A Tale of Two Homesteads
It’s been a long journey from California to Iowa, but both are great places to grow and enjoy fresh food.
August/September 2007
By David Cavagnaro
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David Cavagnaro’s house in Iowa.
DAVID CAVAGNARO
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I’ve never been much of a city person. Even when I was growing up in the suburbs north of San Francisco, I was roaming the nearby creeks and hills and wanted to be a naturalist. I started my first vegetable garden in our tiny back yard at age 8, expanded up the street in front of the neighbor’s house, and eventually had half the neighborhood kids working with me as garden helpers.
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After a bit of college and a lot of travel as a scientific field worker, I got married and began a slightly more sedentary life. My wife, Maggie, and I lived in a series of rental houses, each more rural than the one before. In each place, we left behind a larger garden than we found when we moved in.
Our adventures in homesteading started when we took positions as resident biologists at Audubon Canyon Ranch, a beautiful heron and egret rookery on the infamous San Andreas Fault, near Point Reyes National Seashore in California. Our son, Pippin, was born there, and that’s where we lived until he was 5, soaking in the beauty of redwood canyons, marshes, beaches and lagoons.
During that time we planted our first big vegetable garden, bought goats and sheep, started an education and docent-training program and began writing about our homesteading successes and failures.
Our desire to follow a self-sufficient lifestyle was growing stronger over time. I wrote a book, Living Water, about journeying to the Sierra Nevada to experience nature as a summer visitor. My second book, This Living Earth, chronicled our efforts to know the natural world in our own back yard intimately. But we still desired to actually live the principles we were discovering at work in nature, as well as write about them. Those first years at Audubon Canyon Ranch gave us that opportunity. Our book about those experiences, Almost Home: A Life-Style, was published in 1975 and that same year, we were finally able to move onto land of our own.
A WINE COUNTRY HOMESTEAD
When we first saw our 180 acres in the wild, rugged hills of Sonoma County’s wine country, it seemed like an unattainable paradise. It had hardly any arable soil and no house, power or water. To buy it, we needed a large down payment and a 10-year mortgage with monthly payments far larger than my freelance photographer income.
But over the next 10 years we came to believe in the laws of manifestation: Visualize exactly what you want to do in life, and the means arrive. We started to call it our “magic mailbox.” We received the exact amount of the down payment from the first royalty check from This Living Earth. Then, a neighboring landowner purchased an additional 40 acres adjacent to us, and invited us to live rent-free in an old cabin on the property. I also landed a three-year assignment with Reader’s Digest for a book called Back To Basics. The assignment was to photograph all the lifestyle projects we had already decided to do on the farm! It was amazing; most of our early efforts at homesteading were paid for in advance. That’s how we began our new homestead, which we named Pippindale, after our son.
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