FINNRIVER FARM & CIDERY JOURNAL

Here we post stories and reflections on farm life, fruit fermentations and our work to reconnect people to the land and grow community.

By Laura Prendergast 26 Mar, 2024
We recommend bringing your bicycle to expand your options for getting around.
By Crystie Kisler 09 Mar, 2024
By Crystie Kisler 06 Dec, 2023
The shorter days of December are still full on the farm but the rising and setting of the sun is not always obvious as we move through gradations of grey. There is a bountiful wintry beauty here — deepening green in the fields, bright huddles of swans, sinewy silhouettes of leafless trees revealed — a beauty I experience in questioning contrast with its opposite and what I know of the horrors happening around the world. What it means to hear the rain fall and wonder what it must be like to hear a bomb fall? How I hold in my heart both the momentary beauty and the undergirding grief? Where my outrage or agony belongs? Where my complicity and responsibility lie? How I establish solidarity with ways of thinking, acting and being that are honorable and humane, actively compassionate, deeply reverent of life and wise for the world? All of that I want to do, with consciousness and care! And yet often I am surprised when the day is over and the darkness drops down— with a feeling of, “Wait, where did this whole day go?” That not only did I fail to figure out how to understand or help relieve the suffering of the world, but I didn’t even start the laundry. So I see the winter as a teacher of the art of witnessing — of sensing what is revealed when the leaves and the distractions and the delusions fall away, what is exposed, what is revealed underneath, what do I need to feel, reckon with and transform through these thoughtful winter months. A good part of my own initial inspiration around Finnriver’s founding were these questions— could we offer a place where people feel welcomed and invited into earthly wonder, where they feel connected to their own bodies as they stand on the land and drink in its beauty, where we could gather together in real time to walk, talk, listen, dance, eat, drink, breathe? And could we gather this sense of the land and its bounty into a bottle to share with others— connecting us intimately from soil to cider to our interconnected selves? And could any or all of this bring more communal and personal coherence to the experience of being human and would that be a beneficial ripple? That’s a lot to expect from an apple orchard or a glass of cider, I know. But that’s what we continue to work on creating here…knowing that we are but a small piece in a big planetary puzzle but knowing also that it takes all the pieces to make a whole. That we are bumbly, humbly linked elbows with all the others— millions! billions!— a great human family of brave, brilliant, beautiful people everywhere who are doing essential work each day to survive, to carry on, to care for others, to grow community, to establish peace, to live with dignity, to insist on liberation, to love the pieces of it all that they do, in peace. This season, these times, call me to recognize how each precious minute of daylight, each precious breath of this wet or windy winter air, is a potential return to my body and to my beating heart as one in a global gamelan of heartbeats all around me. I’m working for a piece of the peace here in Chimacum and swaying, praying hard that we learn to cradle instead of crush each other. Thank you to all of you activating, in all the myriad different ways, to show up for the big Love! I hope you are all finding the way and keeping well as can be through the winter. I hope that if you make your way to Finnriver, or if a bottle of Finnriver makes it way to you, that you can steep in the moment. With heaping care and a full heart from the farm, Crystie
By Laura Prendergast 10 Oct, 2023
Sour Raspberry: A Limited Edition New Release
30 Jun, 2023
Chimacum Corner Farmstand owner Katy McCoy reminisces about the origins of Chimacum Interdependence Day in 2011.
the sun sets over a beautiful field in the Chimacum valley
By Laura Prendergast 14 Jun, 2023
At Finnriver, cider is the art we’ve chosen to build community, create small scale rural economy and work with other stewards of the land in a collaborative effort.
