BUSINESS NEWS
Coast River Business Journal
Meet the Merchant
April 2021 • 11
Interview by Emily Lindblom elindblom@crbizjournal.com
KJewelsFarm
web. Also frozen chickens. I will have wool at the
Sunday market and Seaside market.”
Virginia Hall, owner
Astoria, Oregon
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Is there anything else you’d like
to add?
Could you introduce yourself?
“My name is Virginia Hall.”
I saw on your Facebook page
that you grew up around animals
in Montana. Could you tell me
about that?
“In Montana we had animals or lived on farms
from the time I was born and I believe one of the
fi rst places we lived was on a cattle ranch where
a man owned rodeo stock. One day, he brought a
rodeo bull over there. My baby brother and I were
outside playing in the yard and we had an Austra-
lian shepherd dog named Cindy.
“Cindy was always well behaved and never
came in the house. That day, she came to the house
and scratched on the door and my mom went and
saw the dog, shut the door and went about her busi-
ness. The dog scratched at the door again and my
mom went out and saw the bull and ran to us. She
had just enough time to grab the two of us, with the
dog running after her. The bull would’ve killed us.
Cindy was quite a dog.”
Wow. And how long have you
been here in Oregon?
“I’ve been here 25 years.”
Could you tell me about the
farm?
“I have sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys
and guinea hens. I started vegetable gardening fairly
seriously when I moved here but I had a lot of issues
I didn’t understand because, just like most people,
I had never been educated about gardening. Then I
had a health issue that kept me mostly immobile for
about fi ve years. So I had a lot of time and I started
investigating gardening on the internet, especially
on YouTube, and I was intrigued with permaculture,
no-dig gardening, Ruth Stout gardening and all the
other various methods of no-till gardening.
“My garden is now no-till and I’ve found it’s
way easier than the other option. The method I
teach incorporates the best parts of all those I stud-
ied. Because I spent fi ve years learning it, I thought
I was qualifi ed to teach it, so I do.”
Could you tell me about the
classes you teach?
“I teach through Community Ed at Clatsop
COURTESY OF KJEWELSFARM
“Without support from the public we would not
be able to survive. We’d be back to being hobby
farmers.
“I feel we haven’t scratched the surface of the
kind of participation we’ll be getting in a couple
years. A local food source is essential if you have
any catastrophic national problem that interferes
with shipping. You can’t just expect the farmers to
pop up when you need them, they have to be here
all along.”
Covered rows at KJewelsFarm.
Community College during winter quarter and
spring quarter. The class I teach has two parts. The
fi rst part covers more business about the soil and
the second part is more business about the plants.
They’re called ‘Vegetable Gardening in the Pacifi c
NW: Getting Started’ and ‘Vegetable Gardening in
the Pacifi c NW: Let’s do it!’
“They were really popular when they were fi rst
held because nobody had ever done anything like
that at the college. The fi rst class was winter of
2019 and 2020. Of course by the end of the class we
had COVID-19 and they canceled the second class
and went on Zoom from there.”
I also noticed you are a veteran.
Do you want to talk about that?
“I was a dental assistant in the Air Force in the
early ‘70s. After training I was stationed at Home-
stead Air Force Base (now known as Homestead
Air Reserve Base) in Florida. I was awarded the
Air Force Commendation Medal. Nobody else in
my clinic got that award, just me, and it was for the
quality of my work.
“My second place to be stationed was in Ger-
many. After that I moved to Dover, Delaware. That
was when I fi rst had my own garden. Delaware is
one of the best places to garden.”
Why is that?
“Rain is a little more moderate there than out
here. They get 50 inches of rain instead of 100. But
if you’re going to succeed in gardening on the West
Coast you have to be a little smarter than the aver-
age gardener. There’s a lot of complications. Every-
thing is rain-oriented and the problem is the exces-
sive rain. You have to understand how and why the
plants grow in order to make plants do things they
wouldn’t normally like to do.”
Is there anything else you’d like
to say about yourself and what
you enjoy doing?
“Mostly I enjoy outfoxing the climate.
“There’s a picture of part of my garden in blan-
kets, extensive coverings during oddball times of
the year. I experimented with pushing the envelope
and discovered there’s some things that don’t work
no matter what you do. A bean is only going to be
happy when it’s warm, it’s not going to be happy if
it’s cold. But the blankets help tomatoes. The smart-
est thing to know about tomatoes is to plant the right
varieties. Dr. James Baggett at Oregon State Uni-
versity developed a tomato called ‘Oregon spring’
and it’s one of the best ones to plant here.”
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That’s good to know, great.
“There are other outstanding botanists at the
teaching universities in Oregon and Washington.
They fi gured out what kinds of breeding a plant
needed to have in order to start in our climate
and perform well. Another one is called ‘subarc-
tic plenty’ and it’s one of the fastest-growing toma-
toes in the world. You can have ripe tomatoes in
less than 40 days after transplanting. The weather
doesn’t have to be that great either, but the warmer
you keep it the better.
“I had two outstanding tomatoes, ‘trip-l-crop’
and the other was just plain ‘black cherry.’ For both
of them, my vines were 12- to 14-feet-long in the
greenhouse. They produce great tomatoes.”
Where can people buy your
products?
“Through the North Coast Food Web. I’m going
to do an April 22 popup at the food web for starting
plants. At the Sunday market my booth will be over
by the corner of 12th and Exchange streets. I was
invited to the Seaside market on Wednesdays so I’m
seriously considering that one too. I’ll have all my
starting plants, berries and all my vegetable starts.
The tomato starts in the greenhouse right now are
jumping out of the dirt in excitement. I must have
planted at least a hundred Oregon spring plants so
nobody should say they couldn’t fi nd one. I also sell
to private restaurants, mostly to Drina Daisy.
“I sell chicken and duck eggs through the food
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