By Jackson Ward from the University of Vermont
After a quick siesta when we first arrived at Leo’s, she put us to work. We gathered branches around her yard, most of which had fallen recently after a windstorm. One pile was a “burn pile” to be lit when the time was right, while the wetter branches were separated into piles by size. Eighteen years ago, Leo’s property was little more than a field, and she was the driving force in getting the place to a functional campo state. She showcased her can-do attitude within a few hours of our arrival as she deftly started up her chainsaw with a few tugs and sliced up the largest branches for us to move into the piles.
Day two started slowly, which, as we would come to learn, is a key part of Leo’s way of life. Her cattle dog ran alongside the truck as we bumped along the dirt road to another piece of Leo’s property where she keeps her cows and her potato field. Most of Leo’s eight dogs have a job, the most memorable one being the mink-hunting dog that had apparently brought more than thirty minks to their maker in the past few months. Leo was particularly proud of her mink-hunter. Minks will eat “virtually anything they can catch and kill” according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and Leo has had issues with them eating her chickens in the past. While it was tough to think of a dog thrashing more than thirty minks to death just in the past few months, living on Leo’s land with her certainly allowed me to see her reasoning from up close. Her chickens are a piece of how she makes money to keep her campo running; I’d want to protect them, too. We spent the morning watering potatoes and learning how to operate another piece of machinery: the tiller, a lawn mower-seized motor on wheels that chewed up the dirt as it was pushed over the earth.
I tilled the potato field into rows and then assisted in the setting of the rows using a hand hoe, and once the rows were to Leo’s standards I helped Hannah and Harriet plant the potato seedlings. In another section of the tilled earth we allowed the rows to stay wider, as we planted three small sprouting potatoes in each hole in these rows.
A rainy day kept our farm activities indoors for day three, and this day consisted of greenhouse maintenance: weeding and sweeping. Leo’s lettuce greenhouses contain the only example of hydroponics in Cochrane, which made the mundane maintenance tasks seem a bit more interesting.
Alex the cat is the resident attention-seeker, and he made our time in the greenhouse significantly more fun as he climbed onto Harriet’s shoulders and took turns going between the three of us in search of scratches.
Delivering bags of pulled weeds to the chicken coop made me feel like a gourmet chef; all seventy chickens treated the bag of weeds like the best dinner they’d ever seen. It felt good to see a waste product being immediately gobbled up.
Day four was my personal favorite, as we spent the morning working to set up rows in preparation for Leo’s raspberry plantings, and then foraged for morel mushrooms until lunchtime. I had never played hide-and-seek with my food before, but that’s what it felt like to be on the hunt for these camouflaged mushrooms. They can be anywhere from half an inch to six inches tall, and they frequently stayed hidden from my untrained eye until I’d been staring at the same patch of earth for several minutes. Finding them felt like real-life treasure hunting.
Blog photo captions
Picture 1: Me operating the tilling machine at Leo’s potato field. Photo credit: Jackson
Picture 2: A wide-angle photo of Leo’s hydroponic system, filled with lettuce. Photo credit: Jackson
Picture 3: Alex the attention-seeking cat on Harriet’s shoulders. Photo credit: Jackson