By Crystie Kisler 17 Jan, 2023
There are rhythms to the year on the farm— an agricultural rhythm that’s shaped by the seasons, and a cultural rhythm that’s coordinated by the calendar we follow. Today— always the third Monday in Janaury*— is the day designated by the US government to officially honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is a complex day to navigate, for the country, and so for us at Finnriver. On the one hand, we feel a deep and earnest reverence for this holy man who not only held justice and love sacred, but also understood that they were inseparable. On the other hand, we recognize the temptation and tendency to show up on social media and shallowly meme the way through the holiday with quotes and portraits. This raises the critical question— how do we, here at our farm in Chimacum, really relate to Dr. King’s message and mission? There is no doubt, in my own heart, that the mission of Finnriver arose out of a lifelong listening to the guidance of non-violent leaders such as Gandhi, MLK and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhât Hahn (whom Dr. King nominated for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize) and a longing to grow more love in the world. I know, I know…this is a naive thing to say and a potentially dangerous one, since it can lead to a sort of lovey-dovey spiritual bypassing and avoidance of necessary action and accountability. Love as a principle is easy to proclaim. As a practice, in the face of centuries of racial injustice designed to keep my white body comfortable, it is a never-ending challenge to renounce ambivalence, to reorient into non-violent resistance and to commit to action for personal and systems change and to deepening community relationships. So at Finnriver, when we say our purpose here is to “reconnect people to the land that sustains us and grow community,” that is a shorthand, a signifier, for this much larger and more comprehensive and complicated aspiration. And what we mean when we say “grow community” has everything to do with what we mean specifically by the term “community.” This is a word that can be constrained to refer to select groups of people who band together around a certain identity or ideology or geography etc. Or, more broadly, as we seek to use it here, it can reach out to embrace what Dr. King named, in the Christmas Sermon of 1967 , as the ‘interrelated’ nature of all life: “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Not long before this sermon, Dr. King had met Thích Nhât Hahn for the first time, a meeting that some have speculated lead to Dr. King speaking out against the Vietnam War. Thích Nhât Hahn described this meeting this way: “We had a discussion about peace, freedom, and community. And we agreed that without a community, we cannot go very far.”** Along with a celebration of Dr. King’s world-transforming wisdom, a large part of this day for me, is also grieving his assassination and the white supremacist social and psychological conditions that encouraged it and still endure in our country. How do we reshape that world to stop and prevent racialized violence and oppression? So that an inclusive, interrelated love can take root and flourish? What do we plant here, day in and day out, to heed Dr. King and "to make real the promises of democracy... to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice...”*** In his book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story , Dr. King outlined six principles of nonviolence, including this one: "Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate. Nonviolence resists violence to the spirit as well as the body. Nonviolence love is active, not passive. Nonviolence love does not sink to the level of the hater. Love restores community and resists injustice. Nonviolence recognizes the fact that all life is interrelated." At the beginning of the pandemic, as we began to feel the fractures forming in our rural community around the public health responses to the corona virus, Finnriver embraced the motto: Love is at the core. This was an irresistible apple pun but also a succinct statement of intent. Yes, we seek to operate from a fundamental commitment to Love as a guiding force in our actions here. Love of land, of the fruit of the earth, of wild and human community, of the precious opportunity to be here all together on this planet. The essential question for us at Finnriver is how to embody that love=justice principle as a business so that we generate transformative potential on our farm, for the community and in the world. To be transparent, our capacity to evolve as individuals and as a collective gets continually buffeted by many factors— human dynamics, economic pressures, personal issues, etc. But we continue to try to create structure here that’s aligned with our social justice aspirations and values because we believe that a loving and liberatory justice is necessary for the flourishing of all of us! Heather McGhee says it: “For when a nation founded on the belief in racial hierarchy truly rejects that belief then and only then will we have discovered a new world. That is our destiny. To make it manifest, we must challenge ourselves to live our lives in solidarity across color, origin, and class. We must demand changes to the rules in order to disrupt the very notion that those who have more money are worth more in our democracy and our economy. Since this country’s founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be. And if it were, all of us would prosper. In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom. Rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more, when the we in we the