“I’m trying to grow healthy food and get it to as local a community as I can,” said Scott Chichester, owner of Chi’s farm (the “i” pronounced like “tie”), at 142 Towne Road, which opened in 2014.

“I derive my deepest satisfaction from knowing I feed my community.”

The strands that twist together to become the story of Chi’s Farm are of greater complexity than one newspaper article can explore. They include the history of farming in Sequim and the present day movement of small, eco-conscious farms and buying local, the ever-rippling effect of Nash’s Farm, the role the Evergreen State College plays in encouraging interdisciplinary exploration and environmental awareness combined with action, the federal and local governments’ support of farmers during the pandemic, how seeds are grown and who to source them from, Chichester’s organic methods, the positive impact Chi’s Farm has upon our community through its local distribution focus, the stories of the people behind it: Sequim native Chichester and the team that works alongside him; the Normans, retirees turned farmers, and the Bridges, an idealistic and pragmatic couple focused on cultivating community and local agriculture.

And, of course, the strands include the story of the land itself.

The 5 acres of earth at the heart of Chi’s farm were once part of a 100-acre alfalfa farm, according to Laurel Norman, whose husband bought the parcel some time in the 1980s. It is now home to eight greenhouses and a farmstand.

The stand is open seven days a week, all day, Chichester said. It operates on the honor system, offering salad mixes year round and in-season produce as well as eggs, bread and ferments from other producers. Currently, a mix of plant starts are available for sale.

“That farmstand is amazing,” said Lisa Bridge, who with her husband Joe Bridge leases the 5 acres to Chichester.

“There is a tremendous amount of traffic … in the summer it is booming.”

“I try to make it meet as many shopping needs as I can,” said Chichester.

Chichester also leases land at two other locations. He estimated that last year there were 10 acres in production.

Chichester and three employees work the land and he is looking to raise that to at least five or six full-time employees; however, he said hes’s willing to accommodate part-time workers at a wage above minimum that increases soon after hiring. (See chisfarmcom.wordpress.com/were-hiring)

Bridge said that employees tend to stay working for Chichester, thanks to the livable wages and his leadership.

“It’s something to be proud of,” she said.

Chichester said he built his business around salad greens (and purples), which are consistently the farm’s most popular produce.

“People find the salad mix to be super useful,” he said, noting that he steers away from spicy and bitter in the mix; components can vary but tend to include lettuce, spinach and mild brassicas.

Greens are harvested fresh and double-rinsed and spin-dried. Chichester advised to always vegetables again before using.

“His produce is clean and orderly — he values that,” said Bridge, “and customers appreciate that.”

Customers said that the mix tends to stay palatable longer than typical when stored in the refrigerator.

One of the farm’s customers, Beverly Hetrick, said, “The salad mix is out of this world. I always stop here on my way home from the master gardeners’ meeting.”

Cherish Dahinden, produce manager at Country Aire in Port Angeles, said that Chi’s Farm is number one “for the volume of our local sales.” She said she has been working with Chichester for four years.

“The first year he started by just bringing us his salad mix and spinach to now supplying us with over 25 produce items during the spring, summer and fall months,” Dahinden said.

“He has cultivated a huge fan base here in Port Angeles due to the quality of his produce and we’re happy about the relationship we’ve built with this local farm.”

Alderwood Bistro of Sequim is another long-term buyer. Jessica Shuenemann said they met Chichester when they were first opening the restaurant 16 years ago and he was working at Nash’s farm.

The restaurant uses a lot of great produce from Chi’s throughout the year, such as salad green mix, bok choi, kales, squash, carrots, cabbage, beets, herbs, hot peppers and radishes.

She said Chichester is “an incredible farmer with deep roots in the Dungeness Valley. The pandemic made his farm even more popular as more people were seeing the necessity to buy local. We are proud of him and to see his farm growing is really exciting. Farming is one of the hardest jobs out there, it is undervalued and underappreciated. His success and other small local farm successes should be celebrated and applauded!”

Shuenemann emphasized the importance of buying local: “When you purchase from Chi’s Farm it goes to the farm and pays the overhead and staff. Provides jobs, who in turn spend their money locally on rent, goods, taxes etc.

“According to Clallam County EDC, when you spend $100 at a locally owned independent store, $68 is returned to the community. If you spend that at a national chain store, only $43 is returned to the community. Spend it online and NOTHING comes back to our community.

“Where we spend our money creates the world we live in, and when we spend it locally, we have made an impact to be proud of right before our eyes.”

CSA farmshares

CSAs (community supported agriculture) farmshares are an important way the local community participates in a mutually beneficial economic relationship with farmers. By paying in advance for a weekly box of fresh produce, buyers have a steady source of nutrition and farmers have a revenue source in advance of the season.

Chi’s Farm offers spring and summer CSA farmshares at store.chisfarm.com/collections/farmshares.

Chichester said the farmshare, “starts with the salad mix.” Half the value is the salad mix and the rest is seasonal veggies. such as carrots, brassicas, cucumbers and peppers and herbs.

Parsley and basil, Italian and Thai, are the primary herbs, with thyme, sage, oregano, cilantro and dill included at times.

Buildings

Year-round salad mix is made possible by the greenhouses Chi’s Farm has been building in sets of two since the fall of 2020, and smaller caterpillar style tunnels since 2018.

“All eight have used the community funding model to purchase and build the structures,” said Chichester.

According to Bridge, for each set, 30 community members loaned $1,000 to build the greenhouses. Many offered more money and more than 30 people wanted to donate each time.

Said Bridge, “It’s been an incredible reflection of how much people really care and trust,” Chi’s Farm.

Chichester says the greenhouses have allowed him to “radically extend my season of harvest.” He can produce two to three rotations in each house and a heat loving crop in them during the summer.

