Browne Susan Colleen - Little Farm Homegrown: A Memoir of Food-Growing, Midlife and Self-Reliance on a Small Homestead

Welcome to the Little Farm

It was the Great Septic Blowout that did it.

That is, the event that inspired this Little Farm sequel. As a novelist, I always figured my original Little Farm in the Foothillsmemoir would be my first, last and only true-life booka story about starting a small homestead in the Pacific Northwest, and how my husband and I pursued our dream of moving to the country for a simpler life. But when our septic tank very spectacularly belched a river of sewage into our shop, I had an epiphany. Actually, after three days of mucking out the mess and sanitizing everything in sight, andtaking another full day to recover from the trauma, thenI had my epiphany.

Being a former city girlmoving out to the Cascade Mountains Foothills as a germophobe cupcake gardenerId learned so much about organic food-growing and coping with our new, more self-reliant life in the country. Why not write a second book, to help other backyard farmers and food gardeners avoid the same expensive and time-consuming boo-boos that John and I made?

Some of you may know me as my other personaSusan Colleen Browne, spinner of Irish tales in my Village of Ballydara series. But when Im not at my computer dreaming up Irish stories, Im dressed in dirty Carhartts and an ancient red Pooh Bear sweatshirt, immersed in running our little corner of food-raising heaven, Berryridge Farm.

Our place is ten acres of logged-off land tucked in the lower elevations of the Cascade range. John and I started out with a cleared one-half acre plot, a modest manufactured home, a well and pumphouse, an uninsulated pole building that serves as a combination shop/barn, and enough space for a small orchard and garden. Initially, our cleared area seemed like plenty for an immense garden, compared to what we had in the city. With the untamed spaces surrounding us, our acreage was a veritable wooded wonderland, tucked within a larger 73-acre clear-cut tract. A jungle of young birch and alder trees sheltered hemlock, cedar, and Douglas fir saplings, interspersed with more natives like big leaf and vine maples, bitter cherry, mountain ash and Indian plum trees. Layers of logging slash tangled with wild blackberry bushes of all sortsHimalayan, evergreen, black-cap and trailing. Among the trees grew a thicket of thimbleberry, sword fern and brackenfern, Oregon grape and native bleeding heart.

Ringed by mature firs, the tract was teeming with black-tailed deer, rabbits, and songbirds: robins, towhees, grosbeaks, goldfinches, chickadees and sparrows, and in the warmer months, hummingbirds with their distinctive chatter and dogfights filled the air. Raptors like bald eagles and red-tailed hawks sailed high above the trees, and in summer, nighthawks, a species of swallow, swooped at dusk. As the only residents along the mile-long lane through the clear-cut, John and I felt our property had a real Home on the Range kind of vibe.

But as I indicated above, mistakes, as they say, were made.