From the Ground Up
“The lady above us owned a traveling zoo,” says Neuwirth. “There was an armadillo nibbling on my feet when I signed the lease. There were monkeys and a bear and people were dropping off pets all the time. I admired a puppy she had in her arms, and she said, ‘Here, take it.’”
Slowly but surely their search became purposeful, and in early 1993, after looking at 50 farms scattered across Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, they found a keeper. “It wasn’t our dream farm,” says Salinas. “It was a compromise. But it was close to Reedsburg, which we found to be a viable little town. Other places were more beautiful, but there was no way to make a living if someone had to. There were other little problems, but it felt like time was running out. We had saved up our down payment, and decided it was time to make a move.”
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They spent several weeks commuting back and forth and making the place habitable before moving in. “We didn’t want to appear to be suspicious city folks, so we didn’t do a final walk-through before closing,” says Salinas. “The place was full of stacked newspapers, dirty underwear, empty boxes, milk jugs, and things like that.”
“I wasn’t particularly happy about it,” he says. “I was trying to hack our garden out of ground that hadn’t been grazed or tilled or even mowed for 20 years….I was putting seeds in the ground and muttering to myself that it was stupid and wouldn’t work.” But the 50-foot garden produced vegetables all summer long, and the following year they tripled its size. They dubbed the place the Neu Erth Wormfarm, after a quote by Charles Darwin: “Every fertile grain of soil has passed at least once through the gut of an earthworm.”
Salinas made the first Chicago delivery himself. Most people are accustomed to bright, perfect-looking vegetables from the store, and he wanted to explain why organic vegetables look different.
Now in its sixth season of business, the Wormfarm has ten local subscribers and 50 from the Chicago area. City customers are each required to visit the farm once during the summer. To make their stays more interesting, Neuwirth–a farm auction addict–has filled the three-bedroom apartment with tchotchkes. There’s the Cheese Room, filled with thrift-store art, clowns, monkey figurines, and a Swiss-cheese-stenciled wall border; the Chinese Room, which started out full of Chinese knickknacks but becomes more minimalist every time one of them breaks; and Gramma’s Room, furnished with antiques and its namesake, a cardboard cutout of an elderly woman left over from Neuwirth’s special-event days. Gramma used to be part of an Italian street scene in the window of Carlucci’s on Halsted; now she rests in an antique rocking chair. But “it’s surprising how many times we open the door and find Gramma stuffed in the closet,” Neuwirth says. “She spooks people.”
