Who are we? The Melissa edition

About Melissa:

There is a picture of me at about age 5 standing in a garden with the biggest tomato ever to have been grown and a look of complete joy and rapture, staring at this incredible piece of food that just came off of a plant in a backyard.  I’ve always loved food, all kinds and from a young age.  By the time that picture was taken I was a professional eater of everything from imported Asiago cheese to cherry tomatoes straight from the vine, pickled okra, and whole Dungeness crabs.  This is what has germinated Flying Bear Farm within me: an innate desire to eat really well, and a native connection to where that food comes from, combined with a desire to share all of that love.

In my early twenties I apprenticed with a Wise Woman herbalist to explore my instinctive connection to plants and food and the wildness of the growing things around me.  Though it was difficult for me at the time to commit so deeply to that life, I discovered a place within me that recognized the sweetness and rightness of living close to the plants, which led me to volunteering with Seattle Tilth as a way to learn more.

In 2007, I started to finish my BA degree at Seattle Central Community College after a stint as a massage practitioner.  I had burned out of massage, though I hadn’t lost my underlying calling to be a healer.  During my community college time, I came up with the idea of Flying Bear Farm as a way of self-soothing.  It was my answer to a broken system and my own desire to live my path instead of getting stuck in the grind.  I imagined Flying Bear Farm as a super-urban, community-centered small farm where I lived, that could also function as transitional housing and work-trade for those who needed help getting back on their feet.  A combination of living my food love and my healing path all in one!  As I moved on from community college to Antioch University, my dreams of Flying Bear Farm blossomed and took on new meaning.  I studied Ecopsychology extensively and realized that the issue I have the most passion around is our human experience of disconnection from the Earth, and the pursuit of repairing that relationship.  I think it’s a natural fit to utilize growing food to help people reconnect to the Earth, and to focus on this practice in the very middle of the city, w

here it’s needed most.  So that is what Flying Bear Farm has grown into: a healing practice that utilizes the growing of food in the city to help reconnect human beings to the Earth.  This is worthwhile and meaningful theory, I think.  And yet, you might ask, “What the hell do you actually do on this farm!?”  Here is my envisioning of Flying Bear Farm as a business:

By utilizing small urban patches of land (backyards, parking strips, empty lots, etc), Flying Bear Farm quilts together an urban farm that grows specialty heirloom produce, 

spices and flowers (full of stories and magic) and sells these as raw materials and value-added products (jam, pickles, packaged herbs, etc) at a local farm stand and eventually at farmer’s markets.  The physical sites of this farm will also function as demonstration and inspiration sites for the teaching department of Flying Bear Farm.  Local people who are in need of urban farm mentoring, from a group class on my site to a year long mentoring relationship at their site, will be supported by myself and the rest of the Flying Bear Farm family.  Ben and my innate loves of art and design will also be parts of the overall services of Flying Bear Farm.

Since the beginning, I’ve known that I can’t create this farm alone. So, here I am, setting forth on my path with good company, passion and a hungry belly.this farm alone.  It can only exist with my community, nature, family and friends all connected deeply to its core.  And within the last six months, I’ve finally found my partner and love, Ben, who is now an integral part of the life of this farm (woohoo!).

-Melissa AKA The Flying Bear

Who are we? The Ben edition

About Ben:

For some time now I have not really known what to say when someone asks me, “what do you do?” This is, in part, due to my diversity of interests, which have led to an even more diverse array of jobs, classes and activities. So I might answer that question these days with a rather incomprehensible string of adjectives. I am a writer, farmer, historian, naturalist, community organizer, artist (novice), arm chair meteorologist and an international studies scholar, among other things. These days I tend to spend much of my time in the dirt with my fellow beard toting friend, Jake. This dirt time allows me to have wall and roof time in my Frellardey (Fremont/Ballard/Phinney) apartment in North Seattle. I am always looking for a day job that exercises more of my abilities, but for now digging in the dirt with Jake isn’t so bad in the wider scheme of things.

Flying Bear Farm exists in it’s own universe outside my daily hierarchy of needs. It is the coalescence of dreams shared with my love and partner, Melissa. It is the physical manifestation of my ideals and the seed of my desired future as a gentleman farmer. Food is the most important thing humans create. It is necessary to exist, central to community and culture, and utilizes more land and water than anything else. I want to be part of our community’s solution to a broken food system, and therefore I am, and always will be, a farmer above all else.

I continue to be in awe of the extraordinary growing season Western Washington is blessed with despite it’s northerly spot. I hail from the shorter growing seasons of the higher and sunnier Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Montana. The whole water thing is rather new to me, as is the mild winter. So if I ever insult you with the exclamation, “nice weather today!” on a classically wet and grey Seattle Monday, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to rub it in (I really think it is nice!). It is possible that as I spend more time in my new home, I too will turn into a weather weenie, but with one Seattle year under my belt that has not happened yet.

As this year closes and we enter the much anticipated 2012, I am planting the seed of Flying Bear Farm with Melissa so that it will begin to grow and prosper into the new year. I invite you to join us in our endeavor in whatever capacity is sustainable for you. You can even join me in becoming a 21st Century urban, gentleman farmer if you like, we’ll show you how.

Stay dry (HA!) and enjoy your holidays with some amazing and sustainably grown food.

- Ben