FARMING FOREVER

Whitney Jacques of Verdant Hare Farm with her resident pigs. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

AGRICULTURE After First Frost

How two local farmers extend the season past harvest’s peak while investing in the future of farming

Farming is a full-time job, with a to-do list that bookends each year’s harvest season, from late spring through mid-fall here in the Inland Northwest, depending on the crop.

Many farmers utilize Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscriptions to get a jump on the season. Also called a farmshare, a CSA is essentially an investment in the farm — a share — in exchange for what the farm produces, like meat or produce, and on a mutually agreed upon schedule, typically weekly throughout the harvest. CSAs can be pre-paid — sometimes months in advance of when crops are started or livestock is born — pay-as-you-go or some other model.

CSAs are only one source of regular revenue, however. Many farmers now employ multiple practices to stretch the definition of farming season, from selling additional items they derive from the farm to extending the CSA timeframe. Such practices promote more and different income streams, a larger or diversified customer base, and the kind of vertical integration that helps other industries mitigate risk, especially in farming’s climatedependent business model.

There are as many ways to extend the season as there are types of farmers. Idaho-based Prairie Home Farm, for example, sells pies from their pumpkin patch, and Greentree Naturals sells seeds to a southern Idaho cooperative.

In the Spokane area, two first-generation farmers are also implementing ways to extend the season and sustain their own operations, while also planting the seed for future generations.

Whitney Jacques admires the animal that inspired her farm’s name, Verdant Hare.

“Hares are fertile and clever, changing with the season, running a step ahead,” says Jacques, who also likes the color, feeling and scent that “verdant” evokes.

Jacques worked on other organization’s farms for nearly a decade before starting Verdant Hare, including Washington State University’s organic farm and Catholic Charities’ Food for All Farm, where she started the Volunteer Farmer Intern Program. She hoped to pay forward the assistance she received as a budding farmer, but when COVID hit, she had an epiphany: A hands-on intern program wasn’t sustainable if people couldn’t gather.

Moreover, she was ready to go all-in with a place befitting what she calls her “big energy.”

“I’d been working for other people for a long time because it was super safe,” says Jacques, who’s held onto the dream of being a farmer since she was a little girl in Alaska.

In 2020, she started Verdant Hare on 20 acres of leased, historic farmland west of the Iller Creek Conservation area off the Palouse Highway.

Jacques’ garden and livestock operations both offer opportunities to extend the traditional farming season. A weekly fruit and vegetable CSA from Verdant Hare runs July through September, a typical season. But from February through June, Jacques also works with Main Market Co-op to produce garden starts for their customers, and for Verdant Hare.

Also helping with post-harvest sales is the farm’s livestock menagerie: 10 turkeys, a Jersey milk cow and calf, and 22 pigs Jacques will slaughter for meat in December. Verdant Hare sells eggs from 75 laying hens through its CSA, while an additional 100 birds are destined for the chopping block, and then on to customers’ refrigerators and freezers. And during October, Jacques has been on sheep-breeding duty to prepare for lamb-a-palooza next spring.

Jacques’ 23 Clun Forest, Finn and Romney sheep are vital to Verdant Hare. They provide both meat — harvesting is on November’s to-do list — and milk. Two ewes, Hilda and Temple, also yield richly colored fleece, which Jacques gets spun into yarn and also sells as raw fleece to provide a modest but year-round source of income that’s independent of weather.

BY CARRIE SCOZZARO

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FOOD | AGRICULTURE “AFTER FIRST FROST,” CONTINUED...

In addition to all this, Jacques shares her time and expertise. For between $50 and $300, visitors can tour the farm and schedule a consultation with Jacques (by phone, in person or at their own farm) or take a class.

In Verdant Hare’s Homesteading 101 class, for example, participants learn to raise and butcher chickens, milk a cow and cultivate a garden through planning, planting, harvesting and putting the garden to bed for winter.

“I really think it’s important for people to have opportunities to learn hands-on,” says Jacques, who also donates her time to a group of local third graders who visit the farm twice weekly to learn about farm life.

“I really hope there’s a little ‘Whitney’ in there,” she says of the kids.

Like Verdant Hare, founders at Courage to Grow Farms in the Greenacres area of Spokane Valley are first-generation farmers passionate about sustainable agriculture, but also about helping expand the farming community. The farm’s name comes from an album by Rebelution, a reggae band its owners admire.

“We had no land, just an idea and sheer motivation,” says Shaneese Dunigan, who started the farm with partner Phillip Moore in 2018. The couple was living in a duplex with their kids and growing microgreens to sell commercially when a chance Father’s Day gift changed everything.