Bridge noted that the environmentally controlled space of the greenhouses are an important element in producing food during the uncertainty of climate change.

After construction is completed and they are inspected by the USDA, grant money reimburses the loans, Chichester said.

Farm bridges

Joe Bridge, like Chichester, grew up in Sequim and both of them worked at Nash’s Farm.

Chichester, class of 1992, earned an associate of arts degree from Peninsula College and later attended (and graduated from) the Evergreen State College for three winters while working for Nash’s the rest of the year.

The Bridges are much more than lessors of the farmland — they are collaborators with Chichester, just as they were with the people the bought the land from, the Normans. Joe is the “facility support guy,” according to Bridge, and she writes the blog for the farm at chisfarmcom.wordpress.com/blog (see the December edition for more of Chichester’s biography).

Lisa Bridge, originally from Massachusetts, has worked in the farming community most of her life. She said that in about 2008, she and Joe put an ad in the newspaper, “Young couple looking for a farm … ” explaining in the ad that they would be dedicated to keeping the land in farming and they would need special terms to buy it.

Eventually they connected with the Normans.

Laurel Ann Norman was a retired counselor from Los Angeles, Calif., and Robert was a ground handling engineer for the space shuttles, said Norman.

“(Robert) figured out how to get them safely to Cape Canaveral and things like that,” said Norman, who is now in her 80s. Robert, 20 years older, has passed.

Robert grew up near Seattle. Norman says there was a farmer in his family, “and he worked on the farm as a young person” and sold produce at Pike Street Market, so when they married and retired from L.A. to move to Sequim and farm the five acres at Towne Road, “he was getting back to his roots.

“But he sure didn’t know much about farming,” said Norman, laughing. “I knew more about it than he did.”

When they retired in Sequim she studied and became a master gardener. Robert built a water system on the farm that was “very complicated” and “worthy of a space engineers work.”

Said Norman, “It was really wonderful farming land. Glacial silt; it was one of these ancient rivers from when the ice melted off the ice age glaciers and ran down to the sound.”

“You can imagine what good growing property it was. It was shame to put it into real estate and properties and driveways.”

Norman said the couple “got in on the beginning of the lavender project.” They used about an acre of land for lavender.

“It wasn’t a lot but it was a lot of plants,” Norman said.

Robert developed a lavender still on wheels.

“It could be pulled around the valley and used at various lavender farms,” Norman said. “We did that for a while but we couldn’t really make any money out of it. It was really a hobby, that was what the IRS said.”

Norman said they next tried garlic: “It was big, beautiful wonderful garlic. We sold it at the Port Townsend Co-op. It was labor intensive, all the farming was labor intensive.”

Robert gravitated towards growing food, putting in pear trees and blackberry bushes and Norman wanted to grow flowers, so the name “Laurel Ann’s Rainbow Farm” covered their range. They met a horticulturist named Paul Moore, and in exchange for “a small piece of property to grow irises on in his his old age… he gave Bob his expertise. He and Bob had a great time together.”

Said Norman, “He called his farm Grandpa’s Iris Garden … I swear he had way more business for what he produced than we did. People flocked to buy his irises.

“It was a wonderful experience to become a farmer in the last half of your life or so … we had a lot of fun doing it.”

Robert got older, he sold the still, and the Normans began to think about the future of the land. They wanted to keep it farming. Bridge said it was Nash Huber who connected them with the Normans when they were looking for land.

“Bob met us at the farm. He was brazen, confident, a funny guy.”

She said he told them, “I’m too old to farm — I’m 92-years-old — I’ll show you my driver’s license to prove it.”

She said it was important to him to keep the farm as a farm, “and we went on a journey to prove to him our worthiness.”

Norman said, “I felt really strongly about not wanting the property to be developed, because it was such good growing soil. Just the fact that they wanted to farm it and grow food on it was a huge selling point. They were young and just starting out, and why not help young farmers out? I was so pleased, and he was too, to sell it to some people who wanted agriculture on it.”

Bridge said that they proved to Robert that they could take care of the land and the couples became friends. “We would sit every Friday at their stove,” and figure out the details until they had a deal that was manageable for their finances. “It was an incredible trust building exercise.”

Norman said that despite being pleased about the Bridges, Robert had some trouble letting go.

“We went down to the title company to sign — we all went together — and he had a heck of a time making his hand sign those papers,” Norman recalled. “He didn’t want to let go of his precious farm, but they were the perfect buyers, just wonderful, and ideal for the situation.”

The Bridges worked hard to clean up the farm from the fallow period between the two couples. They grew produce on the land and sold it and built the farmstand.

Like the Normans, they found that the amount of labor they put in didn’t translate to a living wage.

“Having purchased the farmland, a home and then having a baby, we found that we needed outside income to stay afloat,” Bridge said.

“Initially we were selling produce and berries from the farm but were unable to quickly generate enough income from the farm to pay our mortgages. We had to pivot towards higher paid work while also revitalizing a somewhat abandoned farm. We knew we would always be stewarding the land in the direction of farming.”

They began to talk about leasing it to someone who could spend more time on it.

“When Scott approached and said he wanted to farm in Sequim, we had absolute confidence in his skill set and in his character and that we would be able to communicate well,” she said, noting that Chichester had worked at Nash’s for more than 10 years “in a huge leadership position.”

Said Bridge, “We knew it would be workable. It would be positive. We were just thrilled. The good communication has continued. That has been consistent. It’s amazing — it’s like a dream come true.”

Norman, too, is pleased with what the land has become. She said she goes there from time to time.

“It’s nice produce,” she said.

Norman said she wishes Robert had survived to see it.

“They know how to farm — they’re real farmers… the trees that he planted are mature and the berries are still there,” she said. “I hope he is looking down from heaven and seeing what he instigated there.”