Build Soil

How they came to farming

Neither Bruce nor Kirsten grew up on a farm, but his mother and her grandmother were avid gardeners.

Bruce: “My mother doomed me to this, I swear she did. We had a big garden growing up and I was literally in middle school before I knew you bought produce at stores, we ate and froze and canned everything from it. When I was three or four years old my mother brought me seed catalogues that I just loved looking at, and she let me pick two things every year that I would grow.
”So I picked odd things that my parents didn’t do in the garden. I grew peanuts on the Maine seacoast! Took me two seasons to get it right.
I had a great crop the first year. I hung them in the barn to dry, the squirrels ate them all! The next year, I did it again, I hung them in the backroom of the house and I roasted them in the wood stove, it was absolutely fantastic!
“My father always had very particular ways about how things needed to be in the garden, that was stressful. Once I got old enough and they would go shopping, I would work in the garden when nobody was there. It didn’t always look the way it was supposed to. That was full freedom and I loved that.”

Bruce says he likes everything about farming: “Even the disasters. You always learn something from them. For a while, when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, I worked at a paper mill where my father was an executive. I saw really quickly I wouldn’t have survived that very well. Here, I can work at my own pace, don’t have anybody…” – he smiles mischievous at Kirsten –  “don’t have too many people tell me the way
I should or shouldn’t be doing things.”
They both laugh. “Farming saved me,” Bruce says. "I tried college a few times, I’d go three semesters and then I was out; there were a few very destructive years, too.”
He picked strawberries, worked in an orchard with a lot of chemicals. “One of my jobs was spraying herbicides. One day, a breeze got me and I burnt out a nostril for months, it was like dead, but that came back. didn’t know anything about that stuff at the time, I was just like: herbicide, sure!
“Later, my mother saw this advertisement for a job at an organic farm. I didn’t know what organic was, never heard of it.”
He ended up managing for twelve years one of the oldest and largest certified organic vegetable and fruit farms in the USA: Hutchins Farm in Concord, Massachusetts, before moving to Walpole. It was his organic school.
“It’s where I started reading about everything, especially books from the mid-1800s. And then to see the way we were doing it,
I was completely hooked. But that farm would never be mine.”

“America is a fast food nation,” says Kirsten, “I was definitely addicted to McDonald’s as a teenager. My mom cooked a little bit, a lot of processed and pre-packaged foods. My grandmother cooked from scratch. I grew up watching her garden, sometimes I helped. I always heard stories about her growing up on a farm.
“Coming of age was a difficult time for me, going through lots of stuff with family, all sorts of medications that they tried putting me on, I felt really disconnected from my body and myself and earth. When I started gardening and eating my own food, it totally changed everything. I started to feel so much better. And I really liked being outside, touching the soil."
She studied Human Services and was working with children that had autism, and adults with dementia. “I learned about our food system. It opened my eyes to the realities of diet and health.”
After college, because she enjoyed gardening so much, she decided to go out west to intern on organic farms in California and Washington state. That’s where she learned about community supported agriculture: one of the farms out of Seattle had a 600 members CSA.
When she returned to New Hampshire, for a few years Kirsten ran her own "Dirty Girl" CSA in her hometown of Nashua, where she tried to offer city people a connection to “their food, their land, and their producer” on 2 acres “nestled amongst modern storefronts and congested streets.” 
Reflecting, she says: “I was too eager and wanted to go too fast.
I was leasing land. It was a nice piece, but the soil was very poor quality, it needed a lot of work and I had minimal resources. It was five miles from where I lived, I had to go harvesting and then drive back home to wash and pack. But it was successful for what it was in the few years that I had that.
“Then I met Bruce in 2018. It’s hard to farm alone. It’s really nice to find somebody that has the same values, the same goals.”
They met at the Keene Farmers Market.
Bruce: “I said ‘hi’, she was covering a friend’s stand, I didn’t get much reaction.”
They both laugh remembering.
Kirsten: “I was packing up, I had been vending there during the first market of the year. We became friends. I came to help him weed.”
Bruce: “Somebody who can weed like that, I thought: That’s worth it.”
Kirsten: “They were monster weeds too.”
Bruce, admiringly: “That’s when you find out, at the big jobs.”
From the living room come the sounds of their two-year-old son Emmett playing. Outside, in front of the farmhouse, two-month-old daughter Lillian is sleeping in her buggy while there’s snow on the ground and there's a light frost. But Lily has been bundled up warmly. “She can sleep like this for hours,” her mother says. “It’s wonderful!”