Living the Good Life

I’m drawing a map. I’m talking to Josephine Hill and she’s telling me about Ragley Organic Farm, which she and her husband, Rob, operate in East Sooke on the Southern tip of Vancouver Island.

I say, “so you’ve got a twisty windy driveway off the road.” She says, “Well, its not real twisty, windy.” Beginning to feel a Monty Python skit coming on I reply, “how twisty, windy is it?” She explains, “its not real twisty, but it’s long, about a quarter mile, and it sort of goes up and it winds a little bit.” Okay.

She fills in the picture a bit more. “You get to the ‘Y’ in the road and if you go to the right you get to the house and if you stay straight you come up to the old barn where I’ve built a little market area. You go straight ahead and you see my big stone oven and beyond that is the lumber division (Rob’s business). If you’re standing facing the house the creek would go from beyond the house some up to the right and past the house.” The map is pretty rough—just to give me a picture of what the farm might look like. But I’m wondering about scale. What’s the big picture?

Ragley farm was first settled by royalty from England back in a time when Victoria was more than a day’s travel away. Josephine tells me a bit about the history. “It was named Ragley in 1912 because the original owner was royalty from England and her ancestral home was called Ragley Hall. I think it’s in Devon,” she explains. “The granddaughter still lives in Sooke but she comes out often with heritage tours and will tell her stories about living here, and the Prince of Wales being here and sitting on the front steps.”

The original property was 160 acres but it has been divided up. Ragley Organic Farm is now about 30 acres of the original homestead. The Hills still have about 20 acres in woodland and despite their lumber operation they don’t cut any of their own trees. They work with the Land Conservency to protect the stream and natural areas. Josephine values the heritage aspects of the farm. She has a fondness for the magic of old places. “Somewhere back in my memory I can picture these country places with barns and names. When we were looking [for a property] I thought that one of the things it had to have was a long winding driveway. I didn’t want to be right on the road. And it had to be old. I couldn’t live in someplace that was new. The gardens are established. There are amazing plants here that somebody planted years and years ago.” She also loves the way first time visitors respond to the farm. She marvels at “the number of people that come up the driveway and breathe a big sigh and say, ‘Isn’t this wonderful.’”

Farming operations started out fairly small. Gardening was always part of Josephine’s life as she was growing up. When she moved to Ragley she wanted a small garden to grow a few things. “Then I thought I might as well grow a bit of salad,” she adds. “And it just kind of evolved from doing what I like to do. My garden is an acre and a half. There’s about 11 acres of pasture and the rest is just wood.”

Currently, her operation sounds bigger than the map we’ve drawn. I’m trying to imagine where all these things could fit in. The farm produces salad mixes for local restaurants and grows carrots, endives, beets, radishes, onions, garlic and lots of potatoes in the field. There are also three greenhouses—one with tomatoes, one with peppers and eggplant and basil and one with cucumbers. There are sheep—13 ewes—which are bred every year, producing lamb for the market. Josephine also has 45 chickens for eggs and raises flocks of 75 meat birds three times through the season.

Then there’s the apple trees. “We have 12 of the old apple trees. They’re actually amazing. We’ve got one variety called Ontario, which was probably planted before the house was built. We’ve got trees that will have 2000 pounds of apples in a season, so I do whatever I can with apples. I make jelly, cider vinegar, juice, pies for the market, apple-blackberry muffins. Any way I can use an apple I do.”

Just as my little map is filling in she tells me about the strawberries, raspberries and a few current bushes, all of which find their way into jellies, muffins or pies. “I mostly appeal to local people to come buy here, so, I try to keep enough of a range [of products] at reasonable prices.” There is also room for the visiting raccoons, bears and deer all of whom also feed off the berries.

Working and Living

My map is looking fairly full. There are places for everything, it all seems very organized. But I’m getting a feeling that the physical results are not the point.

Josephine acknowledges that the farm is a lot of work but is quick to add that she values hard work. She thinks society has a mind set that physical work is not honorable work or valuable work. From her point of view she thinks the world is wrong. She sees it as very honorable work. And she likes the very physical sense of it. “I can’t work and not get dirty,” she says. “I love it. There’s nothing nicer than kneeling in the garden and putting your hand in the dirt.”

There are many things she does on the farm just because she loves the work. Growing her own beans is one of them. “I grow them because I love to grow them,” she says. “Financially it doesn’t make any sense but I do it because it’s one crop that I really like to grow. We don’t have television so we spend our winters sitting in front of the wood stove shucking dried beans.”

My impression is that this is much less like running a business than it is about having a lifestyle—more like living rather than making a living. “It’s got its own rhythm that you have to go with. Its no a chore. Some days I’m absolutely dead tired but its not like ‘O God, I have to go out a do this.’ I happily go out and do it because I like it. So, yes, it is a lifestyle. I’m living the farm.”

For Josephine, farming isn’t about finished products. It’s about doing what she loves to do and sharing it with others—about taking care of the land, the animals, and the plants. It’s about working with the world rather than controlling it. She expands, “[when] you hire local people and it really becomes a community thing. You’re feeding and employing people, and its a place for people to come and walk the trails. It’s a place for people to use in whatever way suits them at the time.”

Looking into the Future

I have a real fondness for maps but I often think that the most important thing about maps is the dreams that they enfold—the possibilities and fantasies that are the major impetus for creating something in the first place. So inevitably, we talk of plans for the future.

While the gardens, orchards and greenhouses are pretty much the way she wants them Josephine sees many opportunities for development of the farm and its markets. “The last ten years has been an evolution,” she explains. “It just went from one thing to another naturally, add a bit more space, add another green house, and so forth. Space-wise it’s not going to get any bigger.”

“I have an outdoor oven and I’m thinking of putting a small kitchen somewhere other than in my house. My vision is that the garden and the baking and kitchen would blend a little more.”

“I’d like to see the oven used more. It’s a beautiful structure. I use it Saturday mornings to bake bread. Somebody should be using it more than that. I don’t know how that’s going to look, whether it will be me doing it or somebody coming in or whether we’ll have guest bakers come for market days.”

The pies are a big hit so she puts the extra effort into making sure there is always some sort of pie available. This is a mixed blessing however as people will come and buy two pies and not even look at the vegetables. I’m imaging that she’s grinning when she says, “I’ve thought about putting a sign up in my market that says ‘No pie til you eat your vegetables.’”

I’ll put that sign right in the corner of my map.

Michael Marrapese
Summer, 2005