BERNVILLE, Pa. – To say Owen and Dianne Maguire held a few off-farm jobs to supplement their chosen lifestyle as homesteaders over the past half century is somewhat of an understatement.

Delivery driver, dairyman (at two farms), parts man (for both John Deere and International), seed farm and fertilizer company tech, organic research farm field foreman (for nearly 30 years), floral arranger, sandwich artist, garden center greenhouse manager and Wawa assistant manager offers only a partial list of their combined resumes on the couple’s journey toward self-sufficiency.

Add to that a growing menagerie of farm animals raised for sustenance, Great Pyrenees livestock dogs bred for flock protection and income, fruits and vegetables grown for immediate use and putting up for winter, and a family wearing lots of homespun threads, and it’s been a busy 50 years for these erstwhile city folk.

Owen grew up, in Bergen County, New Jersey, “I could see the Empire State Building from my bedroom window,” he said, and Dianne is from Center City Allentown.

“So, neither one of us knew how to do jack (expletive) as far as growing food or anything,” said Owen, a four-time cancer survivor, in a quiet and direct manner with a persistent expression on his face indicating he may find even the somewhat tragic just a little bit funny.

Dianne graduated from Temple University Ambler campus with a two-year degree in horticultural landscaping in 1971. Owen attended Delaware Valley University, earning a bachelor’s degree in agronomy in 1974.

College had initially offered what seemed like a reasonable alternative to being drafted into the Vietnam War, he said. While a student there, Owen got a job at a garden center in Chalfont, where Dianne was working as a floral designer.

“You were the delivery boy,” she laughed/shouted in a manner contrasting his quietness and leaving this reporter wondering how she managed to decipher his hushed tones from another room. It’s a contrast that seems to work.

Ultimately, Owen delivered a proposal, of sorts.

“I didn’t really ever propose,” he said. “I told her I needed a cook, and she said she could cook, and I said, ‘Good, this’ll work out.’ That is a true story.”

“She foolishly agreed to marry me.”

Dianne said she had initially attended Temple Ambler to learn to design floral arrangements and got more than she bargained for.

“I had more hands on than Owen did because we went out and we picked the grapes and pruned the grapes and stomped the grapes, and we went out and picked the apples and turned them into cider,” she said. “We did all of that, which was fantastic. It started out as a women’s, horticulture school.”

Owen soon got his own hands-on experience when the couple moved to Dianne’s parents’ home in Allentown and he took a job at The Seed Farm in Emmaus.

There he got his first experience running tractors and was put in charge of detasseling crews. “The detasseling back then was all done by hand,” Owen said.

Trial and Error

Owen ultimately discovered conventional farmwork was not for him.

“I don’t want to just drive a tractor all day or milk 100 cows all day, and that’s all I would know about farming,” he said. “I want to start at the beginning, put food on the table and go in that direction, do a little of this, a little of that. I don’t want it to be boring. I said, ‘The world of homesteading agriculture, there’s just so much to it, and we didn’t know anything.’”

The Maguires credit their homesteading success to book learning, jumping in with four collective feet, and a little bit of luck.

At one point in our misadventures, I said to her, ‘You know, this sucks.’ I said, ‘I have a degree in agronomy, you have a degree in horticulture, and we don’t know how to put any food on the table.’ So, we were lucky enough to rent this place in New Tripoli.”

Owen’s first order of business was to call the owner of the 10-acre farm they had snagged for reasonable rent and ask permission to put in a garden. The answer was affirmative.

“A couple weeks later I said, ‘Do you mind if we get chickens?’ He said, ‘No, a farm should have chickens.’”

“Can we get rabbits, can we get goats, can we get sheep, can we get turkeys?” Dianne interjected from the kitchen as she heated up homemade soup and bread for her guests.

After so many phone calls, the owner finally gave them a hall pass to do as they wished.

Goat milk became a staple and goat cheese a specialty, with Dianne also serving as editor for the Blue Mountain Dairy Goat Association.

Their own kids began arriving, first daughter, Erin, in 1976, then son, Kyle, in 1980.

When the farmer decided to sell at a price they could not afford, the Maguires’ search for a place of their own took them to a tar-shingled house on a 3-acre hillside in Bernville.

They moved in on a balmy day the day after Christmas. Then the mercury plummeted.

“I thought the furnace was going to explode,” Owen recalled. “And the curtains would move when the wind hit us.”

“I had to blow insulation in the walls and then put Thermax over that and then put siding over that,” he explained. “That was the only way I was going to get up to the number that the feds required.”

The “feds” was the now-defunct Farmers Home Administration Low Income Housing Project, which had initially bristled at the place because it was not up to code — just wood siding and roofing shingles slapped on the exterior — and there was too much acreage for confines of the program.

“But Dianne kept hounding them,” Owens said. “And the guy who was handling our case, Dianne walked in and he said, ‘If I approve this house, will you promise me I never have to see you again?’ And Dianne said ‘Yes.’”

A somewhat happy discovery during the rehab was German-engineered post-and-beam construction, circa 1870.

“It’s built like an old barn timber frame, all the angles and pegs and everything,” Owen said. “Frickin’ oak, which is great, but it drives me nuts when I’m trying to do anything to the house.”

“Some of the beams are sawn, You can see the curve marks in it, and some are actually hand-hewn, because you can see the ax marks in it.”

“And there’s still bark on the ones …,” Dianne added from the kitchen.

“…The ones that are hand-hewn are only hand-hewn on two sides,” Owen finished.

They planted trees for windbreaks, installed a woodstove, a shower, a big garden and kept collecting, and studying, books and magazines.

The work of Helen and Scott Nearing (Living the Good Life), the Foxfire book series and other back-to-the-land classics remain among that collection.

“They’re all in the book pile in the room where you don’t touch anything because it might fall down,” Owen quipped. “We subscribed to Mother Earth News, Countryside Magazine. We were just sponges for information. Every time we’ve read an article about something, it was like ‘Oh, we should try that.’”

It’s knowledge and experience they’d like to share with future generations, although their own children have not shown interest in perpetuating the homesteading lifestyle.

“Which is a heartbreaker,” Owen said, “Because all that time we’re doing this, we figured we’re building something, and we’ll be able to pass it along. My son and daughter, they’re not interested. The only one who is interested is one of my granddaughters, who has moved to Florida.”

But it’s difficult to pass along that kind of knowledge through a 10-minute phone call, he said.

“We do silly things like talk about writing books and whatnot,” Owen mused.

“We don’t have any energy for it,” he added, almost as a question to himself.

“She always says like ‘Nobody wants to read those books anymore.’ I said ‘You would be surprised.’ I said, ‘I follow so many sites on the computer, people who are still doing that, and so many people who want to do it, and they are thirsty for information.’”

Down to three dogs, three cats, two chickens and two ducks (excellent for tick patrol, they said), the couple’s advice to would-be homesteaders could probably be summed up thus: Crack a book, pick up a shovel.

“She’d always say, “You don’t know how to do that,” Owen said laughing. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I know, that’s the fun part!’”

Source: lancasterfarming.com