Title: Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land

Author: Kurt Timmermeister

Completed: August 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: At a recent kid’s birthday party, I was talking with a neighbor about local foods. He has owned at least one Seattle restaurant and been working in the Seattle food world for decades. The conversation was going great… until it came up that I was vegan. There was a noticeable pause, the conversation took a turn, and required discussing the DIY pizza oven and cider press for five minutes before he seemed convinced that I wasn’t going to browbeat him into giving up eating meat. Eventually he recommended this book.

I love that this farm is so close to Seattle, I think we biked past it last summer on our family bike camping trip to Vashon. The story is about his experience leaving the restaurant world and (somewhat unintentionally) starting a near-urban farm. His descriptions of getting started with the garden and orchard inspired me in the same way as Eat Like a Fish did to raise vegetables or kelp and his experience with beekeeping reminded me that it’s been too long since I checked on our bees. I agreed with the author that anyone interested in eating meat should recognize and appreciate the animals it comes from, but we clearly disagreed with what that might look like. As a result, I skimmed/skipped sections where he went into much more detail that I wanted to read about butchering chickens, lambs, and especially pigs.

Near the end, he also mentioned that he doesn’t make his own sea salt despite living on an island surrounded by saltwater. He starts to explain that it’s impractical (after so many chapters of doing completely impractical farming) before admitting it doesn’t interest him. Having done it, I can attest that it is impractical, but I still enjoy doing it sometimes. Salt is so crucial cooking and it’s enjoyable to watch a small pot boiling away beside a autumn fire that I’ll keep doing it. Perhaps sharing some of my homemade salt with my neighbor will be enough to convince him that I really do appreciate making food, even if there isn’t any meat in my dishes.

Highlights:

