She had never explained the choice. I had not asked. I had been quietly delighted. Freddy comes home every other weekend. She brings my granddaughter Ana age four who has begun naming the chickens.
I converted the farm in stages between 2016 and 2020. 8 acres of specialty cut flowers, peonies, ranunculus, dahlia, snapdragons, lisianthus, sweet peas sold to a small list of Des Moines florists and to two pela vendors who supply tulip time. 6 acres of Fraser fir and Douglas fir Christmas trees planted in a rotation that produces approximately 300 saleable trees per year by the third week of November. 3 acres of heritage apple orchard, 11 varieties, all from the old USDA Beltzville collection that produces apples for the local farmers market and the cider press at the Pella Historical Village. 4 acres of native tall grass prairie restoration along the back creek registered with the Iowa Prairie Network and the Pheasants Forever local chapter.
The remaining 26 acres remain in corn and soybean rotation under a tenant agreement with a young Pella farmer named Theren Vermuan. His grandfather had farmed across the road from my grandfather in the 1930s. The whole operation runs on the original 1925 well. Eddie's irrigation system, the design I'm proudest of in my long career of pump rooms and pipe runs, consists of one main 4-inch PVC trunk line that loops the property under 12 inches of frost-depth burial with six metered branch lines to the flower fields, the Christmas trees, the orchard, the prairie water tank, and two hose bibs at the workshop. Every branch line has a turbine flow meter calibrated to the nearest tenth of a gallon and a backflow preventer rated to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources spec.
I built the system myself across the summers of 2017 and 2018 with the Vermuan's help on the trenching. The system meters every gallon I pump. The system also meters every gallon that leaves the property unauthorized, though I had not until 2024 considered the possibility that any gallon might. The fields each have a particular history, I had not chosen carelessly. The peony bed runs along the original 1923 farmyard hedro because my grandmother Hrika had loved peonies and had asked Hendrick for a peony bed on their wedding day in 1924.
She had grown up on a peony farm in Freezeland and had not been able to leave them behind. The Christmas trees are on the back 6 acres because that ground had been corn on corn for 70 years and had not produced a profitable bushel since 1996. The orchard is on the slope above the creek because the slope is east facing and the apples there ripen one week earlier than they would in the lower bottoms. The prairie restoration is along the back creek because the back creek has a small population of Iowa Pleistocene snails Discus macclintocki a federally threatened land mollisk that the US fish and wildlife service designated as critical habitat in 2018 with my consent. I keep the restoration site under a working lands for wildlife agreement with the NRCS.
The agreement pays me $3,400 a year to maintain the corridor. I would do it for free. I take the check because the program needs to count. The well casing has a small bronze plaque set into the concrete at the wellhead that my grandfather had made in 1925 with a Dutch monogram of his initials HB and the date. Below the monogram are eight Dutch words my grandfather had asked the foundry to set.
Water is head van. Water is the life of the farm. I read the plaque every morning when I check the wellhouse gauge. I have not gone a single morning since 2016 without reading it. The plaque is the first thing I learned to read in Dutch.
It is also the last thing my mother said to me at the hospital before she passed in 2015. She did not say it as a sentence. She said it as a list. Water is the life of the farm. Edmund, take care of it.