people is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than and greater for the sum of us.” ― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together You can read more about the Finnriver DEI action & accountability plan here , knowing that’s due for an update, planned for Spring of 2023. Commitments we make to racial justice include our Social Justice Cider project . We make a monthly contribution to the Jefferson County Anti-Racist Fund as a business member of their mutual aid fund. We are working with Usawa Consulting on on-going staff training in racial justice literacy, and we host an ongoing racial ju stice reading group (currently reading The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda V. Magee). Throughout the year, we hold events at our Cider Garden that celebrate the creative culture in agriculture and that affirm diverse and inclusive community. On New Years each year we celebrate Fishes & Wishes, an event that involves lighting up a giant sculptural salmon and asking folks to make wishes on small stones collected from the beach (see photo above). Human hands infuse their warmth and those wishes into the rocks. We then collect the stones in a basket with a promise to toss them back into the salmon streams, so the waters and the fish can carry the wishes back to the sea…where they will be uplifted and circulated with the hydrologic cycle. It’s symbolic but also somatic— a ceremony that honors our connection to each other and the interrelated whole. I don’t know what most people wish for but I can hope that some of these wishes are for the world to wholly embrace itself. So while I was prompted to write this post on Dr. King’s day of memorial, I know very well the effort doesn’t end at midnight and that our attention, our intention has to remain activated. Today, every day, I am wishing for loving justice. And today, every day, I am aware of the work to get there. ——— *The campaign for a federal holiday in King's honor began soon after his assassination in 1968. President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law in 1983, and it was first observed three years later on January 20, 1986. At first, some states resisted observing the holiday as such, giving it alternative names or combining it with other holidays. It was officially observed in all 50 states for the first time in 2000. (Wikipedia) ** Thích Nhât Hahn Foundation *** From the "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered by Dr. King on Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
By Kai Wallin & Crystie Kisler 26 Nov, 2022
Content Warning: As settlers and farmers who now grow apples on Native lands, we feel compelled  to understand the history of the apple in this country, with special care for and attention to the suppressed story of Indigenous orchards and their vital influence on America’s relationship with this fruit. Our eyes were opened by the book The Ghost Orchard, the Hidden History of the Apple in North America by Helen Humphreys, which reveals critical elements in the origin story of apples related to Native communities and the North American landscape. We are sharing some of what we have learned here about Indigenous orchards with a content warning and a sense of grief that the story attached involves references to the brutality and traumatic history of Native genocide.
By Laura Prendergast 04 Oct, 2022
During the pandemic we took a year off from Live Music on the Land , Finnriver's year-round weekend music series. Although we tried to create a virtual venue for musicians on our Facebook page, the chance to enjoy live music was a void we all felt. Music is good for the soul and we imagine for the land and orchard as well! Then in the spring of 2021 we started back up with live music every weekend (Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays), featuring regional and touring musicians in many genres, balancing support for musicians and accessibility to the public by asking for $3-5 cover charge for adults. Now, half a year later, we are honored to receive recognition for Best Music Venue on the Olympic Peninsula . Thank you to everyone for showing your support of live music and regional musicians! There are many people making it all happen behind the scenes and we thought it was an apt time to shine a light on their hard work and commitment to bringing live music to this land. None of this amazing music would be possible without Camelia Jade (CJ), shown below playing her guitar. She's a multi-instrumentalist, audio engineer and the Finnriver Music Coordinator, aka the person booking and recruiting the bands, orchestrating the calendar, running sound and lining up sound engineers. But she's humble and quick to pass the gratitude on to others, "I'm so grateful to everyone who has helped to make the music program here so successful. Thank you to the wonderful local musicians who are here season after season, and to the regional musicians who come to visit and share their art with us. Thank you to our sound engineers Jon Isenhower, Taylor Thomas-Marsh and Austin Davis! And thank you to the patrons who show up to dance and listen!" When CJ first began as Finnriver's music coordinator several years ago, she had to overcome a general perception people had about what kind of music to expect on a farm. It influenced the types of applications she would receive and typically resulted in a more limited bandwidth of genres.
By Crystie Kisler 20 Jun, 2022
You can now bring back your 500 ML Finnriver Cider bottles to our bottle return station, located at the back entrance to the Finnriver Cider Garden in Chimacum.
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