Sometimes being a food snob changes everything.
Since buying their three-acre Stone Ridge property 11 years ago, visual artists Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano have turned it into an oasis worthy of a photo spread in Horticulture magazine. They’ve planted a host of fruit trees and other edibles, including exotics like ginseng and Siberian kiwi. They’ve put in a cranberry bog, a lotus garden, and even (cue the music from Little Shop of Horrors) a bog for carnivorous plants. They tap their maple trees and raise chickens. They make teas and soda from sassafras and wintergreen and forage throughout the seasons for ramps, wild asparagus, berries, and more.
Tired just thinking about it? Then you’re not Levy or Serrano. They recently purchased eight acres across the road with the goal of planting a diversity of nut trees there. Pecans, almonds, Korean pine.
So what’s with the two artists? Are they, like the trees they’re planting, nuts? No. There’s a fine line between passion and compulsion, and Levy and Serrano are treading it with palpable delight. This isn’t a hobby they’re pursuing, and it’s not a shallow and disposable “lifestyle,” either. What Levy and Serrano are doing runs deep. “Sometimes this seems overwhelming,” says Serrano. “But when you’re really passionate about something, as we are about our land, it doesn’t feel like work.”
It was their palates, of all things, that launched them on this way of life. “We wanted what we couldn’t find in stores,” says Serrano. “Blackberries, for instance. When blackberries are ripe, they start to disintegrate. That’s when they’re supposed to be eaten. You can’t get ripe blackberries in stores.”
Now it’s not just homegrown blackberries these self-described food snobs enjoy. They have a cornucopia of straight-from-the-garden delights to savor—and their friends do, too. “I recently brought some of our Georgia Belle peaches to a dinner party,” recounts Serrano. “People couldn’t believe how good they tasted. Everyone there wanted to buy the tree.”
Levy and Serrano are part of a small but growing contingent of people who are discovering the joys of living off their land. Whatever you call it—“homesteading,” “pursuing economic self-reliance,” or simply “gardening a whole heckuva lot”—collectively they are blazing a trail for the many people who sense that their more conventional lives are out of whack and yearn for a more grounded and environmentally sustainable way of life.
There’s a basic precept at work here: If you want to lead a more grounded life, try living closer to the ground.
Linda-Brook Guenther and Todd Andrews have also embraced this principle. They maintain a vegetable garden on their 2.5-acre Accord property that’s large enough to support a modest community-supported agriculture (CSA) business and, like Levy and Serrano, they raise chickens and tap their maples.
Homesteading is in Guenther’s blood. Her parents moved to Ulster County to live off the land in the 1970s: their daughter’s first name (“Linda-Brook”) reflects their eco-values. But the similarities go only so far. “My parents were retreating from the American Dream,” says Guenther. “A lot of people called them drop-outs. We’re choosing a life that we love, and we’re definitely not dropping out. We believe in interfacing with the culture of the neighborhood and the Hudson Valley as much as possible.”
Though very much part of the web of community, Guenther and Andrews have de-coupled from society in important ways, such as not having the Internet or television in the house. “The Internet is amazing, but I don’t like sitting in front of a computer,” says Guenther. “I had it for a half-year, and it ate up too much time and caused too much frustration. My mother has dial-up next door if we really need it.”
They are also home-schooling their two children, aged four and six. “We’re not trying to shield our kids from anything,” she says. “We want them to see how other people live, and we want them to make important decisions for themselves.”
Home-schooling and homesteading seem to go hand in hand, so much so that one might be excused for thinking that “homestead” means “home ‘stead of public school.” Andy Bicking, who shares a two-acre Esopus homestead with his wife Jenny Fowler and their two young homeschooled children, says, “It’s not surprising that home schooling goes with the territory. Much of what we value starts at home.”
On the family farmstead, children get exposed to realities they’d never see in school. “There’s this glossy romantic version of homesteading that has it all about growing flowers and dancing with the butterflies,” says Guenther. “That’s not the reality, though. Where you have livestock, you have death. A neighborhood dog came in once and ate half the chickens. It’s hard work and it ain’t all pretty.”
Erica Chase-Salerno, a friend of Guenther’s who’s also home-schooling her children, says she took the plunge into keeping chickens “mostly because I have kids. Children want to know where their food comes from. This way they find out, and not in an intellectual sort of way. It also teaches them about death. It makes death something normal and natural because it happens all the time.”
The grown-ups learn from homesteading too. “A dialogue of sorts takes place on the land,” says Scott Serrano. “Plants start to talk to you and tell you what they want. You try to make every plant as happy as it can be.”
Andy Bicking echoes this sentiment. “Voles are a big problem for us,” he says. “We’re figuring out what they enjoy eating and what they don’t enjoy eating. There’s a constant learning.”
The rewards of homesteading are profound—being present with nature’s cycles, learning from the land, knowing you’re leading a full life rich with meaning. “There’s a tremendous amount of satisfaction in slowing down and having that connection to where your meal came from,” says Krista Oarcea, who lives with her husband Aram and their three children on a two-acre homestead in Lyonsville.