Moore received Curtis Stone’s The Urban Farmer: Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land, and by February 2019 the couple had 10,000 plant starts in the living room. Their hunt for land netted several temporary parcels, totaling half an acre, including their backyard. They were in business.

In March of 2020, the couple purchased a bus to live and travel in, planning to share their newfound gardening knowledge. The statewide shutdown squelched that dream, so they parked the 40-foot bus — home, sweet home for a while longer — leasing what would be the first of a succession of plots.

“By May we had sold 40 CSA shares and were farming 100 freshly-created, 50-foot long beds,” says Dunigan, adding that much of the

farm’s initial output was donated to Catholic Charities’ Food for All program. Fast-forward to 2021, and Courage to Grow is thriving with several CSA options ($750-$950 for 20 weeks and $1,400-$1,800 for 40 weeks) varying in amounts of food, and available for Spokane-area delivery and farm pickup. A tall hoop house protects gorgeous purpleblack tomatoes, peppers and eggplant from both summer’s intense heat and fall’s advancing cold weather. Greens, squash and other FIND OUT produce still await harvest in early October, but some still won’t be

MORE picked until winter. As extra protection from the cold, a low hoop of plastic can quickly be assembled

VERDANT HARE over the carrots, for example. verdanthare.com, These orange beauties are destined 509-723-3038 for the farm’s new RBG Regenerative Agriculture Season Extension

COURAGE TO Project, named after the late

GROW FARMS Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader couragetogrowfarms.com, Ginsburg at the request of a donor 509-270-7264 who helped fund the project. To start, Courage to Grow is collaborating with other local farms under the RBG Project umbrella to deliver produce year-round to area food banks and shelters. The goal is to give out 1,000 boxes by year’s end, distributed via four batches of 250 boxes, from Sweet Mercy Farm, Mighty Microgreens, Montague Heritage Farms, Kobes Valley Farm, amd Dogwild Farm. Courage to Grow also includes veggie-forward recipes with each box. A second part of the RBG Project is a work-in-progress, involving not the growth of a particular crop, but of other farms. Plans for that include a variation on the Airbnb or residency model by leasing housing to interested participants who’d also learn about urban farming and take that knowledge back to wherever they’re from, says Moore. Those plans are still in flux, however. After this season, the four-acre parcel Courage to Grow is currently leasing will be unavailable; nearby a construction crew hustles to finish building a house in this growing part of Spokane Valley. Their hunt for new land to farm continues, but the couple is optimistic. “It can’t be hard anymore,” says Dunigan, reflecting on the challenges they’ve faced and met. “We just have to be along in our journey.” n

REVIEW

EUROPEAN VACATION

Wes Anderson takes his ornate flights of fancy across the pond in The French Dispatch

BY JOSH BELL

The Inlander newsroom is not quite as stylish as the one in Wes Anderson’s new film.

ALSO OPENING

ANTLERS

A teacher (Keri Russel) in rural Oregon notices a boy in her class has been acting strangely. It turns out, he may be harboring a horrific mythical creature who is slaughtering the townsfolk. (SS) Rated R.

At what point does a signature style become a crutch? For devoted followers of filmmaker Wes Anderson, the answer may be “never,” as his increasingly fussy, hermetically sealed approach to making movies continues to bring him acclaim and admiration. With The French Dispatch, Anderson hones in even further on minutiae, at the expense of characters and story, until the movie becomes an inert diorama. Anderson creates lovely, often breathtaking displays, but they’re completely airless.

Part of the problem is that The French Dispatch is an anthology, and none of the individual segments give Anderson enough room to develop characters with the same detail and depth as his elaborate visual tableaux. The title refers to a venerable New Yorker-esque magazine that is releasing its final issue in 1975 following the death of its founder and editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray). The movie is divided into three stories presented as articles from the magazine, along with a framing sequence about Howitzer’s career and death, plus a short introductory note from writer Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson).

Sazerac takes the viewer/reader on a tour of the fictional city of Ennui, France, which has a similar relationship to Paris as Gotham City has to New York. It’s the same, only more so, a stylized and idealized version of the city as envisioned by someone who might, say, read about it in a highbrow literary magazine. The urban planning seems to consist entirely of Anderson’s signature symmetrical designs and clockwork mise en scène, a series of windup toys that he can put into place and then slowly wind down.

Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Jeffrey Wright play the three journalists behind the main stories, which are presented mostly in black and white (with sometimes jarring transitions to color) and in the boxy Academy ratio. In the first story, Benicio Del Toro plays a convicted murderer who is also a brilliant artist, and whose muse/lover (Léa Seydoux) is a guard at the prison where he’s incarcerated. The artist spends years working on his masterpiece, to the consternation but eventual vindication of his wealthy patron (Adrien Brody).

