A little bit of everything is grown at Cookville Community Farm — fruit, vegetables, berries — and while the owners’ five children no longer live at home, an empty nest hasn’t led to empty gardens.
“They keep getting bigger instead of smaller,” laughed Kim Cook, who runs the Erickson farm with her husband, Tim, and four of their children.
The family is happy to offer that abundance of fresh food at the Creston Valley Farmers’ Market — which is the way it should be.
“I think society is too individualistic and that it’s of benefit to share a lot of things, food being one of them,” said Cook.
But they also take it a step farther, with one regular customer working at the farm in exchange for produce.
“We really like the idea of community,” she said. “We’re open to letting that grow. It’s not just about food and money but relationships with people. … Our family is kind of the core, but we’d like it to reach beyond that, like spokes in a wheel.”
To that end, Geoff Hanes, a son-in-law’s friend and classmate — “We’re kind of the nature geeks in the class,” he said — delivers produce each week to the Cranbrook Farmers’ Market, where customers are excited to see fresh produce earlier than anything grown around Cranbrook.
“It’s definitely fun selling in the market,” said Hanes.
Cook’s children began selling saskatoons at the Creston farmers’ market four years ago, and she added more produce a year later. She also offers baking, including bread, muffins and cookies made with local wheat. They’re up at 4:30 a.m. to get ready for the market each Saturday, but happy to be there — Tim and a son even take their guitars and play at their booth.
Gardening and farming are nothing new to the Cooks. Her family had a cow, pigs and chickens, and when they married, having met in high school, they started gardening to feed their eventual five kids, and later bought the house where Tim grew up.
“We bought it with the hope of doing more with the land,” said Cook, who was born in England, moved to Canada as toddler and came to the Creston Valley in Grade 4.
As gardeners, they are mainly self-taught and constantly trying new things — Cook has started a small hügelkultur patch, a raised bed with a rotting log inside to send nutrients straight into the plants.
Through their experimentation — which includes an old swimming pool that has been turned into a greenhouse — the Cooks are usually eating fresh produce in February or March. They start seeds in August so that plants grow to a decent size before going dormant in the cold weather.
“Sometimes, they look like they’re frozen and dead, but they’re not,” she said.
The winter crop is smaller, of course, but over the course of the summer, Cookville Community Farm turns out squash, corn, kale, cucumber, kohlrabi, popcorn, beans, dill, zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, beets, strawberries, blueberries — and that’s just a fraction of the list.
And even though it keeps the family busy, the hard work is all worth it.
“We’re quite concerned about our food and the way food is going,” Cook said. “I’m interested in knowing what I’m eating and what my kids are eating.”