Farm dreams: How a Stanwood family lives close to the earth

It is near the end of a wet winter that has yet to bargain mercifully with spring.

February 29. Leap day.

A gusty breeze from the southwest rips into a patch of wavy grass as the man on the plow stops his two big draft horses and climbs off.

He studies 100 feet of turned sod, squats to one heel and picks up a clod of the rich, dark soil that his 37-acre farm near Stanwood has claimed from the river over decades of lowland flooding.

The man is Tristan Klesick, well known for delivering organic produce to homes from Anacortes to Woodinville.

He crumbles the clod in his leather-gloved hand and turns his eyes to the horses.

The big blond Belgians, Susie and Karen, are content to ignore Klesick until he issues them another command. When he does, they are congenial as well as precise in their footwork.

In the white farmhouse three fields away, beyond the family's small herd of beef cattle, a goat pen, a chicken coup and workshops, Joelle Klesick is managing a household with eight children.

It's a home-schooled family so on this or any other day, she might be helping Andrew, 10, with an academic project while the baby, Stephen, is napping.

It is highly probable that Maleah, 3, and Madeleine, 6, are helping their big sister Alaina, 12, bake cookies.

A piano tune bounces off the high wooden ceilings in the old farmhouse, touching every room with 15-year-old Emily's mood.

The older boys, Aaron, 13, and Micah, 16, are somewhere on the farm tending to their own business enterprises.

Aaron is rebuilding equipment he bought to do custom hay bailing. If Micah isn't out in the pasture with the family's cows, he could be updating one of his customers' Web sites.

Shadows in the fields

Dressed in bright pink, little Maleah walks between rows, planting her lettuce starts in random spots while five of the bigger kids plant a thousand starts in the long furrows.

It is May 6, later than usual for spring planting, but finally sunny enough to cast shadows of the children busily working on the soft, tilled earth.

Tristan watches his kids work methodically and quickly, using bare hands to pack soil around the roots of each plant.

Andrew finds a live snail and gives it to Maleah, who examines it protruding from its little house.

It is an enchanting scene, but to Tristan, one of tremendous personal reward. He has dreamed of having a family farm from the first time he started a little 5-by-15-foot city garden about a dozen years ago

The Klesick kids help a great deal with the family business and Joelle says they take ownership.

"When one of the kids talks about the business," she says, "they call it 'our business.'" If they talk about serving customers, "they call them 'our customers.'"

The kids get paid for their work. When they're old enough, they have job descriptions and time sheets, the Klesicks say.

They learn to take responsibility for whatever their job is, from boxing customer produce to caring for the livestock.

Farm dreams

Tristan says he is the "head dreamer," but that the others are not far behind. He enjoys watching the kids develop their own enterprises.

Tristan and Joelle see the farm and the family business as a way to be together with their kids and have an influence on them in the relatively short time that kids spend growing up.

They see farm life as an educational playground where they can learn and play and be free to follow their dreams and passions, Joelle says.

The kids, for example, all had to pitch in to help restore their old, dilapidated farmhouse.

"We want our kids to learn that sometimes you have to dream big, and work hard to achieve your goals," she says.

"And when things get tough to keep pressing on; sometimes you have to step out in faith in order to see God's hand carrying you."