Reflections on a Saved Farm Season
Three Sisters Garden's Tracey Vowell on loving — and being challenged by — nature
It Feels Like Years Since It’s Been Here
We need the rain. We need the rain. We need the rain.
OK, the weather today is unpleasant. Cloudy and quite a bit of that rain we need. So I thought it might brighten your day to share this photo I took from our window of yesterday’s sunrise.
I’m a bit tardy on sharing this, but with our unusually panoramic south view, we get to watch the sun rise in the morning and set at night from our living room. That half-year actually started a few days earlier.
It’s never less than awe-inspiring, even though we’ve been blessed over the past 11 years with watching this spectacle thousands of times.
A Fire Out of the Fire
Last February, as she prepared for the 2022 planting season, Tracey Vowell of Three Sisters Garden in Kankakee, Illinois received some horrifying news. A farm where she stored equipment and some of her product had suffered a devastating fire, and her losses were severe.
But, thankfully, Tracey has made many friends over the years and they rushed to her support. One of them, Chef Rick Bayless, threw a benefit dinner for her at Chicago’s Frontera Grill, where she worked as executive chef before going into full-time farming almost 20 years ago.
Now Tracey is winding down a successful growing year, and everything I’ve written about Three Sisters Garden of late has been happy, whether it was big boxes of her famous sweet corn, ginormous watermelons or the weapons-grade 6-pound butternut squash I had delivered just last week.
Tracey, in her newsletter today, wrote a lovely essay about taking a deep breath and dealing with the positive side of fire in a farmer’s life. In it, she describes how a sustainable farmer like herself can love nature, but face a constant tension with nature’s desire to reclaim the land that Tracey is cultivating.
I hope you’ll read and enjoy it.
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Today was my day to get back up on the horse.
As the sun rose, I wandered out to what had become our burgeoning burn pile, and lit it up. You can imagine my apprehension, knowing it would be a big burn, but time only makes it worse.
While Kankakee slept, I stood outside in the half dark, slowly feeding a fire, preventing it from reaching the nuclear storm level of heat, but establishing a good roll so that I could go about my task of trimming tree line. A daunting task on a regular year.
We are a long, narrow farm, long from front to back, and are fully tree-lined on three of our four sides, which makes for a great environment, feeling somewhat secluded, protected even. But it also amounts to about 4,000 feet of trees, and quickly developing brush, that must be maintained.
After the COVID crash, when all the restaurants closed and I needed to figure out our next move, I spent three days tending a constantly burning fire, while the guys trimmed and cleaned tree line, hauling it up to me, in what seemed like a never-ending repetition. We made it almost all the way down one side, full length, 3,200 feet.
But home delivery came out of that time spent watching the fire, and today, early, I convinced myself that it was time to really get myself together.
Jose in the city on deliveries, Jesus harvesting carrots, I started cutting brush and limbs, and hauling them to the burn pile, turning and pushing with the bucket on the front of the tractor, getting back to maximizing the size of our tiny farm, uncovering the edges.
We have to push back, or Mother will slowly but surely plant trees and vines that increasingly encroach on our growing area. Some of it is black walnut. No, I have no interest in processing and selling what we have, and if you lived here with them, you would feel the same.
Black walnut does make those lovely nuts, but it also kills many other plants that may grow among its roots, and left unchecked, those spreading roots will increase the dead zone created by the tree. She throws thorny brambles and vines that go on forever, poison ivy, spikes that dig into your clothes. She never concedes and says, ‘OK, you can have that piece of land.’ Never.
Every minute of every day, she is scheming about how to take her land back, cover it over in her choices for green, and send us packing. So, we trim tree line, every opportunity we get, pushing back against Mother and her quest for green world domination.
But then, look at the photo I took this morning, of the light, the fire, and that beautiful cloud, monitoring me and my fire. As I started my day, thinking of little other than pushing back Mother’s encroaches on my growing space, and making my peace with fire, she sent me incredible beauty to watch travel across the sky in the early morning light, as I nervously got myself back into the swing of the burning thing.
And yes, Kankakee County is one of the few left in Illinois where burning your own waste, from your own property, is still legal. I am thankful for that, or a full wood chipper operation would be necessary. And ever since Fargo, I think not.
-Tracey
Raise a Glass of Koval and Support Urban Ag
This morning I stumbled on a really cool event: a Harvest Season Happy Hour presented by the Advocates for Urban Agriculture (AUA) nonprofit and hosted by Koval, a distillery with which I have a long personal acquaintance, which in 2008 became the first legal distillery within Chicago’s city limits since before Prohibition.
The event will be held on Thursday, October 20 (that’s next week) starting at 4 p.m. at Koval’s tasting room, located at 4241 N. Ravenswood Ave. on Chicago’s Malt Row.
I’m hoping to plan my schedule around the happy hour and hope to see some of you there. Here are the details from AUA.
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Advocates for Urban Agriculture (AUA) is thrilled to host an end of harvest season celebration at KOVAL Distillery!
AUA is an advocacy and organizing organization centering growers, farmers, earth stewards, land and water. In partnership with and guided by growers we provide funding, technical assistance, advocacy and political education as resources to reimagine our relationships to land and the local food system while honoring indigenous sovereignty, black liberation, and immigrants’ rights.
We're excited to transition our annual fundraiser into a more casual, inclusive, and communal environment with a values-aligned venue. KOVAL Distillery crafts its entire line of liquors from scratch using a grain-to-bottle approach sourcing grains harvested by trusted farmers and has a longstanding commitment to supporting non-profits like AUA. If you're interested in learning more about urban agriculture in Chicago, want to support the work of local growers and are down to have a good time, this is the event for you!
Throughout the evening there will be:
Warm, spicy and savory cocktails with ingredients from Bee-utiful Honey and Candles, Cedillo's Fresh Produce, and Herban Produce available for purchase with part of the proceeds going to AUA
Live Jazz music!
Delicious seasonal small bites to enjoy from local growers and small-business owners in Chicago
Walk-through photo and video gallery highlighting Chicago area Growers and Farmers
Creative, Autumn-themed crafts and activities (great for adults and kiddos!)
A silent auction with unique, one-of-a-kind items