What do you do when you want to work after staying home with young children but you’d rather not go back to your field of training? This was the question for our new garden manager, Toni Migneault.
It was 2021 and her youngest child was just starting school. She briefly considered going back to work in education, but it didn’t feel right. She had been training for 9 months to do a hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, and was noticing how much the outdoors seemed to help her outlook in life.
“I just knew that in order to be happy and balanced I needed to be outside as much as possible,” she says as we sit on the front porch of the Deck farmhouse. As we talked, we watched two great blue herons fly past while the hogs made noise down the hillside from us.
Based on that new insight Toni looked for work that kept her outdoors. She has been here ever since. Last fall, when the garden manager position opened up, it was an obvious decision to offer the position to Toni.
“I am taking a course that teaches how to plan a garden for market sales, and it includes an application for laying it all out,” she said. “I was interested in learning this for myself from the ground up, not just taking over someone else’s. It has been very interesting and empowering.”
Toni and her family are avid mushroom hunters, and even sold matsutake and chanterelle mushrooms through Full Farm CSA this fall.
“We began mushrooming when the kids were little so we could have an activity out in the forest that wasn’t about going long distances, since the kids didn’t want to do that,” she said. A close friend taught them the methods and they were off and running - or clambering - through the bushes and trees in search of treasure.
