My thirty-third farm was Maury Hill Farm on Vashon Island, right next to my hometown of Seattle, Washington.
The Farm
The farmers are Holly and Harley. Harley grew up on a cattle ranch in South Dakota. His ancestors are Dutch and many Dutch immigrants settled in South Dakota, possibly because it’s flat and looks like home, he said. Holly is from Chicago. She moved to Olympia to be near her sister. Harley came to Olympia for work. Holly and Harley met when they were in teacher training at Evergreen College in Olympia. After finishing college, Holly needed to buy a used car so she could get around to substitute teach. Harley knew cars so she asked him to help her choose one. The long drives to look at cars gave them time to talk. They hit it off and eventually got married. They moved to Vashon where Holly got a job as a first-grade teacher. Harley has a job monitoring the water systems on Vashon.
My Experience
Scamper
When I arrived, Harley motioned to the splayed-out dog sleeping on her side in the living room. “She’s not doing well,” he said. Holly was off in Africa with her son while her beloved dog Scamper was dying, Harley was in a dilemma. Should he do his best to keep Scamper alive until Holly got back in a week or take her to the vet to be put to sleep? He knew Holly would want to say good-bye to Scamper.
Garden Intro
Vashon Island is very lush and green. Holly’s gardens were bursting with flowers, vegetables, and weeds taller than me. I decided a good starting project while I was
waiting for her to return was removing the weeds that made it difficult to enter the property. I planted some seeds and seedlings with Harley and they took off quickly. A few days after I arrived, it was the 4th of July. “Knee high by the 4th of July’ is a farmer’s way of judging how well the corn is growing. Harley went out to check on the corn, which was knee high. A month later when I left the farm, it was a corn jungle, the tassels waving well over my head. The crop of more immediate concern though was Holly’s garlic.
The Garlic
Holly is passionate about garlic. She grew up with her father’s traditional Armenian dishes that used a lot of garlic. As soon as she moved to Olympia, Holly got a community garden space so she could grow her own garlic. A friend gave her some garlic bulbs that Holly planted at a house she rented. When Holly and Harley moved to Vashon, that special garlic came too. In their early years on Vashon, Holly planted 900 bulbs of garlic and sold them at the farmers market. Now she’s down to just a few hundred plants that she keeps for herself and friends. When I arrived, it was getting time to harvest it, but Holly was still in Africa. Genny, a WWOOFer who had worked with Holly and the garlic before, worried about whether to harvest it or not. The soil should be dry when you harvest, and it had been raining. But the plants looked ready to harvest. After harvesting a few small bulbs, we decided to wait for Holly to get back. When she got home, we started harvesting. While we worked, Holly gave me an education into the world of garlic.
There are two main types: hardneck and softneck.
Softneck varieties are the most common type and what you will find at the grocery. They have a mild flavor, are harder to damage, and store for a long time. The necks can be braided and hung which helps the bulbs to last longer. Their drawback is that they are harder to peel. The US imports softneck garlic from China.
Hardneck varieties have stronger, more complex flavors. They grow scapes, a long flower stock, which can be eaten. Hardnecks don’t store for a long time and they bruise and get damaged easily. However, they are easy to peel and excellent in cooking. Local farmers markets are the best source of hardneck garlic.
Holly had a few favorite varieties:
Armenian, of course, a hardneck with a hardy and strong flavor. I bet it’s good in winter soups.
Asian Tempest, also a hardneck. It has a lot of heat and is best used raw like for pesto. It isn’t good for cooking.
Inchilium, a softneck that is good for winter storage and braiding
Garlic is one of the oldest domesticated crops. Instead of planting seeds, farmers save the biggest bulbs from their harvest because bigger bulbs will grow the biggest bulbs. They plant these in the early fall. The cloves will grow a clone of themselves with no danger of cross-pollinating. Garlic is ready to harvest in the early summer. We harvested each plant individually using a hand trowel. I’ve never seen garlic so lovingly tended to. The plants were spread out in the living room to dry. As they started drying, Holly would sit down next to a pile to trim off he roots and clean off the dirt. Curing, thoroughly drying the bulbs, allows the flavors to fully develop and helps them store longer. It takes several weeks and is normally done in a barn. The garlic sat upright in any available living room chair, looking like alien guests. I wondered how they were going to eat this much garlic over the winter.
