Last fall, Charmaine Heffelfinger made daily trips to Tunstall Bay to gather bags of fallen leaves from a maple tree. She piled them, along with sticks and branches and whatever yard waste people would give her onto a large grassy patch of her front yard that now provides a home for young squash and zucchini plants.
“It’s called Hugelculture,” she says. “It’s a way to make soil.”
With this new patch of garden, a 12x20 ft greenhouse, 23 chickens, a small flock quail, an old truck and the spirit of co-operation with her neighbours, Hefflefinger hesitantly, but proudly, calls herself a farmer.
Starting this spring, Heffelfinger and her neighbours Deanna Adams and Susanne Armstrong-Bates have started collaborating, working on each other’s garden plots for two hours each week on a rotating basis, in order to get more done.
“It’s like a garden round-robin,” says Armstrong-Bates. “Three people working together for two hours can just get so much more done than one person individually.”
Armstrong-Bates does not use the term farmer to describe herself, preferring “stressed-out gardener,” instead.
“I just can’t keep up with the weeding and the watering,” she says. “Especially in such a hot dry summer.”
Deanna Adams says she’s not sure she’s a farmer, but she does spend a lot of time in the garden. Like both Heffelfinger and Armstrong-Bates, she also has chickens, but doesn’t sell the eggs because they get gobbled up too quickly by her teenage boys.
Currently, the women focus on feeding their families with their gardens, but also sell to a handful of friends.
“We didn’t realize how much we could produce once we put our minds to it, but now we are definitely in a position where we have to think more about how we’re going to sell all the extra food we produce,” says Armstrong-Bates. “We got an old candy-cart from that the Candy Store didn’t want anymore, and if we can get around to painting it and making a sign maybe you’ll see our vegetable for sale along Miller Road on weekend’s. We’ve also tossed around the idea of a Collins Farm Fall Fair, and maybe one day making a pumpkin patch... but we’ll see.”
These three budding “farmers” are just one group that are keeping the spirit of agriculture alive on Collins Farm. This is exactly what the Collins sisters, Jean Jaimeson and Marion Moore, had hoped for when they started working on getting official farm status for their land back in 2002.
While the sisters were growing up, Collins Farm encompassed 160 acres. Their family had 9 cows and their father delivered milk to the Pie Shop, a small grocery store in the Cove, and individual summer and winter residents. They also had a large vegetable patch, from which Jean recalls eating a lot of root vegetables, and mangold - a plant similar to chard.
“Humans ate the tops and the cows ate the roots,” she explains.
When asked why they sought farm status Jaimeson and Moore say it just made sense to keep it as a farm.
In the early days of Collinsia (not just a version of the family farm name, but also the genus of local flowering plants, including the Blue Eyed Mary) as they call the farm, Sue Ellen Fast worked as the farm’s manager, and the operation received a grant from the Ruddy Potato, where they sold the majority of their produce.
In 2006, the sisters teamed up with seven local families to create a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group.
CSA member Heidi Kuhrt says that Marion and Jean are the backbone of the group, offering guidance, and still digging right in to make sure the garden keeps growing. She makes sure people know what to plant, she mulches, weeds and this year helped to lay-out all the drip-lines for irrigation. While 96 year-old Jean is unable to be as physically active in the garden as she once was, she still starts tomato and squash seeds in her greenhouse and contributes advice.
Learning the skills Jaimeson and Moore have acquired and put into practice over a lifetime is something that Matt Matheson hopes Bowen youth will get a taste of by working a roughly two acre plot on Collinsia this summer.
Matheson and Sarah Haxby are supervising Bowen youth, including the Young Farmers of Bowen Island and a new group called Bowen Grows, to grow what they hope will be a substantial amount of food.
“What excites me is that we’ve got one of the oldest gardens on Bowen back in production,” says Matheson. “And with the youth, the aim is to grow enough to provide for the kids and their families, and also to put on a community feast in the fall.”
You will find the Young Farmers at upcoming Farmer’s Market’s selling produce they’ve grown at Collinsia, and other gardens around Bowen Island.