The second story focuses on the student activists who transformed French society in the 1960s, led by the passionate but naive Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet), who has an affair with McDormand’s clearly compromised journalist. In the final story, Wright’s food critic witnesses a kidnapping when he’s invited to dine with the local police commissioner (Mathieu Amalric) just before the man’s son is abducted. A madcap chase, depicted partially via animation, ensues.

All three stories come to rather anticlimactic endings, and the middle story is the weakest, lacking even an anticlimax. Anderson fares best when working from influences as fastidious as his own work, from New Yorker illustrations to Jacques Tati films to European comics like The Adventures of Tintin. He’s ill-suited to political material, and his approach pales THE FRENCH DISPATCH in comparison to the vibrant, daring French New Wave filmmakers who were an essential part of that student movement. The French Dispatch is more exhausting than entertaining, and the overstuffed cast (including Anderson regulars like Jason Schwartzman, Bob Balaban and Saoirse Ronan showing up to barely utter a line) has little room to create fully realized characters who exist outside a series of somewhat esoteric references. As is often the case in actual literary nonfiction, the writers stand out more than their subjects.

Anderson films like The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom can be genuinely emotionally affecting, but The French Dispatch has all the emotional impact of a limitededition collectible, never to be opened. Like those highend pieces, it’s for fans and completists only. n

Rated R Directed by Wes Anderson Starring Benicio Del Toro, Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright

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Not So Bright

Director Edgar Wright’s visual flair can’t save his new horror film Last Night in Soho

BY CHASE HUTCHINSON

In Last Night in Soho, writer-director Edgar Wright returns with his signature flair for vibrant visuals though with a decidedly darker sensibility lurking beneath the sparkling surface. He spins an initially intriguing tale that takes us through time before getting utterly tangled up in itself in a woefully messy final act.

The film begins quite well and finds a good rhythm that it can’t sustain. It tells the story of aspiring fashion designer Eloise who leaves her small town to move to London to pursue her dreams. She is played brilliantly by the tactful Thomasin McKenzie who is tailor-made for this character in her best performance since her breakout role in Leave No Trace. Eloise feels like she is from a different time, old-fashioned in her music tastes and style, and that makes her a bullying target for her classmates.

However, it also makes her perfectly suited to be drawn into the history of London in a quite literal sense. When she moves out of student housing to escape the bullying, she rents a room that every night transports her back into the world of the 1960s and into the shoes of aspiring singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Sometimes a more passive observer while at other times an active participant, Eloise soon discovers that the glitz and glamor that draws her to Sandie’s life guards a darker horror that will begin to bleed into her own life. She will have to find the truth underneath it all in order to escape this dark past.

That is all that needs to or should be said about the plot as the film is built on mysterious revelations that, while not entirely well executed, are still worth preserving from spoilers. Informing all this is the fact that Eloise has a history of mental illness in her family as her late mother

ultimately took her own life. It isn’t the most thoroughly developed or authentic feeling piece of information as it is mostly conveyed in brief, fleeting glimpses of her mother in mirrors. This speaks to the persistent and prevailing problem that the film is never able to fully grapple with the deeper themes it introduces. Wright has been criticized for prioritizing style over substance, which creates a false dichotomy. He needn’t nor shouldn’t sacrifice his penchant for stylized presentation. That is what makes him distinct. A more substantive story and developed characters would bolster the impact of this visual style, not undercut it. Instead, the story becomes directionless and repetitive the longer it goes on. When it keeps repeating scenes where Eloise runs aimlessly around, the film itself begins to feel similarly uncertain about where it wants to go or what it wants to say. The characters get lost in this meandering malaise. Despite McKenzie’s performance, Eloise is not as fully formed of a character as she could be and the side characters are no better. Michael Ajao as John is reduced LAST NIGHT IN SOHO to being a largely disposable love interest to Eloise. Rated R Towards the end, he is Directed by Edgar Wright referred to briefly as “the Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, boy,” which serves as an Thomasin McKenzie, Michael Ajao unintentionally revealing statement about how little the film seems to care for his character. Whether it is Eloise’s grandmother who mostly exists over the phone or her landlady who becomes a crucially central part of the story, the characters border on being paper thin when they should have been more. Even Taylor-Joy is an underwritten background character at best. There is still much to be taken in by for those seeking interesting visual composition. It is the most full jump Wright has made into horror and he shows he has an eye for creating some genuinely frightening sequences. His love of music shines through, working in concert with the energetic scenes of dance and dread in equal measure. It just is stifled by a last act that feels frantic and indecisive. A staircase scene in particular throws everything at the wall, an overcompensation that sums up how the film should’ve developed confidence in telling a more solid story underneath all the visual splendor. n

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