• If that reader looks at carrots at the farmers’ market next weekend and marvels at their existence, picks them up and smells the earth that they had come from hours before, that would bring a smile to my face.
• I had hooked up a small wood stove and had given the house a cursory cleaning. I had lit a fire in the small wood stove in a vain attempt to cook a pot of oatmeal with brown sugar and golden raisins. The fire never quite roared in the small chamber, the water never came to a full boil and the oatmeal resembled a muddy paste much more than the Scottish country breakfast that I’d had in mind. Undeterred by my family’s lukewarm reaction, I persevered, convinced that this frigid, moldy chicken coop, situated in the middle of four acres of blackberries, was a bucolic dream reminiscent of the many pastoral British period films I had seen.
• Little by little I came to be unable to eat at my own restaurant at all. I told no one, especially not customers. It was a humiliating position to be in. I couldn’t see the possibility of changing the restaurant into a more health-conscious business—the financial pressures were too great. The guy who sold hot baked goods from a tiny storefront had been replaced with a restaurateur disgusted by eating at his own establishment. My relationship with food had been shaken, and by proxy my own image of myself.
• Every trip I made to a farmers’ market either on Vashon or in the city, I mused on what the lives of the farmers were like. The farmers looked very similar: youthful if not young, dressed in very utilitarian clothing with obvious signs of work and wear, with hands dry and callused from working with tools. Their helpers were younger, presumably politically liberal and generally very happy and carefree. I liked the feeling, the look, the attitude. I wanted to be like them. I perceived a sense of honesty and integrity among the farmers.
• Bees are most particular beings. Their size is standardized. Unlike a pig or a cow or a dog, one bee varies very little from the next. In twenty days they reach full size and stay that way. This uniformity allowed early hive designers to create a hive with precise sizing, based on the measurement unit of bee space. Bee space is the amount of room needed for a bee to move through; larger than that volume and the bees will begin to fill in the area with wax and propolis until the space is back to their liking.
• I only walk on the back side of the bee boxes; the openings where the bees come and go is on the opposite side, where I never walk. I was instructed that it annoys the bees, but I think it is more than that. It reminds me of being taught as a small child to only walk up to the altar in church and then turn and return to the nave—to never walk behind the altar. God would not strike you down if you did wander around the altar, but you knew that it was just wrong. Beehives are the same way. The front is for the bees, the rear for the beekeeper. Order is important.
• Looking back now, I realize with some amusement that I was predicting my future. I put little stock in financial institutions, have little time for IRAs, bonds and other esoteric financial concepts; I value earthly institutions, solid investments that I can see and touch: fruit trees. My vision was that when I am old and gray I will have very little cash in the bank; I never expect to be financially rich. But rather, I will have rows of fruit trees in their prime, producing lovely fruit. There I’ll be at eighty, sitting in the log house, enjoying fresh apricots, peaches, cherries, persimmons and all the rest. For me, wealth is having these luxuries.
• I had also heard about a bit of federal legislation that made producing hard apple cider even more appealing. A Vermont senator, Patrick Leahy, had introduced a bill that would make hard apple cider exempt from any federal laws if it only contained apples and no other ingredients. Designed to protect the small cider makers of his home state, it could never be taken advantage of by big producers because of the strictness and it appealed to me entirely; freedom from the oversight of the government. Perfect.
• My pressing partner and I will greedily drink as much fresh apple juice as possible, keeping in mind that the lion’s share must be saved to be preserved. Part will be saved for vinegar and the rest for apple redux, which is made simply by boiling fresh apple juice.
• Vinegar is essential. Acid is a most necessary part of cooking. Without acid, food is flat, simple and lacking depth. Ample salt and seasoning are always needed, but acid makes good food great.
• Every night the vinegar is topped up, kept full, ready for the next salad. The acids in the vinegar keep it all very healthy and nice. I must use those extra bits of wine. Wasting food is the greatest sin; all must be used.
• The grasses have long roots: the rhizomes. Although grasses can also spread through seeds, in a pasture setting it is rare to ever let the grass go to seed. The pasture fills in through the spreading of the roots.
• from the day you get your dog to the day he dies, you will never know if he is dumber than a stick or if he is brilliant, spending his life pretending to be simple in order to convince you to feed him well and take care of his every need. Cows, to me, exhibit that same perpetual mystery.
• I have found it difficult to find descriptions of original processes for dairy products. Yogurt recipes certainly exist, but finding a really good recipe for butter is extremely difficult. Recipes for cheese making exist, but not as many as one would think. We have collectively lost the ability to process foods in a nonindustrial manner. As we lose this ability, we also lose part of our culture.
• The milk could simply be heated to 110 degrees and the culture added, but thanks to Harold McGee and his book On Food and Cooking, I have learned that heating the milk before adding the cultures to 185 degrees Fahrenheit alters the casein proteins in the milk to create longer proteins. The result is a more custardlike, thick yogurt.
• factories used grain, fermented it to make alcohol and then needed to get rid of large volumes of the spent grain mash. They quickly learned that cows would eat this slop of wet, sweet grain and would produce milk from it. Dairies realized that if they moved their cows to the cities and fed their cows this cheap slop, they could realize a higher profit than if they kept their cows on pasture. Their customers were the recent immigrants in the big urban centers of the East Coast. Eventually there came to be a great deal of these slop or swill dairies, keeping cows alive for a short period of time on the waste of distilleries. As you can imagine, this is not the diet a cow would prefer, and it produced hugely inferior milk, eventually killing the cows in a ghastly fashion.
• It was pure and good. (Blogger note: There’s a lot that’s “pure and good” on this farm, but what exactly does that mean? The author is very focused on pure and good without ever really defining what he means)
• As a method for people in small rural communities to buy and sell farm equipment and animals, Craigslist is unsurpassed. It is immediate, free and reaches out to many people efficiently. I used to have to go to a feed store and read what were in effect weeks-old postcards announcing baby pigs for sale posted on the bulletin board. By the time I found the notice and called the farm, the pigs were most likely long gone. Craigslist has changed all that. I can now quickly find specific breeds of pigs or sheep or cows that are for sale and know a few hours later if they are still available. Old farming equipment, such as tractor parts, is equally well served. I wouldn’t be surprised if small farming in America will have a renaissance because of this simple technological advancement. A Web site that was never intended by its designers to aid in the sale of disc harrows and baby Toulouse geese has greatly improved small agriculture in America.
• Hogs raised to market in this country are slaughtered at 220 pounds. The wisdom is that that is the upper limit of muscle growth; beyond that pigs only gain fat.
• The trick is always to mound up the pile of wood late at night and turn the heater to the lowest setting so the wood can smolder through the night to keep the bacon on smoke continuously. If the pan runs dry, it tends to burn the pan out much quicker than one would want.
• When I bought this house nearly twenty years ago, I thought, as many do, I bought this house; now I own this house and I own this land. You can own a house, a building, a structure, but I feel differently about the land. As I began to work on the land, clearing scrubby trees, improving the soil, I started to feel a responsibility toward it. I am protective of this parcel, possessive of it, but I am aware that I do not own it. No one can own land. We are all mere stewards of the land. You may own your condo, but land is different. I have an obligation to pass this farm on to someone in better condition than when I first set foot on it. I want to leave it cleaner, less polluted and more productive when it’s my time to go.
• I have run into the odd locavores who smugly announce to me that they are producing their own salt, and shouldn’t I join them in this endeavor. My response, generally in a polite fashion, is to let them know that if they want to row out into the bay and dredge up five-gallon buckets of seawater, bring them back to shore and boil them down to capture a bit of questionable-quality sea salt, that they are most welcome to. I am quite content with my bright red box of kosher salt, thank you. I could apply some cost-benefit analysis here, but it is simply a matter that I find uninteresting.