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closeHarvest Fest hosts a tour of the back roads
Key Peninsula dishes up a taste of the farming life
Susan Schell
of the Gateway
It was time to get a little bit country on the Key Peninsula. Farmers joined their kinfolk on Saturday and invited the community to get a taste of their livelihood during the 11th annual Pierce County Harvest Festival.
Eight farms participated in the event on the Key, and each was bustling with children, adults and the animals that had a job to do.
Makenna Cameron’s duty for the day was to take care of the farm’s babies, the ducklings, baby chicks and rabbits, for her grandmother at Bea’s Flowers.
Billy Farmer’s job was to keep the crowd entertained and the air filled with music as he strummed his guitar at the Morgan Creek Farm.
Rebecca Runn and her daughter Davia Hendershot tended to the vegetable stand at the Calico Cat Farm, making sure there were plenty of potatoes, tomatoes and miniature pumpkins available for visitors. Their two tom turkeys also performed for visitors with plenty of feather fanning, strutting and gobbling.
At Gentle Giant Meadows Ranch, Filbert the goat made the rounds with packs full of candy, while champion 4-H dogs showed off their skills on an agility course.
The farm displayed before-and-after photographs, offering visitors a personal view of just what it takes to make a farm. “Before” photographs showed freshly plowed fields dotted with equipment, and it later turned into stables and hen houses for their chickens, sheep and horses.
The people who live on the farms and work the land come from all different walks of life. There is no cat at the Calico Cat Farm; the name stuck after a description Runn’s father gave to her mother.
“She always wears different, funny outfits,” she said. “My dad said she looked like a calico cat farm lady.”
The farm has been growing fresh produce for 16 years.
Steve and Donna White of Morgan Creek Farm both are former flight attendants. When they had enough of that life, they settled on the peninsula in 1996.
Steve builds greenhouses and decided to start one of his own as a hobby. The couple now regularly takes their produce and flowers to farmers’ markets around Pierce and Kitsap counties. Their specialty is dahlias, and the array of color in their flower field is breathtaking.
“That’s the great thing about dahlias,” White said. “The more you cut them, the more they grow.”
The farm also houses horses, chickens and a pet goat named Uku.
“He’s our mascot,” White said. “Uku means ‘little tick,’ because that’s what he is. When we first got him as a baby, he followed us everywhere.”
One cold fact farmers have to deal with is that frost kills. White pointed to rows of wilted greens, blackened by the cold.
“This just happened this week,” White said. “We heard there was going to be a frost last night, and our hearts were racing. We thought we’d lose all the flowers before the festival.”
But the Whites were lucky this year, and the frost slept through the weekend as the sun splashed down on their little farm on Saturday.
Harvest Festival visitors strolled down the rainbow rows and took a moment to capture the sweet smell of autumn.