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Willoway Farm offers Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Heirloom Vegetable Shares, Heirloom Flower Bouquet Shares and brown and blue egg shares. In addition our vegetables, herbs, and flowers can be found at locally at weddings, local restaurants and local shoppes whom support local vendors. 

I met Jacqueline Fulcomer from one of my Podcasting friends Dr. Anh who has a podcast called Food as Medicine and it’s such a coincidence because Jacqui used to live right near me here in Montana just 6 miles away in Fortine where I worked as a teacher. 

Tell us a little about yourself.

As you know I’m Jacqui, I live in Fredonia ,WI about 45 miles north of Milwakee. My partner and I manage an 8 acre farm… where we have about an acre and 1/2 of vegetables cut flowers and herbs tat we manage organically. We also have about 75 young apple trees on our hill that we graft every spring. We own root stock, we sell to CSA clients… Community Supported Agriculture. Then we also sell to local chefs… we also sell to one local school and attend a local market as well.

Willoway Farm and CSA Sales

• CSA =Community Supported Agriculture
• local chefs
• local school
• farmer’s market

I’m so glad you explained CSA is Community Supported Agriculture. Now do you have a podcast?

We do have a podcast… it’s called Willoway Farmcast…. took the pod out and added farm… We started doing it as a newsletter for our csa members… it started out on Soundcloud and we have a couple of episodes out on iTunes. We haven’t put an episode yet this year, because I forgot how to upload them… This year we will have

talk about what’s in the basket and what’s happening on the farm… 

We also encourage people to ask questions so we can actually repeat them, and answer them because if one person has that questions chances are someone else does too! And we enjoy doing it, at the end of the day, sometimes we just post sounds of the farm, sometimes we’ll just post from the farm to give people a little ear shot. Part of it’s because: 

A. we don’t feel like typing after a day of gardening

B. it’s a way people can simply  listen to the podcast and don’t have to be locked into the screen from picking up the basket….

People like their ways, listening while driving or doing dishes, my two biggest places to listen are running in the woods or driving…

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

You know… I grew up in NJ, and my parents were not big gardeners… I grew up in a neighborhood, my dad enjoyed growning blowers… we got a little cabbage patch kid gardening kit, it was like the first time I grew vegetables… IDK how old I was, we didn’t [pant it at our homebase, my parents did have a tiny little sea shore shack that they rented out, they let me put my cucumbers and whatnot in that sandy garden, It was so exciting to plant something and come back and eat the cucumbers…

As a child I didn’t really like other veggies but cucumbers were it for me… After that I was always drawn to doing outdoor work in nature… and when I landed in WF MT, 1999 spring, I can’t even remember sometimes….

My room mate attended and had been to Purple Frog Gardens in Whitefish, and  she brought me over the and this was one of my first roommates. I started volunteering at Purple Frog Gardens and Pam was like, you know I’d be happy to pay you.

On the weekends when I wasn’t working for the forest service I was working in her garden with the her chickens adn the apple trees and whatever she needed help wiht.

And Pam from episode 118  was just an amazing guest on my show in February I think! If you want to hear more about Purple Frog Gardens  she’s been doing this for years and talks about community and volunteers and just tons of great tips there! Do you want to tell listeners just a tiny bit about working for the USFS in case they’re interested?

Well, you know, I when I left Rawling NJ where I was raised, I left at 18, went to Paul Smith College beacsue they ave a forestry program and I basically wanted to get paid to work in the woods that was my dream! So once I landed in MT, because of my experience with the forestry classes, I did get a forestry position and I did that for 4 summers, 3 summers in MT, once in Alaska.

That kind of work was mostly labor, I was also working on the fire crew in Alaska, did get to do a little traveling. otherwise, when I was working in Montana, it was more local they did not fly us out… it wa rellsy a lot of expereiences and it showed me what I was capable of doing, I got to be chain saw certified. 

it was all htese things, if you had asked me in Rawling, NJ in high chool, if you would ahve asked me if I was ognna be runnig a chain saw or even simply skiing down mountains, I didn’t grow up doing that stuff… You know I put yourself there. Sometimes you have to put yourself in places and make things happen and that’s how I landed here wher eI am. When I moved to Montana, I didn’t know anyone but I just put myself there, but things happened pretty quickly. The only thing I didn’t like working for the USFS was I was a peon in a govt type world, I could workin the field and I can  see thngs that are planted and south facing

leaving 5 trees per acre, they weren’t growing back, but all the money that is being spent, for people to plant the trees, check to see if they’re growing,  man their not growing because it’s a south facing slope in MT, and there’s droughts and dry periods, and it’s easy to see something’s don’t work, and the only way to make changes you have to talk to people in Washington, DC …  

Some management I know is good in the Forest Service, some maybe not the best ane the people in Washington DC, are not always in tune with what is happening locally. That made me think… maybe I don’t want to keep pursuing forestry and I don’t want to be in an office later and I don’t want to not have a voice… and Pam said, to me after maybe my 4th season working there, “hey have you thought about farming?”

