Jo Ann Gardner

[excerpted from author's website]
For 30 years, 1971-2001, my husband and I operated a small hand/horse-powered farm on a remote peninsula on Cape Breton Island, a move which changed my life forever. Although we had been moving in this direction--growing large vegetable gardens, preserving the produce, keeping cows, horses, chickens, pigs, making hay--we rented, not owned, these farms (we even kept a cow in a garage and made butter in the bathtub before we rented a proper farm). Now we owned 100 acres on a lonely peninsula, at the end of a badly rutted dirt road, in the hinterlands of Cape Breton on the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia. I called this place the 3 no's: no running water, no telephone, no vehicle (except horse-drawn). It may sound forbidding and unattractive but to us it was a challenge.

It was here that I learned how to harness a horse, fell trees with a cross-cut saw (my husband Jigs at the other end), stand on top of a haywagon and pile a ton of hay so it wouldn't fall off, and, when needed, spread manure by moonlight after a day in the woods. All this in addition to the usual farm and cooking chores. This spare close-to-nature life inspired many articles and books: Old Fashioned Fruit Garden; Heirloom Garden; Living with Herbs; Herbs in Bloom; Gardens of Use & Delight with Jigs Gardner; Elegant Silvers with Karen Bussolini; and the forthcoming Seeds of Transcendence: Understanding the Hebrew Bible Through Plants.

In 2001, we moved to a one-room schoolhouse in New York's Champlain Valley where we maintain a small farm with extensive gardens, and where we still practice the principles of simple living that sustained us through our life's journey. Since 1978, I have been offering workshops and inspiring lectures in the U.S., Canada and abroad on herbs, heirloom plants, roses, biblical flora, and more recently, classes on the Book of Ruth to churches, synagogues, plant groups, and schools.