Before visiting Tuttle Farm on the tour, our interviews had been with folks who are (or plan to be) in farming as a business. While achieving some of the same benefits of commercial farming--raising a family close to the land, growing good food and so on--Tuttle Farm is a much different sort of project.
Located on an average sized lot in a subdivision in Aurora, Illinois, Tuttle Farm is a family experiment in suburban food production. Erin Tuttle, along with her parents and occasionally her two sisters, have been slowly transforming their turf grass to the extent that currently about half of the yard is now home to native plants, vegetables, chickens and bees. This year, they've made their first foray out of the fenced-in back yard and into the front, with a lovely little cluster of chard, kale and green onions gracing the corner.
Erin admits that they often get strange looks from their neighbors and they sometimes feel like the talk of the block, but their adjacent neighbor is really supportive and loves the four chickens, who each produce one to four eggs per day for the Tuttle family and their friends and neighbors. As the project has spilled into the front yard, they've even made some unexpected connections with new neighbors.
The farm is definitely a family project and everyone has his or her specialty--gardening, cooking, caring for the chickens. Erin's mom has taken initiative with the two hives of bees, one Russian and one Italian, and they hope for their first yield of honey this year. In addition to being a source of satisfying work and good food for the family, Erin sees the project as educational beyond the bounds of their fence. She participated in area garden clubs and feels distinctly called to serve the suburbs with an imaginative vision for good food production. With ample land, much of it originally farm land, the suburbs are ripe for large edible gardens and a family's own crop can be supplemented by CSA shares and the burgeoning farmer's market movement.
For Erin, Tuttle Farm is more than just a hobby. It's a way to inspire and educate people about what's possible in an environment many have abandoned for its seeming lack of intentionality and vision. It's also a way of expressing some of the deepest values she holds as an Orthodox Christian:
I think one thing that is so important to me is just the idea of living within our limitations. I think that as Christians, we have a big God at the center of our faith who took on limitation to come and be with us. In the Orthodox church, we call Mary's womb "more spacious than the heavens" because even the heavens cannot contain God and yet God chose to be contained in a womb and then to come walk in this world of day and night, and warm and cold seasons, and hunger and thirst and tiredness and energy. And in doing that, God sanctified those limitations. I think living a life that's close to the land--and, again, even if we just know where our food is coming from--then we know that there are certain things that aren't available at certain times of the year and there are certain times weather inhibits what you can eat. And there are certain times that maybe people play a part and animals play a part and things outside of our control play a part and we therefore begin to know our limitations. I think that our goal then is to be able to rejoice in those limitations and live fully in them because I think that there are holy things and we become fully human when we walk in those things.
What beautiful connections! Thanks to Erin and the whole family of humans, animals and insects for welcoming us in to see their homegrown adventure in the midst of a busy time.
