2007 Update

I have no excuse for waiting this long to update my loyal readers, concerned friends, and rapidly losing faith family on the farm, our goals, and whether we have successfully ditched a comfortable professional life for what my ex-boss refers to as “dirt farming.” 

          “Ex-boss” should be your clue on that last point.  After 18 years in the Senate, I did finally leave in January to spend part of my time at the farm farming and the other part in DC making our 14-year-old Vivian’s life a living hell. 

The latter job, normally a breeze for me, was complicated by the amount of driving I was doing between Viv’s DC schools and our South Alexandria home.  All of the greenhouse gasses we were eliminating by eating and selling local food were belched back twofold each day by my Subaru inching up the GW parkway and through downtown DC.  As of August 20^th, we will purge that particular piece of gross fossil fuel consumption by relocating the Green Fence Farm urban outpost to a small apartment in northwest DC.  Thankfully, now I will be able to walk to Viv’s soccer games and school events in my embarrassingly outdated clothes to make my overloud and mortifying comments.

Last Spring – more accurately, in the pitch dark on a freezing early April morning when winds blew so hard that our cheap vendor tent flew over a row of parked cars and made the local news – we started selling at the Staunton Saturday Farmers’ Market.  After a few weeks of warily eyeing our motley collection of  eggs, produce, yarn, wool, and pasture raised chicken, the market customers (a loyal, friendly, but demanding lot who KNOW farm fresh) started buying from us.  We are now easily selling all our eggs, chickens, and produce (except tomatoes – we have had a sort of tomato tsunami this year – that will take a long time to entirely bail out).  We also sell sometimes, when we have enough, at the Wednesday Verona Farmer’s Market.

Through the market, we started working with the Staunton Grocery, an incredible gourmet restaurant in downtown Staunton.  The chef, Ian Boden, cut his teeth (the adult ones he has, since he is about 12) in some top New York City restaurants and is committed to serving locally grown food.  He has already grabbed the attention of Virginia Living and Southern Living magazines and has regular customers from Charlottesville and DC.  The place is packed ever night with locals as well – and that is despite the fact that the words “all you can eat” do not appear anywhere on the menu.  You need to go here before it becomes the next Inn at Little Washington and you can’t get in unless you are getting engaged, its your 50^th wedding anniversary, or you are Alan Greenspan.

That’s the good news – that we are easily able to sell all we produce, and probably twice that, within 20 miles of the farm.  The bad news is that we don’t have enough left over to sell to our small, but enthusiastic, group of DC customers (most of whom I think just took pity on me as I stood outside Viv’s school, like a crack dealer, hawking bags of lettuce).  We are hoping that the few DC customers who bought from us for reasons other than their daily good deed will come out to the farm for their shopping.

As for other goals, our website should become more informative – and less of a dusty relic of Christmases past – soon as our Austin, our tech savvy son – takes over maintenance and the nagging of me for copy (something I was doing without much success on my own).  We have increased the size of our laying flock, so there is hope in the future of someone besides Chef Ian getting eggs.  We are planning on doubling the number of chickens we “processs” (nice word for “slaughter”) next year and adding duck and quail to the “process.”  We are always expanding our vegetables and trying new things.

As for the family, we eat almost no supermarket food anymore – and certainly no meat that we haven’t looked in the eye.  We scratched the idea of breeding our own pigs (do you have any idea how big and mean those suckers get?), but did raise two feeder pigs last year and are still enjoying the meat.  We are flat broke but eat as well as I ever have.

I am often asked whether I miss my work in the Senate.  I do miss the people, the excitement, the feeling of being in the middle of what is on the front page, and a regular paycheck.  I do not miss panty hose, meat locker level air conditioning, never controlling my schedule, thoughts of legislative strategy blotting out thoughts about my family, and meetings. 

One day last spring, I was setting sprinklers which involves switching one on and then running like a crazy person through the garden to avoid getting soaked.  I had just started my lunatic run when I tripped over a rusted tomato cage lurking on one of our rusty colored mulch garden paths.  It hit me mid shin and I flew over it, like a circus clown, and came down hard, half in (head half, unfortunately) a raised bed filled with goat manure.  As I lay there, face on the ground, goat crap in my ear, inventorying my bones to see if anyone broke, I heard the “chit chit chit” of the sprinkler.  No energy to get up, I lay there as the spriknkler methodically soaked the ground around me and my head. 

Drenched and muddy, my first thought was:  “Still better than the office.”

Nick’s ex-wife, in one of her semi-annual attempts to squeeze more blood out of the Green Fence Farm stone, accused us of “deliberately impoverishing” ourselves. She has a point; certainly “dirt farming” is no way to get rich – in fact, it is a highly efficient way to lose money.  But impoverished, no.  We are richer than ever -- in sunlight, fresh air, great food, family time, our own ideas and mistakes, and good life.  I have never been happier.

Kate Sparks-Auclair

August 2007

2005: THE BEGINNING

2008 UPDATE