Over the Fence Urban Farm

Cooperatively farming small patches of Earth in Columbus, OH

Tag Archives: Farm Tours


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Farmer Field Trip: Stratford Ecological Center

I’m not traveling as I’d hoped this summer, but the time is flying by. A few weekends ago, I took advantage of an invitation from OEFFA (Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association) to spend the day at Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware. If you haven’t been, you need to go. If you have, you probably need to go back.

Stratford was instrumental in my development as a farmer. I first learned about it when our older kids attended farm camp there, about 15 years ago. Despite its increasing popularity, the littlest was able to follow more recently. The drive up from Columbus isn’t short, about 30 minutes, but pleasant. About as closer to “a quick trip to the country” as you can get in Central Ohio without getting on the interstate. It used to be more quaint, but development has really changed to landscape between here and there over the past decade. In a way, all that building makes Stratford more special – 236 acres set aside to preserve nature and teach children (and their teachers and families) where food and fiber come from.

When you arrive, you enter through Stratford State Nature Preserve: 60-some-odd acres of woodland set aside to do what it will. Cruising through the narrow, winding road, you feel hugged by the trees and your blood pressure drops. After a few minutes, you emerge on the farm fields under big open sky. Depending on the year and the season, might be planted with hay, sunflowers, and other tall large field crops.

Walking around, you’ll meet the flock of chickens who live amidst the apple trees, pass through the high tunnel (the first I’d ever seen and still one of the prettiest) tasting greens, and pet sheep, llamas, pigs, and other mammalian livestock. Also on display are an edible rain garden, straw bale building, and . In the winter, the sugar shack is humming, converting countless gallons of sap into maple syrup.

The purpose of my visit this summer was to tour the farm with Jeff Dickinson, Farmscaper at Stratford since its founding in 1990, learn about the Agriculture Resilience Act (ARA) – a marker bill designed to get Congress thinking more about the connections between farming and climate, and help participants digest the lessons we learned through some creative activities leading up to contacting our legislators asking them to support the ARA.

“The Agriculture Resilience Act will expand resources for sustainable farmers working hard to build healthy soils and fight climate change, building on six key focus areas: increasing investment in agricultural research, improving soil health, supporting the transition to pasture-based livestock, ensuring farmland preservation and viability, promoting on-farm renewable energy production, and reducing food waste.” (OEFFA, April 22, 2022)

I learned a lot during the legislative briefing and participated in good conversations that got me energized to make some phone calls, send postcards to my representatives, and educate others about how sustainable farming can help mitigate climate change. I’ll post again with more specifics there. In the meantime, read up on the bill through the link above and consider picking an issue that resonates with you. Contact your legislator, talk to your neighbors about it, and write to your local newspaper editors.


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Like a Perennial, We Rise

[Basement-born seedlings chilling in a cold frame, in the high tunnel. (left to right clockwise – chamomile, nigella, malva, poppy, calendula, larkspur, snapdragon, celery, blanket flower, bee balm).]

Late winter and early spring have been so much richer since I started growing seedlings a decade ago. Indoor seed starting gives me months more pleasure watching things germinate and tending to plant babies in the nursery. This year was no different. I started right around New Year’s and now the basement seeding station and high tunnel are packed with product for our 5th Annual Pollinator Lovers’ Plant Sale with Bernadett’s Farmacy and starts for our CSA.

I feel at once like the soundtrack for my life in this moment could be Aerosmith’s “Back in the Saddle Again” and The Beatles “Here Comes the Sun’.” This time of year is really busy on the farm and it’s also a time of rising up from winter’s slumber. We’re savoring the last days of “soup season” and enjoying the bright fresh herbs and greens. I’m working on this idea of holding conflicting ideas in my head at once. It’s a theme that seems to keep popping up for me.

All that to say that I’m happy it’s spring. Very happy. And I’m finding it harder than usual to dust off the tools and get to work.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been out back every day since mid-February tinkering, seeding, propagating, turning, pruning, spraying, moving. I am so grateful, once again, to have the privilege to work the patch of land we are currently stewarding. And, I’m really starting to feel my age – physically and mentally. I move a little slower and with more creaks than when we got this started and I’m more hesitant to put my ideas out in the world. Not quite sure whom I want to commit to being at the moment.

We are all coming out of our Covid-chrysalides and figuring out who we will be now. It’s an incredible opportunity, and incredibly terrifying.

One thing that’s helping me build inspiration for the growing season is visiting friends’ farms. Last year was really isolating. Farming is already pretty isolating but I really missed farm visits. I didn’t realize how much.

