Making a Home, Part 2
Finding a place on Crowder Ridge
There’s a photo of Jamie and me taken during our first season farming together in 2015. We’re standing in “G1”, or Garden 1, a small divot of land between his childhood home and the cow pasture fence. In the image, we’re unintentionally matching in ribbed white tank tops and olive green work shorts. He’s holding a hoe and I’m holding a rake, American Gothic-style, and we are more or less insanely in love. I am beaming. He is smitten. The garden is lush, alive, like us.
If you look toward the back left of the image, you can make out a house in the distance, and to the right of that house, a field. We didn’t know it then, but that photo held a piece of our future.
The sliver of house in the photo belonged to Jamie’s aunt Pat, his father’s sister, who sold the house to someone outside of the family and moved off the farm some years ago. No one talks about it, but I sense that this is a cardinal sin in the realm of family-land matters. Aunt Pat used to sell me eggs when she raised chickens, but a long Covid haul has nixed that hobby. She doesn’t come around much.
At 514 Franklin Avenue, we talked frequently about having our own piece of land. We dreamt of a place to root ourselves. We wanted fruit trees and permanent structures. We imagined events and workshops with our community of food friends. We didn’t want to ask permission to enact our ideas. We wanted a home base. Our thought was that if we had something to call our own, a sense of permanence, we could really get somewhere. For Jamie, the idea of reclaiming family land offered a thread of connection to his grandparents who both had ties to the land on Crowder Ridge Road. His maternal grandfather, Johnny Hoyle, worked the fields for the Crowder family when cotton was king. Years later, his paternal grandfather, John Swofford, purchased acreage from the Crowders on which he established cattle and one of the largest chicken houses in the county. Hoyle and Swofford have since passed on, but the land remains and Jamie is the third generation of Swofford men to live on Crowder Ridge.
Meanwhile, our life expanded to the point of bursting out of our tiny Shelby rental. A Christmas Day dog rescue in 2017 (the day after Jamie proposed on Christmas Eve) added a third animal to our home, and our budding side hustles spilled everywhere–– cases of glass bottles and labels, stacks of towering pie boxes, bulk ingredients piled beneath our dining table or generally shoved into whatever open space we could find. The house, though cozy and well-loved, felt constricting and unruly.
We began looking at land maps and scouting “For Sale” signs on drives through the county. We looked at a few farmhouses off family property, but they didn’t stick. Though never communicated directly, it was understood that Jamie could have a small piece of land were he to marry. That’s just what happens. Jamie’s grandfather carved out a piece of land for both of his kids. Jamie’s father did the same when his sister returned home, married, with a family in tow. Truthfully, I don’t think anyone pegged Jamie the marrying type, and therefore never considered the prospect of him living permanently on Crowder Ridge Road.
And so it was a near miracle to find ourselves sitting across from Jamie’s parents at Chen’s Chinese restaurant one Sunday afternoon, surrounded by the modestly coiffed after-church buffet crowd, formally asking them for a piece of land. We had identified a reasonable 2.5 acre plot, an old hay field. It was flat and none too expensive, adjacent to his Aunt Pat’s old place which was still occupied by an outsider neighbor person. Sure we’d have to figure out a place to live, but having a piece of farm land felt like priority. We would build a yurt or live in a trailer until we could afford to build a home. We didn’t have money for any of these, but his family agreed to give us the land just as soon as we were married, and that was progress enough.
We soon learned that the outsider neighbor person had asked to purchase this same piece of land, but since we were family, and in these parts it’s ‘Family First’, we got dibs. Soon after, a “For Sale” sign went up on the house adjacent to our newly acquired hay field/future farm.
We applied for a home loan and were denied. We didn’t meet the income threshold to be considered mortgage-worthy. Self-employed people making less than a teacher’s salary together rarely do. But as luck (and privilege) would have it, we had a relationship with this particular mortgage lender, and through non-traditional means and their financial stewardship, we were able to acquire the home right next to our freshly deeded farm plot. I have much more to say about how generational land wealth and skin privilege play into this seemingly fairy tale scenario, but that is for the next essay.
We moved to the farm in November 2019. As were our lives up until that point, we were in perpetual motion, juggling multiple businesses, and flying by the seat of our pants. By this time, my baking life eclipsed my writing life and Jamie had found stability (and a salary for the first time as a farmer) managing another farm. We moved into a house with tall ceilings and three times the space of our rental on 514 Franklin Avenue. We had more room than furniture.
For the first time, we had land to call our own.
ON THE FARM: Life mirrors the pace of nature. As the greenness of spring explodes onto the landscape, animating every living thing, it animates us in the exact same way. It is both energizing and exhausting. Jamie and I wake before the sun, greedily drink our coffee together, and carve out a small quiet moment before the day takes off. Then we open our computers, whip out our to-do lists and make a plan. Jamie heads to the field and I get in the bakery. The next time I look up, it’s 10pm and we’re sitting down to dinner, bleary-eyed, another day gone. We never get it all done, but it’s always enough.
We’re halfway through our spring CSA, a milestone! This week, we’re hosting two nights of dinners on the farm which means a small reprieve from the market hustle. So far, we’ve survived the first two weeks of double markets with little incident. Sundays are for rest, no doubt.
WHAT’S GROWING: Summer crops are in the ground and growing—cucumbers, squash, artichokes, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes. We’re harvesting spring offerings every week, a plethora of radishes, carrots, turnips and salad greens.
On Sunday, we planted our spring flower garden— a medicinal and culinary array of color. We’ll have sunflowers and calendula, borage, anise hyssop, bee balm, zinnias, cleome, evening primrose, dahlias, nasturtium, perilla, and bachelor buttons. By summertime, it’ll be in full technicolor bloom.
WHAT WE’RE COOKING: Nothing too elaborate as the work load intensifies on the farm. Jamie made a beautiful pot of stewed dandelion greens with chickpeas and tomatoes. Bitter greens feel requisite for springtime nourishment.
We ate another piece of vermillion snapper, this time with confit fennel, grapefruit, and olives. I’ve been roasting flats of strawberries with olive oil and sugar and a few cracks of Wild Timur Pepper. The deeply concentrated berries get spooned on yogurt, ricotta-slatherd toast, and bowls of ice cream. I served them at market on top of a polenta cake with olive-oil whipped ricotta.
When we’re low on energy, we cook a big pot of beans and eat leftovers for days. Salads too. Always, salads.