A Tale of Two Homesteads
(Page 4 of 6)
August/September 2007
By David Cavagnaro
LEAVING CALIFORNIA
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Eventually, I married again and my wife, Joanie, and I had a daughter, Carina. We lived on the farm, but life in California had become so costly that we began to realize we couldn’t afford to build a house on our land.
The only thing that doesn’t change is change itself, the old saying goes, and so change we did. Joanie and I made the hard decision to leave not only this beautiful land, but also California. But where would we move? We had no plan for where we might go.
Once again the laws of manifestation delivered a serendipitous answer. I had become increasingly interested in the genetic diversity of crops, first through my stomach — by virtue of my Italian family’s love of diverse foods — and later through an intellectual understanding of the genetic erosion in our food supply. I joined a fledgling organization called the Seed Savers Exchange, which was then located in Missouri. Eventually Seed Savers founders Kent and Diane Whaley moved to Decorah, in northeast Iowa, where they planted their first preservation garden in 1985. National Gardening magazine asked me to travel there to photograph an article on the garden.
When I walked into the long five-acre field along the Upper Iowa River, I felt like a kid in a candy store. Here were more than 1,500 endangered vegetable varieties growing in the most beautiful soil I had ever seen in my life — I needed to get my hands into dirt like that in the worst way. I could see that they needed help with the project, so I asked if I could come run the garden for them the following year for free.
Joanie and I came to Decorah the following summer, renting a small house in town while I helped with the Seed Savers garden. After only two weeks in Decorah, we decided to move here permanently. That was 20 years ago, and we never looked back. The same year we moved, Seed Savers bought Heritage Farm, and for the next eight years I worked as manager of the preservation gardens, where we had 15,000 endangered vegetable varieties from all over the world. I took photographs of heirloom vegetables, which helped put Seed Savers on the map as part of a resurgent global interest in genetic preservation, and also established me as a horticultural photographer. Joanie and I moved onto an 11-acre Norwegian homestead we bought for about the same price as the septic system we would have had to build on our land in California. This gave us breathing room to learn the lay of the land and the ways of a new climate.
Having lived our entire lives with the mediating effect of the Pacific Ocean, we were taken aback by the abrupt temperature fluctuations of the plains — once 50 degrees in a single hour — and there were nights that first winter when the thermometer dipped to 35 below zero. But the first farm was a perfect place to experiment and learn. Iowa is almost as foreign to Californians as another planet, and we quickly learned two important lessons: listen and observe. We learned a lot from the advice of new friends and neighbors, who taught us what grows well here, and how to build a root cellar for storing fresh food in winter. We soon learned who had extra apples for cider, and who raised free-range eggs.
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