Nine Things to Know About The Farm!
Welcome! Here is where you’ll find updates from us, fun facts about apples and grapes, relevant (and irrelevant) reflections on life, gossip about our dogs, insights from our mistakes, and incredibly attractive family selfies. This is our journey — raw, authentic, and hopefully entertaining. Thank you for joining our adventure!
This blog page will mostly be dominated by Caroline (and from here on out I will no longer have to speak in third person). She is on the farm full-time since graduating college from a computer screen in May 2020.
The past few months have involved fixing up the farm, getting a puppy, organizing finances and business documents, developing marketing strategies, talking to local apple growers/vineyard managers/cider makers/winemakers, rebuilding the website, harvesting the apples, grappling with life post-college in a pandemic, and doing random farm chores (there are so many I can’t begin to list them here).
Anyways, here is a list of things to know about Kristof Farms:
Grandma Jane. Our matriarch is a tough, animal-loving, art-historian socialite. She was progressive before it was cool. By the time the rest of the household is awake, Grandma Jane has already taken the dogs on a mile-long walk, watered the vegetables, created three petitions to release political prisoners abroad, answered seven emails, unloaded the dishwasher, and made a phone call to the vet about a new scab on one of the dogs’ paws. Though she’s approaching 90, she’s as sharp as a knife, and takes more steps than the rest of the family combined. A triumph for her, perhaps not for us.
The Farm Dogs. Aside from Grandma Jane, you should know about the farm dogs, Chloe and Connie. They run the show around here. Chloe is a 7-year-old Curly Coated Retriever with the most aggressive tail wag you’ve ever seen in a dog, and Connie is a 4-year old Kuvasz who demands constant attention and enjoys hunting for dinner. Nothing goes into the trash, recycling, or dishwasher without first getting licked by the dogs. Out of fairness, there must always be TWO items to be licked. Frequently, Grandma Jane comes home with a bag full of empty peanut butter jars, collected from her church community who all know how much her dogs love peanut butter. Disclaimer: Tux, our Aussiedoodle pup, is also being raised out here, and we are training him to not expect human food plates after every meal. It’s hard work. Sigh.
The Trash System. Kristof Farms is home to the Most Complex Residential Trash System in America™: A perplexed visitor attempting to dispose of something MUST make sure the item can’t be reused for anything else. Human container? Now dog kibble container. Aluminum foil? Not quite sure, but we can keep that. If and only if the item cannot be reused, one is faced with six options. Without giving away too much, let’s just say that the recycling bin is twice as large as the garbage bin and gets picked up twice as often. Garbage only gets picked up once a month.
The Dog Fur. There is dog fur wedged into every crevice of the farmhouse you see and don’t see, into every object you touch and many meals you eat, too. The dogs shed — a lot — and there have never been less than two dogs at a time in the last 50 years. So, if you are allergic to dogs like half my family is, be prepared to be highly medicated on the premises. I promise that dog fur adds an artistic touch to your clothes!
Petition signing. Chances are if you come to Kristof Farms, Grandma Jane will ask you to sign several petitions to champion human rights for unjustly imprisoned individuals. Founder of the Oregon chapter of Amnesty International, Jane is absolutely delighted by signatures — her passion is infectious. If you SHARE her petition to your friends, she may even forgive you if you accidentally put paper in the trash, though she won’t ever forget it. As I was kennel-training my puppy, Grandma Jane threatened to release a petition to “Free Tux.” You can sign her current petition here!
The Land. Kristof Farms is magnificent. Sprawling across more than 100 acres in the fertile Willamette Valley, the farm embraces a rich and diverse landscape. Only about 20 acres is devoted to the orchard and vineyard, and the rest of the land is in trees and enriched by ponds (we have four ponds on the property, courtesy of the late Ladis Kristof) and blackberry bushes, where wildlife roam freely by day and terrifyingly at night. Luckily, the dogs protect us!
The History. If you’ve read our story, you know our family is heir to an inspiring and heartwarming story that brought us to our property. When my grandpa arrived in the US in 1952, a penniless refugee from Eastern Europe, he made his first purchase in an attempt to jumpstart learning his 8th language. It was a copy of the Sunday New York Times. After working at a logging company in Oregon, he dreamed of one day building a library in a forest — after several decades and degrees, he did just that.
The Books. The farm really is a library in the woods. Floor to ceiling bookshelves deck every side of every room, practically, in numerous languages. When no more books could fit in the house, my grandpa built a separate library next to the garage, and continued extending that library until it doubled the size of the actual house. When he passed about a decade ago, we spent months packing and donating 25,000 books.
The Art. The farm is also an art gallery, thanks to my grandma’s profession as an art history professor at Portland State University. After my grandpa passed, we converted the old library into a loft; we wanted to have someone else on the property full time to keep Jane company, and were lucky when one of her former students, Adam Rupniewski, took up the offer. A phenomenal and creative artist, Adam has further decorated our premises with color and meaning.
Sorry, I couldn’t think of a tenth. Anyway, we hope that one day you can come visit! (Ideally, when the global pandemic is something that we only read about in textbooks, and not in daily transmission rates.) We can’t wait for you to join us on our journey.