations in the US was happening in the nearby town of Mt. Angel. What luck! The little town of 3,000 swells to 300,00 over the three-day celebration. As a warm-up to the big weekend, the monks of Mount Angel Abbey held a grand opening for their new brewery, Benedictine Brewing. There are only three monasteries brewing beer in the US, so this sounded like a special treat. I was there shortly after they started pouring. The monks mingled with the guests, chatting and answering questions. I wasn’t sure what to say to a monk, so I was happy they didn’t stop at my table.

I switched to German beer while listening to the oompah bands and admiring the men in their lederhosen and feathered hats on Friday. The polka bands blew me away. I had no idea they could be so fun! Everyone jumped up for the Chicken Dance did it with exuberance even on the tenth time. A few times each set, the band would slow down and sing Ein Prosit. We’d sway and sing along, then hold up our beer cups and take a chug. Outside the beerhalls, local organizations sold German-style food. Oktoberfest was the community’s biggest fundraiser. The tunes were going through my head as I hiked around Silver Falls State Park on Saturday. I had to back for one more day on Sunday. By the grand finale late that evening, I was content to not hear another Chicken Dance or accordion till next Oktoberfest.