Last week I got to visit Rachel Tayse at Harmonious Homestead and Bernadett Szabo at the new location of Bernadett’s Farmacy. It was so energizing. If you have the chance, go visit a local farm or gardening friend in the next few weeks. Share your plans, ask questions, just look. Here are a few of my highlights.

Rachel is just across the highway, but it feels like another world. I’m envious of her mix of wild and cultivated spaces. She’s been on her farm for a decade (give or take) and you can see the history of her work on the land. The garlic beds immersed in the orchard surrounded by willow, the bee hives parked beside the blooming cherry tree, the shitake logs – and their fruits (!), and the solar-power protected chicken habitat. And this is just the backyard. If she opens her place for an open house this summer, don’t miss the chance to check out her urban oasis.
Visiting Bernadett was – I realize now as I process images and ideas- an opposite sort of experience. Not only is she about 30 minutes outside the city surrounded by farmland, she is just starting a new homestead after many years at her old place. She and her family got settled there last fall and got to work immediately building a new home for their chickens (including a rooster so gigantic you can’t help but giggle when you see him strutting around wagging his waddle) and erecting a great new high tunnel. She is learning about all the bounty that was already there including a collection of mature fruit trees in the front yard and a colony of ramps in the ravine out back. I aspire to collect as much rain water as she does and envy the big sloping hill she plans to use to move it to her beds from its collection spot an acre away. So when she caught me taking a photo of her empty barrels awaiting installation and asked, “Why are you taking pictures of my garbage,” I had to laugh.

Where are you finding inspiration? I can always use more.


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The Farm as Artistic Space

I have so many thoughts to try to organize on the subject of this post. More posts will be necessary. Consider this Part I.

Three years ago I wrote an article for the art education journal Artezein (see Art Education in my Backyard) about the farm as it relates to and benefits from my training and experience as an art educator. But that was just a piece of the puzzle; a snapshot of my thinking. A meditation on what I offer others through the work. Since then I have been given more time to the notion of the farm as my artistic practice.

This has been on my mind since I got started. As I attended meetings of urban farmers in Columbus, I felt a sense of imposter syndrome. What qualified me to be in a room with these people? What did I have to bring to the conversation? In those moments, I often recalled the work of Nikki S. Lee who has positioned herself as a member of various cultural groups in oder to learn more about them, to try own their clothes and see the world from their point of view, and to make amazing photographs along the way.

After five years, I’m more confident in what I’m doing, and in calling it something like long-term, socially-engaged, participatory, performative, eco art project exploring relational and green aesthetics, and small scale economic theory. My use of all this jargon is part of the performance, as I play the part of academic as well as artist and farmer.

Since this all got started I have hosted numerous tours on the farm including a few for elected officials (see On Site with Columbus City Council Member Elizabeth Brown and City Council Farm Tour), blogged extensively, and offered spoken words and images at Pecha Kucha (check out a recording embedded in this post if you haven’t seen it already!). In each, I flexed my creative muscles – in multimodal directions.

After reviewing an exhibition of mobile photography at the Columbus Museum of Art, I started thinking about all the images I posted on Instagram to share the moments of “fleeting beauty” I experience while in the field. Like the conceptual artists who inspired me to engage farming as a creative practice, those images serve as documentation of my work. They serve as a gateway for people not accustomed to thinking of soil and water as artistic media entrance into the farm as creative space, not merely an agricultural one.

And so, it is with great pleasure that I am celebrating an exhibition of my photos at Global Gallery in Clintonville this month. The show was sponsored by the Greater Columbus Arts Council and will be up through the end of the month. I’ll be there for a reception this Friday night from 6-8pm. Hope to see some folks come out to talk about “The Work.”

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When One Season Ends, Another Begins.

The last Friday of September I started my day hosting a farm tour for 2017 Master Gardeners of Ohio state conference. It was my second such tour in two weeks and I was, in all honesty, getting a little weary of playing host. I was also humbled and a little nervous to be showing such an esteemed group of growers around my yard. All I could see in the days leading up to the tour were my failed experiments – broccoli that wasn’t flowering and powdery mildew on my squash vines. I was happy to hear their compliments and answer their questions and compliments like how did I kept my basil so healthy, and how bountiful the butternut squash crop was (despite the mildew).
After I said good bye to the tour bus, did some farm chores, and graded a few papers, I drove up to New Albany, OH to check out my friend Bernadett’s homestead. I met Bernadett through various central Ohio Facebook pages and we’ve spent some time together in person attending female farmer meetups, local foods events, and working on a garden project at our children’s school. She had been over the fence a few times but I had never had a chance to see her spot. I am so glad I finally made the drive!

As my touring season ended, it was great to start gathering inspiration for next year from Bernadette.

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