The first row
In 1978, Joy and Henrik Skipper bought a tired piece of bottomland west of Salem with a leaky farmhouse, a cracked silo, and soil that had been overworked for forty years. They planted clover that fall, slept on the floor for two winters, and waited.
The first apple tree went in the spring of 1981. The second, the morning after their daughter Annika was born.
The way we farm
We are small, deliberately. We weed by hand. We rotate, we cover-crop, we let some fields rest. The orchard is pruned in February over thermoses of coffee. The bees are checked on Sundays. Tomatoes are tied with strips of old cotton bedsheet.
None of this is romantic. It's just how the food gets to be good.
What we believe
That a place should look better after you've farmed it. That the smell of a fresh-picked August peach is worth more than any logo. That the people who come up the drive — whether they leave with a flat of berries or just a few minutes of quiet — are the reason we keep going.
