EATING off the LAND
Couple aim to grow, raise or produce 80% of their food
EAGLE — While many busy young families are looking for quicker and more convenient ways to put meals on the table, Jimmie Frazier and wife Emily Brown are doing the opposite. ♦ Their dream is to grow as much of their own food as possible for themselves and their 3-year old twins, Lucius and Oliver. ♦ But Frazier already needs to correct the record: “This isn’t a dream, it’s an idea. Dreams are things you know you’re never going to accomplish. I might dream I’m going to fly away as Superman, but that’s never going to happen. An idea is a goal you can accomplish.”
If you count from last winter when Brown was thinking about ordering seeds and then starting dozens of seedlings indoors under grow-lamps, they are in their first full year of living off the land. And that land is a 4
1⁄4-acre property they purchased two years ago here, roughly 35 miles southwest of Milwaukee.
“We picked the worst land for farming,” admits Frazier during a walk up and down the heavily wooded kettles that make up much of their lot. “But I was an arborist for 15 years and I love all these trees.”
He’s now a sub-contractor for FedEx, helping to manage several routes, which gives him a more flexible schedule so he has time to do things like build a 25by-25-foot barn complete with hayloft. It’s where two dozen chickens and seven goats live in relative harmony.
One of the first things he did after they moved in was to clear space for the vegetable gardens — the sunnier one is in the front of the house, and the shadier one in the back.
Brown, a naturalist at Wehr Nature Center in Franklin, tends the gardens and harvests “buckets and buckets of food,” much of which is freeze-dried for winter.
The food can be easily rehydrated and then used much as fresh produce would be.
On their pantry shelves you’ll see jars of freezedried vacuum-sealed cauliflower, broccoli, beans, squash and, yes, cooked scrambled eggs. And there are also freeze-dried vegetables that have been vacuumsealed into Mylar bags, a process that gives them a shelf life of up to 25 years, according to Frazier.
Theirs is a bi-level house, with a second kitchen on the lower level that they use as their “production” kitchen. It’s where the freeze-drier is housed, the honey combs are brought in, the vegetables are washed — and where this spring they’ll start making cheese from the goat’s milk.
Both Brown and Frazier are vegetarians. Luckily, the kids love veggies, too, chowing down on everything from broccoli and cauliflower to carrots and summer squash.
“They eat whatever we eat,” says their mom. Their diet is sweetened by honey from five bee hives, which average about 2 1⁄2 gallons of honey per hive, per year. (You can buy their honey under their Twin Oaks label at the gift shop at Wehr Nature Center.)
“We have two kinds of bees — Carniolan, which are more hardy, and Italians, which are more docile,” said Frazier, who took a beekeeping class from the University of Wisconsin-Extension.
He’s jokes that he’s pretty sure “they’ll never have to buy eggs or honey.”
And he describes a bit of silliness he enjoys with the twins at the grocery store: “Do we need eggs?” he asks when they walk past the eggs in the refrigerator case. “No!” they respond. “And do we need honey?” Again — “No!”
Having their kids understand where their food comes from is part of what motivates this couple.
“We want the kids to see the whole process from start to finish — the beauty of growth — and to experience it as a family,” explained Brown, who does the cooking.
“Every day I say to the kids, ‘You see all this food? This is from our garden. This is our broccoli and these are our eggs.’ And when we make a meal we go out to the garden together and cut the broccoli, if that’s what’s in season, and bring it in and wash it. They almost always help me cook — if they’re not being too wild.”
She considers recipes as starting points from which to improvise depending on what’s in season. So with soup, for example, she sautés garlic and onion, adds maybe winter squash, maybe broccoli, throws in a few mushrooms and then pours in vegetable stock.
They’re grateful that both sets of their parents live close enough to help out frequently, doing everything from pickling and making butternut squash ravioli to building fences.
And Frazier’s 19-year-old son, Levi, a student at UWStevens Point, often comes home to help with chores and occasionally to camp in the woods.
“Our idea is contagious,” says Frazier with a smile. “If it was up to my mom, she’d be out here every single day.”
By most people’s standards, this live-off-the-land duo is little fanatical, but they try to keep the workload reasonable because they want it to be “fun, not stressful,” as she puts it.
She emphasizes that “it’s not our expectation that we will ever grow all our food — I don’t see a time when I won’t be working full time, and I value my quality time with the kids. Maybe one day when we’re old and gray, we’ll make our own bread and pasta, but not now.”
They grocery shop about once a month, using Brown’s printed-out grocery list as a guide.
They buy items like rice, bread, pasta, olive oil, peanut butter, avocados and coffee. And they can’t do without spices because she cooks quite a few dishes “from various ethnicities” such as Indian, Mexican and Thai.
As they continue producing more and more food — oyster and shiitake mushrooms spawned on logs cut from their woods are now part of their repertoire — they expect their grocery bill will go down from $700 a month for a family of four when they began to something more like $150 a month.
Frazier estimates that they currently produce about 50% of their food; and the goal is to produce 80% of what they eat.
“We’re knocking more and more things off our list,” he said. “Maybe next year we won’t buy any tomatoes. But I know the kids are always going to want bananas.”
They’re learning as they go, experimenting with what works and what doesn’t.
One thing is figuring out which vegetables they like and don’t like. Celery, for instance, won’t make the cut next year because all of this year’s crop ended up being fed to the goats.
And this year’s potato crop — grown in wooden bins built by Frazier — was a disappointment. So he’ll change up the soil mixture and try again.
For both of them, living sustainably and reducing their carbon footprint is important. That means creating as little waste as possible, recycling everything they can and feeding any excess or spoiled food to the chickens and goats.
“People think goats eat everything, but it’s chickens that will really eat anything,” said Frazier.
When it comes to possible future projects, there are way too many. Aquaponics? A greenhouse? Solar panels? Taking a wall down to make a bigger production kitchen?
And then there’s the tincture they’re planning to create from the resinous blob of bee-produced propolis that’s on a plate in the kitchen. Propolis, which is said to have medicinal properties, is used by the insects to seal cracks in the hive.
Brown says their goal isn’t to make money from the farm. Instead, they use money from the sale of eggs or honey, say, to help pay for chicken feed or maybe to fund the next project. “We’re not selling stuff to make money, we’re selling stuff to invest in more ideas.”
Both of them acknowledge she’s the one who comes up with many of the ideas, whether it’s building a barn or raising goats for milk.
Frazier describes his wife as the metaphorical “architect who can see the end result,” while he views himself as “the builder, who looks at things literally, and knows the struggle and work that will be involved.”
Brown grew up in West Allis and Frazier outside Chicago, so nether was a farm kid —although Frazier spent summers on an aunt’s farm in Iowa, and after graduating from high school he was employed for a number of years on a grain farm in Libertyville doing work he found “fulfilling and important.”
But here they are today, raising their kids to be in tune with the seasons of the garden—and striving to spend as little time and money as possible in the grocery store.