Welcome to Frontier Farm!  We’re a small family farm in southern Marion County, Ohio.  We’ve been raising organic vegetables for ourselves for many years, but this is the first year that we’re going to be selling our produce.   We have ten acres, some of which is taken up with our chicken house and yard, and about an acre is under cultivation.  We raise vegetables without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or insecticides  year round. In the summer, we have a large outdoor vegetable garden.  We raised salad greens, Brussels sprouts, carrots, broccoli, and kale all through the winter in a hoophouse (or high tunnel). 

 

Why “frontier?”  There are many reasons that this name resonated with us.  A frontier is a boundary, a transitional zone.  It makes the edge of what’s known and what has yet to be explored.  This is the beginning of a new sort of life for us: raising vegetables for sale.  A frontier, if you will, in our lives.  Another reason is that there’s a new frontier of food in the United States: more and more people are embracing food that has been raised by organic methods and by local farmers.  The concept of seasonal food has become a more acceptable idea.  Maybe we don’t want a dry tasteless tomato in January—maybe we can will ourselves to wait for something really good in August! 

There’s also the reason that Bryan and I still think of this part of Ohio as the frontier.  As an Ohio archaeologist and frontier historian in our “real lives,” Marion County was the frontier for much longer than the southern half of Ohio and the northern lakeshore.  Our farm is located just a quarter-mile north of the Greenville Treaty Line*, a political boundary that meant that our farm was not settled by Europeans until the 1850.  By contrast, the city of Delaware, Ohio, just 15 miles south of us and south of the Treaty Line, was founded in 1808.

*The Greenville Treaty Line established the boundary in 1795 between European settlement and Native American lands after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.  It ceded land north of the line to the Western Confederacy of Tribes (which included Shawnee, Ottawa, Wyandot, Delaware and other Native American tribes), which included much of Northern Ohio, Detroit, and present-day site of Chicago’s downtown).