On the long drive up Aladdin Road to Blue Ridge Farm dense forest alternates with open fields and old farms. The area was once more populated than now. When the Goldfield mine and mill was running, you could operate a farm and work at the mine nearby. Jillian and Ryan Garrett are a modern version of those times. They have paying jobs working from home but just as much work maintaining the farm. At Blue Ridge Farm (blueridgefarmer.com) they have combined passions for wildlife, hardy plants, donkeys, chickens and compost with technical skills in using the Internet to promote Regenerative Agriculture and their own business.
It hasn’t happened overnight. In their resumé they have 15 years of farming near Medford, Oregon that included agrotourism. They moved to Northeast Washington still wanting to farm but with a keen appreciation for the nature already thriving here. It includes turkeys, bob cats, cougars, bears, elk, rabbits, wolves and many more critters. They photographed and watched the habits of the wildlife, then designed their farm to protect both the wild and domestic creatures. Their practices include harvesting their hay a little late to allow cover for young turkeys and fawns; closing their donkeys in at night so cougars and wolves won’t eat them; moving their mobile chicken coup and cyclone fencing with it to stave off coyotes, bob cats and other predators.
Plants need protection too. High fences to keep out deer; low tight woven wire to keep gophers from the cabbage and kale; mouse traps in the greenhouse; wrapping around the fruit trees. Even then, when the snow gets high, rabbits can girdle the trees; gophers can climb over wire as well as under raised beds; wire worms persist in the soil. Perseverance demands constant vigilance.
There was still snow on the driveway when I arrived. The Deep Creek Valley is cold. The Garretts have recorded temperatures down to -30º in the winter. The growing season is only 90 days on average. For serious protection from the cold, they have two Rimol greenhouses with propane backup heating as well as rocks and water barrels for thermal retention. The greenhouses have peaked roofs so that snow slides off and one has polycarbonate siding.
Besides all the infrastructure for protection, more is needed for production. This year’s crops were already underway when I visited. Raised beds on the floor of the greenhouse were partly empty but still had bok choy and rosemary growing in them. Temporary tables covered parts of the raised beds and hold electric warming mats with trays of soil blocks sprouting new crops. Soil blocks are a Blue Ridge specialty. At first, they seem odd like planting pots with no plastic sides and slanted in like pyramids rather than tapered at the bottom for easy stacking like plastic pots would be. The method to this madness is air pruning. In a closed pot, roots become a tangled mat on the walls and bottom of the pot. In a soil block, they back off from the air near the sides of the block and branch out inside the block. When the block is buried in the ground, the roots shoot out into the soil up to two weeks sooner than similar starts transplanted from a plastic pot. Plus there is no plastic waste left over.
To make the soil blocks, they have some little metal presses that you stuff with a compost mixture and then turn over and press onto a flat surface, even directly onto a warming mat. They have begun to have larger custom-made presses built. You can stack smaller soil blocks on larger ones as the plant root systems develop spreading down and outwards.
To hold good moisture and structure in this system you need good compost. Having tried commercial compost, the Garretts decided that they could do better. Their method is the Johnson-Su bioreactor. The hardware is fairly cheap: a pallet, woven wire fencing, some porous ground cover to line the inside of a round woven wire tower and a few 4” drain field pipes to set up breathing pathways in the center of the tower as you fill it with material to compost. There is a good video on the Blue Ridge website.
The donkey barn provides good manure for composting. There is more to the mix of course. Part of the beauty of the method is that it uses home-grown plant and animal waste and works in a few months with no compost turning or equipment involved. Worms love it in the moist environment that is warm but not too hot because it breathes. Worm castings make the end product hold together well but still permit air pruning. Jillian and Ryan sift the large chunks out of the compost before using it. This system allows them to export plant starts in rich soil without depleting the fertility of their own farm.
The seeds they start in these soil blocks are critical too. Cold-hardy varieties are a must, even when many end up in their larger row-crop greenhouse. Although some of the plant starts like rhubarb and elderberries are meant for outside use, many are used to fill their big production greenhouse with warm-weather crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers and corn. These help them feed themselves but also fill orders for community supported agriculture (CSA). This enterprise lets customers subscribe to weekly boxes of vegetables and possibly eggs delivered in season.
As if getting fresh local food grown in a way that enriches the soil and does not harm wildlife was not enough, Blue Ridge Farm publishes its own magazine that not only includes news about their operations, philosophy and techniques, but also offers recipes that use their products in tasty, wholesome and creative ways.
All of these enterprises along with their attention to living closely with wildlife has earned these Blue Ridge Farmers the 2024 Stevens County Voluntary Stewardship Program (VSP) Conservation Farmer of the Year award. This annual award was created by the Stevens County Conservation District to honor landowners who voluntarily implement projects that protect critical areas while maintaining agricultural productivity. The award is well-deserved. It takes an exhaustive amount of work to be so productive in harsh conditions. Leading does not just mean continuing to innovate in methods and varieties of food but also to undertake teaching others the how and why of creating healthy relationships with the land, the animals, the soil and the whole community where you live.