Homesteader and herbalist Deirdre Haren stands in her drying shack in North Waldoboro surrounded by trays of plant leaves that she uses for formulating her teas.
The way Deirdre Haren sees it, taking logged land, littered with stumps, is better than running a tractor over pastureland and dealing with pasture weed for the rest of your life.
Deirdre is the granddaughter of farmers in Ireland (on both sides of the family). She’s also a chemist and environmental scientist with degrees from Oberlin College and Trinity College in Dublin. She’s studied bio-active compounds in seaweed in Ireland for a government agency.
She’s a compost nut, too. She worked at Earthcare Farm in Rhode Island, a compost farm founded by Michael Merner, who would weep while handling soil because of how much life it gives.
She studied meditation and yoga for six full months in India. Those disciplines give her strength and fortitude for the rigors of homesteading.
You might have seen Deirdre at the Damariscotta Farmers’ Market. Deirdre is an herbalist who’s formulates different teas, both for health and pleasure. She and her partner Evert McKee run the stand, and behind them is their parked car with a surfboard on top.
Deirdre, Evert, and a posse of four others live on a hill among upturned trees, restoring the land little by little, with gardens of flowers, herbs, and big beds of tomatoes, black beans, carrots, beets, potatoes, onions, garlic, greens, and onions to sustain them through the year.
“I think no one wanted to buy this land because it was a mess, but we’re finding this beautiful soil that’s rich with organic matter from all the breakdown in the woods, and I like the idea of cleaning it better than going into a beautiful wood and cutting down trees.
“I can’t believe how much we have all learned, but everyone doesn’t need to know about everything. The guys hunt and fish which is crucial for winter survival. Evert and Johnny, Evert’s brother, are the main lumberers. Cody, Evert’s best friend, is the person who will sit and research about all the finicky electric stuff, like for our solar panels. We have experts in all the different fields of homesteading.
“I grow all the plants for my medicinal teas, and forage, too, because there are a lot of things in the woods that I use. I like teas over tinctures because you can see very clearly in your cup that you are consuming a plant. The beautiful taste is healing, too, and it connects you to the earth.
“I’ve studied the chemicals in plants, but it’s from the people at the farmers’ markets from whom I’ve learned about the spiritual energies in plants, and their personal stories about their connection to plants. That’s why I do farmers’ markets, but a tent there is expensive for a tiny farmer like me.
“After the market’s rent, after the insurances I need, and after the mandated use of a commercial kitchen in Brunswick, it takes me about three months to make back that outlay. I think that’s why you don’t really see farmers from Waldoboro at the markets. They are so small-scale that they don’t have the financial capacity to pay those fees.
“To me, Waldoboro is wild this way, like Ireland. There are all these tiny, self-sufficient farms tucked away.
“Homesteading is hard work. We don’t have any money. What we do have, and why we are doing this, is time. Otherwise, we’d be locked down, spending all our time holding down three jobs, just trying to earn money to pay for things we don’t own.
“Here, we have the time to spend growing food, and we have the knowledge to do it. That’s why, when we get up in the morning, Evert makes me an omelet from our chickens and I go out and harvest the greens to put in it. Then we talk about what we’re grateful for.
“After that, we literally have no routine to our day. We tend to whatever needs to be done in the garden, or whatever building project there is for that time of year. We might have a rough idea of what projects need to be done week by week, or month to month, like building our homes. But we’re always trying to focus on the things that need to be done today.
“All of us have been houseless at one, or many points, in our lives. Only Cody has his own house. We built his home first because he was the one who’d been houseless the longest.
“I’m excited because Evert and I have built our root cellar and finished our foundation, which is way harder to do by yourself, especially in concrete, but we did it and it was so worth it. Now he’s milling for building our house.
“For the first winter we were here, most of us were living in campers, and no one had insulated them. Evert and I lived in the pump house we had built. It was insulated, but it didn’t have any power. That was the really cold winter, and my car, the one car we owned, had broken down. That was the year I started working for Odd Alewives, too. I needed the money to pay for car parts.
“Evert is a really good mechanic, but repairing a Subaru on your own is difficult. For about a week, he’d been working outside, under the car, because he needed to get the control arm out, and one of the bolts was frozen. So I made pancakes on top of the woodstove with the blueberries we’d harvested at the barren over by the quarry. They were full of this flavor of summer, and I was so happy. When he popped in, I gave him one.
“An hour later, he was back: ‘That was like magical summer Waldoboro blueberry energy, because it’s out now!’ In the photo I took of him, he’s holding up the control arm and his face is covered in grease and he’s just so happy that it was out; that he could fix the car now, and that we could move around again. That was the Waldoboro blueberry juice.”
