“I was named for a comic book character, Red Sonja, in Conan the Barbarian,” Sonja laughs. “My Dad did that to me!”

Sonja is an eighth-generation Vermonter, born and raised in Burlington, which is Vermont’s largest city. “That’s not saying much,” she says. “The entire state probably has a smaller population than Seattle.” She attended the University of Vermont in 2013, but decided to travel rather than graduate. She headed west and drove across the US, ending up at a friend’s in Olympia.

She heard about Port Angeles and decided to check it out. In the process she discovered the Olympic Peninsula. In her student days in Vermont, she had volunteered on local farms, so she worked for a short time at Spring Rain Farm in Chimacum. “The so-called local movement really began in New England. I worked in a really good restaurant called the Penny Cluse Café that was totally into buying seasonally and fresh from local farms. We made everything from scratch, so working on farms here was not a big stretch for me.”

Sonja likes working outdoors, so last August she applied at Nash’s. She has proven to be an energetic and hard-working person with lots of talent and knowledge of food. Like all of the staff, her job consists of a little of everything—harvesting, packing, and weeding. She is very impressed with the longer growing season that we enjoy here in Sequim. “By now in Vermont, you would be in full harvest mode, but close to winding things down,” she remembers. “Here we are just getting into the full season and we’ll be harvesting all fall and into the winter. It’s pretty wild!”

Sonja is a professional cook and has worked in several restaurants. She enjoys all aspects of food and local food systems, and really feels that it is important to support the people who grow food locally, to get the best flavors and highest nutrition possible. “It’s getting back to basics, something our culture has almost lost. I’m glad to find it here in such abundance!”

One of our newest crew members this year is Breanna Krumpe, a Sequim native and graduate of Sequim High School. We were delighted to find out that Breanna attended Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, graduating in 2013 with a degree in music. She is a soprano who trained in opera and lieder, and she also plays viola and piano. We always appreciate having musicians on our staff because it makes our social gatherings and staff parties so much the merrier!

After graduation, Bre, as she is known to her friends, lived in Portland for a couple of years. “I enjoyed the city,” she recalls, “but I found that I missed home too much. I would come back to Sequim and just be so happy to be home.” She moved back here this summer and started work at Nash’s on August 1.

Portland did do one thing for her, however. She became aware of the “farm-to-table” movement that is so prevalent there, and came away with a desire to be self-sufficient on her own piece of land. Instead of trying to acquire that land, Bre did a smart thing and decided to work on a farm for awhile, to see if she could handle the work load, and to gain an understanding of how things grow. “I work with amazing people who have lots of knowledge about growing food. They are also very generous with that knowledge.”

Bre works on the packing shed crew, which means that she does a little of everything, including harvesting, weeding, bagging, and packing. Her fellow crew members hope she will eventually sing for them while they work!

About six years ago, Farmer Nash was at the Blue Heron Bakery near Olympia, WA, chatting with the owner about milling wheat, something Nash wanted to start doing to create a value-added product from the wheat the farm was growing. The bakery owner mentioned he had an old mill he would like to sell, and Nash bought it.

While no one can find a make, model, brand or year of manufacture on the mill, we know it was built on the East Coast, because the original housing was Eastern White Maple. It was not in good condition, so Sam McCullough, Colten Bartlett and Dave Roberts took it on as a “winter project,” something they could do in the warm, dry shop. They disassembled the entire thing, and worked on cleaning up the parts, replacing some of them, and, with the help of Edensaw Lumber in Port Townsend, matched the wood piece by piece. They repaired water damage, sanded and varnished the wood, and then painstakingly reassembled it.

Nash took the Missouri Sandstone millstones to a grain conference in Mount Vernon, where Roger Jensen, an expert on calibrating millstones, looked them over and pronounced them fit to start milling without further work. The stones sit vertically in the housing. One is stationary, and the other turns. Wooden mills constantly flex, and the drum is not nailed, but clamped, so the miller can respond by tightening one clamp or loosening the opposing clamp. The moving stone can also be moved closer for a finer grind. This made for tedious work, and try as we might, we could never efficiently do really fine flour without burning some of the grain.

Consequently, when the Bell Street Bakery in Sequim closed, Nash purchased their modern metal mill and sifter. It is many times more efficient and does not need the constant calibration to mill fine flour. But the old mill has a new job—it is an excellent display background for our grains, flours, and corn meal in Nash’s Farm Store.

Jeremy Buggy, Lead Grocery Buyer

Jeremy Buggy was born in Phoenix, and spent part of his childhood in California. At the age of 12, however, he and his family moved to the town of Palmer in Alaska.

Three years later, he had his first farming experience. “I got a job on a farm called, optimistically, Gold Nugget Farm. It was a vegetable operation and we raised all kinds, including brassicae, which the moose just love. They would walk down a row of cabbages, taking one bite out of each head! Very frustrating, especially when your growing season is only 4 months long.”

At age 17, Jeremy started working in the Three Bears Grocery in Palmer. That’s were he got his start in grocery retail. He continued his career path back in Phoenix where he went to study to become a priest. “The monastery was pretty expensive,” he remembers. “So I got a job at Whole Foods, managing the cashiers. That’s where I met Julia, who worked in the supplement department, and I changed my mind about becoming a priest!”

They were married in 2011 and today are parents of two beautiful daughters, Amara, age 3, and Rayna, age 1-1/2.

The family came to Sequim in 2013. Jeremy got a job at Nash’s Farm Store in the produce department, but he missed the actual farming, so in 2014 he joined the field crew and from June to December he transplanted, weeded, harvested and packed produce. But the Farm Store needed his skills so he returned there last winter. Currently, he is the Lead Buyer and our expert on the POS system (cash register computer program). He also anchors the Capitol Hill Farmers Market for Nash’s farm every Sunday. Julia is an inspiring yoga teacher and teaches at the YMCA, SARC, for the Jamestown Tribe, and locally in Dungeness.

Away from the farm, Jeremy and his family love being in the mountains and by the Dungeness River. Jeremy also loves playing baseball he plays for the Peninsula Baseball League as pitcher and first baseman.

Gabe Mills, Irrigation Crew

You could call Gabe Mills a Sequim native, except that he was born in Bremerton. In 2009, he heard that Nash’s was hiring and came down to check the place out and apply. He has become one of those flexible and versatile people who has acquired experience in several important areas of the farm, like the harvest crew and packing crew, and now he is the lead for the irrigation crew.

“I was raised in town and never had any connection with the farms in the area,” he says. “I never thought about what I was eating, and I figured organic food was something ‘new age’ people did.”

But working at Nash’s gave Mills a different perspective. “You change how you think about food when you see it come out of the ground. Everyone that works here talks about food, how it is produced, and how it affects your body. I think about it more now than I did before.”

Gabe admits that growing food is hard work, but that it has its perks. “The people at the farm are like a family or community,” Mills comments. “This is the first time I’ve encountered that in a work environment.”

In his spare time, Gabe likes to play guitar and any other instrument that comes his way. When he started at Nash’s, he was still the drummer for a progressive rock band in Port Angeles called Govinda, and also wrote songs.

Several years ago, he started going to a retreat center in Santa Fe, NM, to train in meditation. He does work for the center in exchange for the training. “I work in the kitchen, on the grounds, and with the housekeeping staff,” he says. “Santa Fe is very beautiful and a very special place to practice meditation.” Gabe will return there to spend the winter.

But if he really wants to unwind, he’s happy playing video games, or picking up his beloved guitar.