Helen and Jen O’Donnell live at Bunker Farm in Dummerston along with their husbands and five children under the age of nine, 45 Red Angus-Hereford beef cattle and their 10-12 annual calves, 6 heritage-fancy hybrid breeding pigs and their annual 30-60 piglets, 800 – 1,000 Cornish Cross meat chickens, 12 laying hens, 12 Swedish Blue and Peking ducks, 3 Lion’s Mane rabbits, 4 cats, 1 dog, quite a few fish for the kids, 170 acres of land (made up of a ½ acre pond, 70 acres of meadows, that in total comprise 6 hay and grazing fields, 100 acres of mixed woodland holding a professionally managed many-acre sugarbush, two greenhouses FILLED every Spring with unusual starter flowering perennials, two houses, an antique barn, a state-of-the-art sugarhouse with attached storage barns… Life is just busting out all over the place.
And at the heart of this matter are Jen and Helen. (Oh, and their two husbands, Mike Euphrat and Noah Hoskins, too, both from our area.) These two powerhouse sisters grew up on Mt. Desert Island in Maine. Helen (born in 1982) and Jen, born two years later, both went to Mt. Desert Island grade school and high school. Helen gardened for families on the island. In fact, Helen told this writer “I haven’t missed a gardening season since I was 15.” (Their mother, Carole Plenty, oversaw the historically important Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden and related gardens on Mt Desert for years.)
After Helen graduated from Bates College in Maine in 2004 - having spent her senior year in Florence, Italy studying printmaking – she moved to the West Coast. She worked in Bellingham, Washington until 2007 “which is where I learned plants from sophisticated, fastidious gardeners. In 2007, I moved to Brattleboro and started working with individual gardeners in the area as well as working several months a year for seven or eight years for Gordon Hayward, a garden designer at the time. With fellow printmaker Briony Cribbs - who now lives just down the road in Dummerston and was from the West Coast - the two of them set up Twin Vixen Press making art prints. (Briony also taught printmaking at The Putney School.) Helen studied and gardened in England during two subsequent summers: first at The Hidcote Manor Garden in Gloucestershire, an Arts and Crafts Garden dating from 1907, and the following summer at Great Dixter, the towering gardener Christopher Lloyd’s garden, now the most important teaching garden in England.
Her sister Jen graduated from Trinity College in 2006 with a BS in Psychology and Education having studied abroad her senior year in New Zealand. “I returned to the East Coast, worked with Americorps with 8thgraders in Boston and then got my teaching certificate from Antioch in 2010. I taught kindergarten and grades 1&2 at Marlboro Elementary School for 2010-2012 and then moved to Putney Elementary in 2012 and am there now teaching in the 4th grade. Where Helen hasn’t missed a gardening season since she was 15, I feel I haven’t been out of a classroom since kindergarten – 35 years in one classroom or another….”
Then things began to come together for these two after both earned their BA degrees. After living and working in Boston or the West Coast, they shared an apartment in Brattleboro in 2009. In 2011 Helen married Noah; Jenne married Mike. The two couples each had a dog that were brothers. “We dabbled in growing garlic. We bought a cow and chickens. And we started looking for land.” Then Helen found what she felt was the PERFECT place. “OK, so the land had a broken-down trailer with raccoons living in it, but it was PERFECT: a few acres of woodland we could clear, raise cows…. The three others were not convinced.”
And then Noah’s parents (longtime Dr. Tom Hoskins and his wife Julie Forsythe in Putney) saw a real estate ad: The Vermont Land Trust had bought the development rights for what would become Bunker Farm. Through VLT’s Farmland Access Program that protects farmland from development, the organization wanted to sell the 170 acre farm in Dummerston in such a way that it would become a working farm. The four of them were selected to buy the property from a pool of applicants, each of which had submitted a business plan.
Two young sisters from Maine married two young local Vermonters. Helen told me, Noah Hoskins - a full-time history teacher at The Putney School – “ is now the guru on the farm. He writes grants, directs projects….” And he’s a problem solver. When it came clear early on that the farm needed a log splitter, rather than buy one, Noah studied a busted log splitter he found in the barn, found replacement parts here and there and built a working splitter.
Mike is fulltime on the farm. He runs the sugaring operation and has been from the start, now with 16 years of experience and the blue ribbons to show for it.
Jen teaches at the Putney Central School four miles from the farm. “I am very focused on helping students develop a sense of connection to each other, to their learning, to their community, and a feeling of belonging. The farm is a vital piece of this work. I host school-groups at the farm, connecting students to animals and agriculture.”
Helen builds on her lifetime skills with gardening, design and plants. She has two polytunnel greenhouses that every Spring are bursting with pots which, when warmer weather arrives, she sets out on tables for sale in front of the barn every Spring. She has help from Hannah Phillips and Sophie Cooper-Ellis as well as volunteers. (Hannah also works with Mike sugaring.) Helen grows and sells unusual flowering perennials that gardeners or her clients will drive from CT or MA or… to buy. Or she drives near and far to work with design clients.
Jen and Mike built their own house on the land; Helen and Noah restored the old house that was part of the farm they bought. But there’s more life - children: Helen and Noah’s Nell, six years old and Suzanna, nine; Jen and Mike’s son Avery, nine, and Shai and Lyda, five-year-old twins, all of whom LOVE being barefoot, with mud between their toes.
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.