Lessons in growing: Ephrata farm teaches, gives back and sinks in
Julie Johnston of Cloudview Farm in Ephrata livestreams on Facebook while Blayne Walsh (back) and Dusty Bolyard inspect, trim and harvest cabbage from a Cloudview Farm hoop house.
Charles H. Featherstone
A cabbage moth caterpillar on a leaf of Napa cabbage at Cloudview Farm in Ephrata. "We planted cabbages around August," said Dusty Bolyard, who harvested the cabbage. "Normally, the cold will kill them off, but it wasn’t cold enough."
Dusty Bolyard kneels next to the remains of a head of Napa cabbage he just harvested. "I'm here for the food," said Bolyard, a Grant County native whose family settled in Coulee City in 1886.
Dusty Bolyard of Cloudview Farm in Ephrata cleans and prepares a head of Napa cabbage.
Julie Johnston of Cloudview Farm in Ephrata livestreams on Facebook while Blayne Walsh (left) and Dusty Bolyard (right) inspect, trim and harvest cabbage from a Cloudview Farm hoop house.
EPHRATA — A cold rain is falling outside, and you can hear it plunking on the plastic cover of the greenhouse at Cloudview Farm.
Inside, several rows of crops sit under gauzy white coverings. Protection, mostly from the bugs, which seem to be able to get in despite everyone’s best efforts.
Blayne Walsh lifts the cover up to look at several small, but growing heads of lettuce and deep green bunches of kale, emerging from the soil.
“It’s so beautiful under here,” Walsh said as he shows off the heads of lettuce. “So much gratitude for these guys, especially in these deep winters, to have some greens.”
As Walsh peers under the cover cloth, he’s joined by Julie Johnston, who holds a cell phone in a stabilized gimbal. Johnston is livestreaming all of this on Facebook. It’s part of how Cloudview Farm tries to do its job as a teaching farm, the kind of place grade school kids take field trips to, at a time when no one’s taking any field trips.
“Obviously everything has changed with COVID-19,” said Johnston, the Cloudview Farm education and community coordinator. “I moved here from San Diego and started in March of this year right when everything shut down. Yay, I uprooted my life!”
While she’s still looking forward to eventually hosting a fair full of children, Johnston decided that if she couldn’t bring the kids to the farm, she would bring the farm to the kids.
It’s had her livestreaming about the farm’s organic garden, its menagerie of sheep, goats and chickens, hosting online story times, and showing a little bit about where food comes from.
“That’s Cloudview Farm, basically to educate,” she said. “We streamlined the mission, and the mission is growing healthy food, growing healthy communities.”
According to Johnston, Cloudview Farm was founded in 2006 in Royal City by Jim Baird, a Columbia Basin native and long-time farmer and orchardist, as a teaching farm for aspiring apple growers. Farmers would come and spend six months learning Baird’s organic farming techniques, Johnston said.
At some point, Baird wanted to educate the wider public. But Royal City was too far off the beaten path, so Johnston said Baird bought the current spread north of Ephrata.
“Teaching farmers to farm was not on the agenda anymore. So it just became educating the community,” she said.
Currently, Cloudview Farm has a seasonal vegetable store (pickups are available in Moses Lake), operates Cloudview Kitchen in Soap Lake to show people how to use all the greens they grow, and provides the Ephrata and Soap Lake food banks with seasonal vegetables, though Johnston said the farm is raising funds to be able to provide both food banks with dedicated, year-round greens as well.
Cloudview Farm is also working with Head Start in Grant County with both cooking classes and help on how to grow vegetables in a garden plot or containers.
“Here’s how you can use the food you’re getting from us, or growing,” she said. “And the same thing with the food banks. A lot of times people will get a bunch of food and don’t know what to do.”
“We had a discussion of garbanzo beans the other day,” she continued. “Everyone’s like, we don’t want garbanzo beans, it’s just they don’t know what to do with them. So things like that, where we can teach people.”
It’s all part of learning where food really comes from, Johnston said, and helps promote a better connection to the earth and respect for the land.
“That’s the basics of what we’re aiming to do out here,” she said.
For Walsh, who moved to Cloudview Farm from Seattle, where he managed a bakery, it’s all about being connected to food and to the land.
“I love being on the land, and I love being out here,” he said. “That’s just a natural part of being connected to the land, another part of feeding yourself.”
“It’s special out here,” he said of both the farm and the region. “Especially being from the city, the hustle-bustle, it’s nice to be back in our rural hometowns, sinking in and giving back.”
For more information, visit cloudviewfarm.org or follow them at www.facebook.com/cloudviewfarm.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.
