A John Deere Publication

An artist's paint palette smeared with various colored paint

Going back into farming provided the Krepky family a new palette with which to express themselves, as bold as Morgan Krepky's paint palette.

Rural Living, Specialty/Niche December 01, 2024

A Fresh Palette

Creative family returns to farm life.

by Steve Werblow

Volumes have been written about folks leaving the farm. After selling a diverse operation in Washington and moving to a house in an Oregon town, the Krepky family flipped the narrative and went back to the farm.

Ten acres outside of Jacksonville, Oregon, presented a new palette for a creative family, especially for Cindy Krepky and her daughter Morgan. Both are bursting with energy and ideas for what to do with their new place, where ideas for new vegetables to grow share physical and mental space with concepts for art and design. Morgan explains.

"I'm a storyteller, so I do comics," says Morgan, who has published several graphic novels, teaches art and handles the website and communications for Dormouse Farm.

Cindy is a storyteller, too, with a long corporate career in documentation and international project management as well as decades of experience growing, processing, and cooking with a wide range of farm bounty.

"Documentation is all about teaching and helping people be successful," Cindy notes. "When you have children that don't know that carrots come out of the ground, there's a massive disconnect. I do a newsletter every week so people have a sense of what the challenges and rewards are for doing this."

Through it all, Dormouse Farm tells a story of its own—about family, about dreams, and about sharing the bounty of the Krepkys' homestead with neighbors.

The whole works. The Krepkys carved a homestead out of an old timber plantation near Carnation, Washington. When Cindy lost her corporate job, farming shifted from "extreme gardening" to a venture that needed a positive return on investment. The following years saw a string of new ventures.

"I guess coming out of Microsoft, you're always thinking of new things, so I just kept going," she says. "So we expanded. Every year we were doing something different. We started with a CSA [community supported agriculture] program, so we were just growing vegetables. Then the fruit was coming in, so we had fruit, vegetables, and herbs.

"Then with the poultry, we added in the meat—I was doing duck and chicken and turkey and guinea fowl," she adds. "Then we decided, 'wow, we don't process the things we don't sell,' so we put in a commercial kitchen.

"We were doing farm dinners every Saturday where we'd bring in a winemaker and a Seattle chef," she says. "We'd seat 75 people in the orchard with white linen and china, the whole works. It was the most wonderful thing, the most enjoyable thing we did as far as getting people to come out to the farm and see what we were doing and understand why we got into the business."

When Morgan and her brother Matthew went off to college, the farming felt less rewarding, says Cindy. She and David decided to move to a nice house in Roseburg, Oregon, and run it as a bed & breakfast inn. With a big garden, of course. And some chickens.

Then Covid hit, the innkeeping business slammed shut, and the neighbors complained about the chickens. Working in the yard with classic rock blasting, Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" provided a jolt of inspiration: when you feel lost, you need to listen to the advice of the dormouse and "feed your head."

The family decided that day to start over on another farm and feed their heads, their hearts, and their creative natures.

"It's just the way we are," says Cindy. "We just love the rural lifestyle. It's satisfying. It's peaceful."

Above. Morgan's comic work. Morgan (left) and Cindy examine a morning tomato harvest. Pickling vegetables, cooking hot sauces, and baking goodies add value to Dormouse Farm produce. Chickens at Dormouse Farm create opportunities for Morgan to select and cross birds for their beauty and color combinations. Morgan sees the farm as a great place for artists to stay and focus on their work. Another Morgan project is fresh pasta. Cindy applies her creativity to the kitchen and garden.

New canvas. The Krepkys found a home on a wooded hillside in southwest Oregon. They thinned trees, put up a greenhouse, and cleared about an acre of garden plots and livestock pens. Soon the greenhouse was full of tomatoes, the pens were bustling with chickens and ducks, and a herd of Kinder goats was munching the undergrowth on the slopes beneath the firs.

The blazing summers of their new site taught some lessons.

"I stopped growing brassicas because they just bolt before they come into production here," Cindy says. "I know there are ways to do it here, but we don't have hoop houses. We said, 'OK, we're going to grow hot crops. We've got tomatoes, we've got peppers—they love it here. Basil? No problem."

There are tomatillos and squash, paintbrush-like heads of yellow and red amaranth, flowers, 6 varieties of eggplant, a couple of rows of potted fruit trees waiting for their permanent homes, and more that tickled their fancy.

While Morgan feeds the animals and picks ripe produce, Cindy bakes her famous sourdough bread and gluten-free cookies, pickles vegetables, and cooks fruit down into jam.

Morgan's art studio is just steps away from Cindy's kitchen. There she develops her graphic novels and teaches local students how to bring their stories to the page. She makes jewelry and draws the labels for her handmade hot sauces, cooked with chile peppers from the farm.

Now she's contemplating Dormouse Farm artists' retreats, studying how to organize them and turn the farm into a creative, contemplative space for others.

Dormouse Farm is tough for people to visit. There's little parking, little pasture, and no water rights. So the Krepkys are looking at other locations. But you can bet that wherever they land, they will keep telling a big, glorious, complicated story.

"I think we're really starting to find our feet now and get really sorted into what we want to be doing—and have a reality check, too," says Morgan. "Because me and Mom are dreamers. We will just go, 'yeah, we can do everything. Let's go.' But we'll go back to doing what we really love doing, what we're passionate about, because the quality shows." ‡