Charles Wainger

I wasn’t always on the path to become a farmer. It was the furtherest thing from my mind while I was focused on receiving a degree in Journalism. After a summer in Spain, once I had graduated, I moved to Seattle and couldn’t find a writing gig, so I took a job at a co-op selling produce to pay the bills; Unbeknownst to me, this experience would turn me into a farmer.

The produce I worked with was unlike any I had seen, and at times the farmers would make deliveries and I would talk with them. I especially enjoyed an older farmer with a cigarette stained mustache who told me how the business is, no sugar, just the dirt. So I started gardening in the city and raising chickens.

Five years passed and I had the opportunity to manage an urban farming company and did so while creating and managing a farm program at my childhood summer camp. Any free time I had I spent completing odd jobs for small farms. I did all sorts of tasks; cleaning, weeding, sometimes planting hundreds of tomato starts until my fingers were caked in a hard green resin. I remember one farm specifically where I would work in a greenhouse on all fours planting and sweating into the soil and every hour the owner would come by and tell me to work faster. I would laugh and do so; I thank her for that.

Then 2018 rolls around like an unsettled dog and I’m broke. I had left the farming company in Seattle and was living all over and working farm jobs I’d find on craigslist. I decided to take the leap and move home to Redmond where my parents owned two acres and transform it into a farm. That May I had my first sale and I haven’t stopped working on growing the best salad greens, microgreens, microherbs, and edible flowers I can; and I’m not stopping there.

So here’s to three summers of Rain Dog Farm and too many more. Here’s to more crops, more campfires, friends and family. Rain Dog Farm, here for the long haul. Here for you.