I told her “No.” I felt like I couldn’t earn enough income from farming… and not that money wasn’t that I was going for… I simply was nervous about it. It seemed like, at that point she was building her farm up to be something and it was a lot of years of investment and the return often comes  later down the road…I think I just started dating Dan…those things didn’t fall into place yet. Because of my experience with the USFS, thinking that was maybe not the route…

I turned my cheek towards organic farming. Because it was still outside work and it’s awesome! Besides other things:

• You’re more in control of how you manage the land
• it’s your creativity in gardening and farming 
• being innovative with ideas and making it work
• just a plan
• and all that good stuff

So I graduated from forestry work, so I don’t pick up a chain saw anymore! Whenever I ran a chain saw, I always wore chaps, I’d never run my chain saw without protecting my legs, I’ve seen many men not wear their chaps!

I’ve always been afraid of chain saw, I barely pick Mikes up to carry it … forget run it! And there’s the whole tip a tree over, and is it gonna fall on you and that part!!!

Whenever I ran a chain saw, I always wore chaps, I’d never run my chain saw without protecting my legs, I’ve seen many men not wear their chaps!

You know Mike and I met on a mountainside planting trees up here… I love your whole thing about put your self out there…. I wuld have never met Mike or found this place I still remember driving up from Missoula and then from Whitefish to here… and thinking that I was in the  middle of nowhere!  And thinking there were trees everywhere and  I lived at Murphy Lake for the 3 weeks and knew nothing about Fortine and Eureka and I remember walking into the old antique store that used to be the Fortine store when it was still in the old antique store and being so ecstactic to be able to get bagels! and Milk! Muprhy Lake is still one of my all time places to go in the whole world!

How did you learn how to garden organically?

I learned a lot there, she was doing multiple crops from hops to apple trees. She was just planting her apple trees! I loved the way she fed her chickens! More like whole griains! We’re not doing that 

we purchase our organic feed from Cashton Farm supplies it’s a non-soy certified organic feed for our layer chickens. Pam did feed her chickens soy at the time. There were a lot of things happening on her farm, and she also grew flowers, not a lot at that time, but some.

Just being at a job and getting face to face with soil, was a little more intimate, a different intimacy then working for the Forest Service you’re more engaged in helping things grow and understanding how the soil works. After a while me and Dan did move to Wisconsin and he’s from Fedonia, WI… and  Montana’s great but it’s very seasonal. Me and Dan met at a ski mountain restaurant so I worked at the Forest Service during the summer  but the problem with ski towns is they’re great but if there’s no snow in the winter, people aren’t really coming and then your income goes down. For me there was a little bit of instability and moving to Wisconsin, we discussed and having family around can always be helpful so we decided that would be good move.

Upon moving to Wisconsin, because I’d been working on an organic farm for years, I was like I need to find one right away, I can at least trade for food. We looked around and we found Michael Fields  Agricultural Institute in East Troy, Wisconsin and we arrived in the fall in Wisconsin in 2003 and they had an open house

Garden Student Program it began the following March, and we enjoyed the open house and the overview of the course. At the time, Dan and I didn’t really have a next plan, so we were like let’s try this. So we did the garden student program for 5-6 months, that program had

• tons of paper work
• workshops for things particularly interested in learning about
• plus teaching you the ins and outs of growing marketing
• growing organically
• large scale
• smaller scale

So you worked every day on the farm! It was good! It really gave us a good beginning. They had a bulletin board with 

• tons of flyers
• people adveristind help on farms
• equpiment

In the spring in 2004, I saw a flyer for some land in NE Pennsylvania and they were looking for someone to farm the land biodyanmaically and it caught my eye because it was in a town my parents have land maybe a half hour from…. and we thought maybe we would just do like a trial period doing what we just learned

• where were just paying rent
• where we having invested so much
• ended up go there

There was a field that we plowed under about an acre garden, with raised beds about 4 feet wide, I forget how long our garden bed was… there were 4 sections. We grew our vegetables and flowers, Dan built a greenhouse to start all of our stuff. That summer we sold to chefs and a farmers market. We did not have a CSA that summer, but it was a great expereince!