Frisky Girl and Feral Woman farms find success in the unconventional

Feral Woman Farm

On a typical day, Lulu Redder can be found in the fields beneath Mount Si, tending to her flock of animals with her toddler daughter, Rosie, by her side.

Redder raises, processes and sells pasture-raised pork and chicken through her business, Feral Woman Farm. She leases six acres at the Tollgate Farm Park, a 410-acre historic property in North Bend that functions as a community park and a working farmstead. Here, Redder cares for chickens, pigs, goats, bunnies, ducks and alpacas. She also has educational programming and petting zoos.

Redder found her love for farms as a kid visiting family farms in Washington, but she is a first-generation farmer. After high school, she traveled, worked on different farms and found her calling. She continued to do farm work, as well as work in food service and apprentice in butcher shops, before deciding it was time to step out on her own.

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“I just came back to a point in my life I was like, I kind of got to go hard or go home,” she said. “And so I just did. … I drove across the country with two pigs and a farm dog in my tiny house and came back to Washington.”

Redder has continued to grow her business the past six years while managing a pandemic and single motherhood.

In 2023, she opened a second arm of her business, Feisty Fowl Processing, a licensed processing service for local, low-volume farmers. The third arm of Redder’s business is Plucky Palomino Petting Zoo. This is Redder’s kid-focused business, which has regular petting zoos and other animal-loving events at Tollgate.

This year, Plucky Palomino added educational programming under the name Farm & Forest School. Students will learn about animals, work with animals, grow produce and eat their produce.

“[We will] give kids a chance to be on a farm and really get that kind of education that they’re not getting in a classroom,” Redder said. “We’re teaching them about agriculture and being kind to animals, what purposes animals serve on the farm. … And then we’re incorporating forest and garden work as well.”

The Farm & Forest School has two teachers and will have structured programming dependent on age throughout the spring, as well as summer camps.

The access to land at Tollgate Farm Park, owned by the city of North Bend and managed by the Si View Metropolitan Park District, helped Redder bring her businesses to life. Multiple farmers lease on the land, and Redder said it’s been nice to have nearby support from her peers.

“We’ve kind of got this fun little farmer commune thing happening here, which is really lovely,” she said. “We’re all autonomous. We can run our own businesses the way we want. But we can share some resources and interact with each other and support each other. And that’s just so valuable.”

Feral Woman Farm’s staff size changes seasonally, but Redder said there is someone doing farm chores up to five times a day.

“We take care of the animals in the morning, and somebody comes and tucks them in at night,” she said. “There’s a lot of work to do, but it’s really fun to work together and to see the animals really happy.”

Redder’s daughter, Rosie, is always part of the team. Redder said being a single mom and a farm owner is a “huge challenge with huge rewards.”

“It’s not easy becoming a single mom, and I don’t think I don’t think I would have made it through that situation as smoothly as I did without this farm and the amazing community I have,” she said. “I really see how much farming, or being on a farm, growing up on a farm, builds kids’ confidence and their autonomy … It’s been a pleasure to see that, and we want to share that with other kids.”

Check it out: To learn about purchasing meats from Feral Woman Farm, visit feralwomanfarm.com. To learn more about Farm & Forest School, visit an open house on March 15-16. Tickets can be purchased at pluckypalomino.com/calendar.

Owners of Frisky Girl Farm Ashley Wilson (left) and Ellen Scheffer stand for a photo in their greenhouse. Photo courtesy of Frisky Girl Farm

Frisky Girl Farm

Ellen Scheffer and Ashley Wilson fell into their partnership through a mutual friend nearly 10 years ago, and it was a match made to last.

The two first-generation farmers started Frisky Girl Farm, a vegetable and flower farm, in 2019 after deciding they wanted more growing space than their urban Seattle farm would allow. They found one of the few rock-free fields in North Bend and have been growing their business since.

On their North Bend acreage, they also have a farm stand, which is self-serve and open daily from May to October.

“We are also the only vegetable farm in North Bend, so we are really creating a demand for hyper-locally grown food,” she said. “There are plenty of farms that are within a 20 or 30 minute drive, but most people don’t want to make a drive like that just to get some things for dinner. So we did really find that we had a very loyal and excited and enthusiastic customer base here in North Bend.”

But the heart of their business, Scheffer said, is their community supported agriculture, or CSA. Through a CSA, community members pay for their “share” of the farm at the beginning of the growing season and then have access to the farm’s products all season long.

Frisky Girl’s CSA is different from many others because members are able to fully customize their boxes of produce, rather than getting a set box each week. Each week, from June through October, customers can go online and select what produce they want, the cost of which is then deducted from their debit-style CSA accounts.

Frisky Girl has six different CSA pickup locations, each equipped with a refrigerator so items stay fresh until members are able to get them.

“We found that there’s a smaller and smaller number of people who want to receive a surprise random box of veggies every week,” Scheffer said. “It’s hard to know what to do with that. It’s hard to cook around that and to make use of that. … People can place orders that are as big or as small as they want each week, and if they don’t want anything at all that week, then they don’t have to worry about it.”

In an effort to become more of a one-stop shop, Frisky Girl is offering more than just vegetables this year, both in its CSA and at farm stands and markets. The farm is growing grains this year and will be offering its own rolled oats and flour. Scheffer said they also plan to partner with other farms to provide eggs, mushrooms, flowers and fruits.

“We want to be able to offer more than just veggies, because that’s not the entirety of most people’s diets,” she said.

For the upcoming season, Frisky Girl will continue to operate its North Bend farm stand, but is moving all of its growing productions to Fall City in a new partnership with Steel Wheel Farm.

“We are in a big moment of transition right now,” Scheffer said. “We have just found that growing in North Bend is really, really challenging. In six years, we’ve lost seven greenhouses, three iterations of our wash station, several other outbuildings, all to wind. … Even though we have continued to make improvements to the fence, it has not been enough to keep the elk from getting in and eating our veggies.”

Challenging as farming may be, Scheffer said she and Wilson are forging their own path, both as women and as first-generation farmers.

“We bring a lot of innovation and a lot of different ways of doing things,” she said. “I think it’s really important to think about how the times have changed and what is realistic and what people actually want. … We really are blazing our own trail and not getting stuck on the way things are supposed to be, or the way it’s always been done, because in a lot of cases, we don’t know the way it’s always been.”

Check it out: To sign up for Frisky Girl’s CSA and see pick-up locations, visit friskygirlfarm.com/csa. Starting in May, visit Frisky Girl’s farm stand at 9905 428th Ave. SE.