For Linda-Brook Guenther, homesteading builds connections among people as well as with the land. “We’re not doing this all by ourselves,” she says. “I call on my friends all the time. Three other families are home-schooling in the neighborhood. We’re constantly collaborating. What we’re doing is all about interconnection, not isolation.”
Homesteading fosters lots of informal economic activity. Levy and Serrano get raw milk for their yogurt from a neighbor. They also recently got a batch of chickens in exchange for fixing a raspberry bed. Bicking and Fowler “use Freecycle [a reuse website] to trade plants.” The results: lower costs, more community. Although homesteading emerged out of the go-it-alone, frontier ethos of rugged individualism, Version 2.0 isn’t only about putting down deeper roots in one’s land. It’s also about building deeper social connections.
In the process, it returns homesteaders to a time when the economy was less about “consumers” and more about “people.” Says Scott Serrano, “The culture of exchange we’re part of is reminiscent of how our country was in the 1930s and 1940s, when everyone had a special skill and exchanged their expertise.”
Homesteading forges powerful links to the past in other ways, too. “When I was growing up,” Jenny Fowler says, “a lot of backyards had nut and fruit trees. These were my play spaces and there was something really special about that. A lot of that is gone.”
Krista Oarcea made a “conscious decision” to raise her family on the land because she lived in Romania just after the fall of communism, where, as with earlier generations, “people only lived with foods in the natural cycle of the year.”
Halyna Shepko, who raises sheep, goats, ducks, and chickens on her 23-acre Gardiner homestead, “was raised on Ukrainian folk tales that were all about the wisdom of the animals. This is a world I feel totally at home with.”
Homesteading is thus backward-looking. But it’s about the future, too. “People tell us we’re homesteading, but I don’t see it that way,” says Bicking. “What we’re doing is born of interest in the world around us, and also of hope for the future, that we can move the culture as a whole to a place that’s more sustainable.”
And it’s catching on. “We recently hosted an information session about raising chickens and 20 people showed up!” exclaims Guenther. “They couldn’t ask enough questions.” Similarly, Halyna Shepko reports, “We had a sheep-shearing event last week and lots of people attended. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and things are shifting. It’s not that I ever felt isolated, but there’s definitely more interest from the community.”
Jenny Fowler agrees. “People are pursuing self-reliance in different ways,” she says. “We have one friend with a very small garden who gets seconds from a local orchard, invites friends over, and makes applesauce. Other friends in Portland, Oregon, have built a small chicken coop in their urban backyard.”
Why this surge of interest? Anxiety certainly plays a role, here in our foxholes in the Great Recession. “People want to be more self-sufficient,” Halyna Shepko says. “Homesteading provides some security.”
Fear isn’t the only driver, though. “People lived off the land for thousands of years,” says Linda-Brook Guenther. “In the marrow of our bones, we still possess that wisdom. People are looking to reconnect with what, at a certain level, they already know.”
The time is ripe for homesteading: It’s plainly a meme that wants to propagate. Local practitioners are helping the process along by sharing their expertise with the community, both as volunteers and for pay. Levy and Serrano helped build gardens at the Marbletown Elementary School and the Rondout Valley Middle School. They also run a garden business called Hortus Conclusus, which means “Enclosed Garden” in Latin. Linda-Brook Guenther and her husband have also launched a garden business: Theirs is called Back to Basics (and, true to their values, it doesn’t have a website).
Indeed, an entire cottage industry for aspiring homesteaders is emerging—think of it as “Homesteader Helper.” Over in Red Hook, for instance, longtime gardener Jay Levine has launched the Hudson Valley Backyard Farm company, which helps people build and maintain gardens in their, you guessed it, backyards.
If you’re tempted to get into homesteading, here’s some free advice: Start small. There are plenty of ways to get involved without going the whole hog (or chickens, or whatever). You can plant tomatoes or herbs or a fruit tree. You can keep bees. And then, if you want, you can expand out from there, knowing that each new activity brings its own challenges and rewards and then do more and more and more, until, who knows, someday you too may be walking the fine line between passion and compulsion, out there with Levy and Serrano.
It’s a sweet thing to imagine: property owners throughout the Hudson Valley growing or raising their own food. It’s a vision that returns us to the past, when people had no choice but to be self-reliant, and it also takes us into the future, when we can expect more and more people to grow their own, whether out of economic necessity, green values, or simple pleasure.
“Going forward, I expect people to stay plugged into their communities and the grid,” says Linda-Brook Guenther. “But there will be many more homes with gardens, chickens, and bees.”
For Guenther, there’s a certain inevitability to this. “The ‘Eat Local’ movement encourages people to buy locally grown food. Homesteading is the next stage in the evolution of that concept.”
Then the articulate Guenther delivers a line that lands with a small explosion, coming across as both insight and challenge: “If it’s not in your backyard, it’s not local enough. Homesteading is the new local.”
Carl Frankel writes regularly about sustainability for Chronogram. He is the author of Out of the Labyrinth: Who We Are, How We Go Wrong, and What We Can Do About It.
RESOURCES
Back to Basics 845-626-2317
Hortus Conclusus www.hortus.biz
Hudson Valley Backyard Farm Company www.hudsonvalleybackyardfarm.com
This article appears in May 2010.