“Harley likes to make things”, Shuen, a WWOOFER from Taiwan, said.
Harley spent his time making things. He made stepping-stones for Holly’s garden. A work-table for himself. Cooked our evening meals. He also liked to can and 
ferment foods. We had so many pickled beets that I watched my pee go from orange to magenta in three days. I imagine there are people who don’t know about this side effect with beets and must assume they are dying. A dozen or so bottles of apple cider vinegar were bottled right before I arrived. (There are two apple trees from the original property called Glowing Coal which is a Vashon variety.) I helped Harley shred and pound the cabbage for sauerkraut, but it wasn’t ready by the time I left.
Harley’s Dinners
One of the biggest treats on the farm was Harley’s cooking. He told me that he has always been into cooking. It seems odd because in his pocket-filled overalls and tie-dye shirts, he just doesn’t look like someone who’d spend hours preparing meals in the kitchen. He chooses his recipes from the Internet. Each day was a new dish. The produce came from the garden. We had delicious stir fries, tasty stuffed peppers, real (not TV dinner) Salisbury steak, and, of course, taco Tuesdays. One day we all came together to make tamales. The stuffing was mostly pork leftovers from the night before. Lard was an important ingredient too. The hard part was filling the corn husks and tying them up so the stuffing didn’t leak out when they were boiled. They turned out delicious and were plentiful. Harley didn’t stop at entrees. He even found the time to make desserts. Raspberry cheesecake with freshly picked raspberries. Rhubarb crisp with biscuits on top. We ate very well.
Rooster Versus Holly
Holly injured her foot the last week of school. The rooster attacked her as she was putting the chickens in their coop for the night. He followed her out of the coop to continue the duel. She kicked at him hurting her foot. In desperation to subdue the unrelenting rooster, she grabbed a bucket and slammed it over him. He settled down inside the bucket, humiliated. On one of my days off, Harley turned him into a tasty chicken dinner.
The Farm Stand
One day I was given the task to dig up the potatoes. Digging potatoes is like a treasure hunt: You don’t know how many are down there or where exactly they are. It’s so satisfying when you pull out a big one. I took my time and scouted around to try and get them all. After I’d dug up the yellow potatoes, I found small red ones. They seemed too small, but they were sitting in the dirt instead of being deeply buried like the yellow ones. I thought Holly had told me to dig up all the potatoes. She was out for the morning so I couldn’t double check. I was having so much fun that I dug up the little red ones too. Later I learned the reds were mid-season potatoes and should have been left in the ground.
Holly and Harley started a farm stand this year. It’s on the road in front of the farm. Harley put out tomato and potato starts in the spring. Now only wilted tomato plants were still there. Holly decided to freshen it up. She bagged up the potatoes and Shuen, the other WWOOFer, made signs. “Yellow Potatoes–Better than Yukon!” “Red Potatoes–Great for Grilling!” The red potatoes quickly sold out. Now I didn’t feel as guilty for harvesting them too early. Holly tried to make flower bouquets but none of us were talented enough to put a nice one together. All three of us spent a morning making herb bundles: parsley, sage, rosemary, no thyme, oregano, and mint. One bundle sold and Holly gave one away. Beets, kale, rhubarb, and lavender were put in the farm stand. Not much sold except the red potatoes.
Mammoth Weeding Project
Our biggest project was weeding an enormous round herb garden that had a spiky pepper tree sitting in the middle. The first step was freeing the herbs from their grass captors. This took days. Once all the weeds were out, the garden needed a layer of compost. We went back and forth across the long front yard with wheelbarrows full of compost. This also took days. Finally, the garden looking refreshed and invigorated, Holly measured the diameter of the garden and put down stepping-stones that lead into the center towards the spiky pepper tree. This was to help people harvest the herbs. The finished garden looked like it should be featured in a magazine.
Daily Walks
Most every afternoon or evening I took a pleasant walk to the beach. Maury Island Marine Preserve was down one street and Point Robinson Lighthouse was down the other. Vashon has rolling hills, so the walks were good exercise. I’d drink a can of beer and write in my journal as I sat looking over Puget Sound with Mt. Rainier, when it was out, directly in my view.
Epitaph
Scamper’s condition worsened and she was taken to the vet to be put to sleep before Holly came home from Africa. She was buried on the neighbor’s property where she was born. Holly wishes she could have said good-bye.