Photography Courtesy of Two Fold Farm & Studio
Even though Tony and I have briefly taken a hiatus from our print magazine due to the surprise growth of our family, we want to keep bringing you the stories of our amazing local treasures. And boy, do I have a treasure to share with you! I stumbled across Two Fold Farm one day while checking out all the amazing farmers who were going to be at Creekside Garden's Farmer's Market. Jordan and J have truly created a perfect marriage of form and function on their farm: producing clean, quality produce, and innovative artwork. But the funny thing is, it's hard to see where the artwork ends and the farm produce begins. As you'll come to understand, there's not much difference between the two, because whether it's Kale or flowers, radish bundles or hand-pressed paper craft, everything Jordan and J do is an art in itself.
We loved hearing from them about their passions and we're so excited to share their answers with you!
Tell us about Twofold Farm & Studio. Are you both from the area? What prompted your dive into farming? When did you begin?
We’re Jordan Delzell and J Jadick. Our goals are twofold: to explore art and agriculture. Currently we grow annual vegetables, herbs and flowers in a half acre market garden while also nurturing 13 acres of diversified fruit and nut trees on what was previously a corn field. 1,300 chestnut trees will be our keystone species. We also have a paper-making studio that uses fibers from the farm and recycled materials from the waste stream to create low-waste handmade goods. We aim to balance agriculture with art, noting that humans have done this since the beginning.
We both grew up surrounded by agriculture (Jordan in Iowa, J in Northeastern PA). We met while both working in the arts in New York City where we lived from 2012-2019.
We both were learning more about the industrial food system and feeling disconnected from where our food comes from while simultaneously feeling burnt out from city life and yearning to be closer to nature. We decided to move to Kansas City in 2019 to pursue more affordable living while learning about urban agriculture. During this time J worked at Urbavore Farm, (one of the largest and longest-standing urban farms in the Kansas City region) and then we both did a work exchange at First Seed Farm, an urban homestead, where we co-managed a garden and fruit orchards in exchange for living rent free. We then worked at Chestnut Charlie’s, a 20 acre, thirty year old organic chestnut orchard that demonstrated that perennial agriculture can be a viable and sustainable alternative to annual crops.
In 2021 we moved to Tunkhannock to J’s family farm and in 2022 we started Twofold.
What are your growing seasons like? Do you grow all year long, or seasonally?
We have many projects that we are working on that vary by season. March-October is primarily devoted to the market garden, winter months are spent on tree work and orchard maintenance along with papermaking. We’re excited by the idea that art and agriculture can complement each other seasonally. The warm months are spent outside growing food, cooler months are spent with more time inside doing introspective, creative work.
What veggies can you just not get enough of? What are your favorite things to plant and grow?
In the market garden we love to grow things like lettuce, root vegetables and garlic. These plants we feel we can grow well, with little infrastructure and are adapted to our climate. Plus our surrounding community loves them!
For ourselves, we are loving winter squash, potatoes and dried beans. These provide sustenance throughout the winter time.
So far we have loved to work with perennial plants because they are overall less work and the lifespan is so much longer. It’s fun to watch them grow and change each year. A farm focused on perennials will result in less soil disturbance and more fungal activity below the surface which means more life and diversity. Year after year the trees and shrubs will grow into larger beings that can sequester carbon, prevent erosion, create wildlife habitat, protect our creek, and yield tons of food and medicine with only having been planted once! This whole system is designed without inputs such as toxic sprays, artificial fertilizers, and limited fossil fuels resulting in cheaper costs for the farmers and less negative impacts to our community and ecosystem.
Chestnuts, our keystone tree, are often called the “grain that grows on trees” or the “bread tree”. They can be eaten raw, roasted or turned into flour and with similar nutrients to rice or corn they will provide a valuable carbohydrate food source for our surrounding community. Historically, they have fed people for millennia including people here on Turtle Island. This area itself was managed by tribes such as Susquehannocks, Seneca, Shawnee, and Delaware (Lenni Lenape) where the American chestnut was a keystone tree before imported blight wiped it out in the twentieth century. Our trees’ genetics are blight-resistant and sourced from the leading hybrid chestnut orchards in the country.
The temperate U.S. is the only region that could support a chestnut industry but doesn’t! This country imports over 40 million pounds of chestnuts per year but only a few million pounds are produced domestically. We aim to be a part of the next tree crop revolution.
Can you teach our readers a little about the process of paper-making, and how you mix your beautiful flowers into the end result?
Papermaking is a very old craft that initially was developed in China and has since become majorly industrialized in the West to mass produce everything from toilet paper to cardboard. At Twofold our method of papermaking is scrappy and focused on the act of recycling items to decrease our household waste and increase self-reliance. We collect paper throughout the year (most of it is junk mail), tear it up, soak it in water and then blend it using a huge commercial immersion blender, making a pulp. We also enjoy experimenting with using natural fibers from plants that we grow in our garden (garlic skins, fennel fronds, carrot tops) that otherwise would be composted. These plants are cooked in a lye solution (wood ash from our wood stove) before being rinsed and blended like the paper. We incorporate flower petals that are harvested from our garden and dried, then added to the base pulps. Then we use what’s called a mold and deckle (a window screen stapled to old picture frames) and pull it through to water/pulp mixture to catch a thin layer of the pulp and this is then pressed and dried onto fabric and large windows in our home until its dried and peeled off. This paper is great for stationary, scrapbooking, matting photos and experiments in collaging or drawing. Jordan creates more experimental sculptural forms out of pulp as well. You can see more of her work at jordan-delzell.com. To learn more about papermaking I recommend starting with May Babcock’s blog Paperslurry.com. I learned paper-making primarily through online resources and it’s super easy to start with simple materials you can find in your home or at local thrift stores.
What are your dreams for the farm? What would you love to add/shift into/experiment with?
Ultimately we want to be able to live a humble, nourishing life by growing food and making things full time. We feel especially excited by continuing to diversify our orchards/farm to be mostly perennial plants that bear fruit and nuts to feed us, wildlife, our community and ecosystem, longterm.
Currently within 3 acres of the 13 acre chestnut orchard are over twenty different species of trees and shrubs such as hazelnuts, pawpaws, and honey berries. Over time we plan to propagate these plants to create a nursery of resilient, climate adapted plants to be able to share with the community and to be interplanted within 10 acres of chestnut trees. We are avoiding replacing a monocrop of corn with a monocrop of chestnuts. An example of this would be that between every chestnut tree there will be a pawpaw tree, a fruit bearing native that can live in the understory. Between each pawpaw there can be smaller fruit bearing shrubs such as honey berry or aronia berry. Over time we would like to add more medicinal herbs and flowers to the ground cover to attract beneficial insects.
We also want to continue to nourish the local arts ecosystem by offering public facing workshops and events, and possibly host artist residencies on the farm. We envision a reality where artists and farm-workers are compensated fairly and respected for the role they play in supporting the mental and physical well-being of their communities. We are excited to experiment with various models of collaborating and cooperating with other local artists and farmers and are remaining open and curious to how Twofold can evolve to serve this purpose.
Where can folks find your products?
We sell produce and flowers at the Tunkhannock Farmers Market at Creekside Gardens. We also sell produce at Food Dignity Markets in Luzerne County. This organization aims to support the development of programs and platforms offering dignified and equitable access to nutritious food. You can find our paper and handmade items at markets and craft fairs and at twofoldfarmandstudio.com.