Finding this island ‘citified,’ Candace Jagel is heading north.

Candace Jagel has a prized piece of island history growing in her backyard.

“It’s just a little continuation of our agricultural heritage,” she said, pointing to a few raised garden beds where snowflake potatoes quietly await their last summer harvest. “The potatoes were Gail Smith’s, an island old- timer who died about two years ago. He sailed tall-masted ships, fished and farmed near Port Madison.

“These were his favorite potato. He lived on potatoes. He loved potatoes. After he died, these potatoes were handed down to people.”

Serving up an island heirloom at her family’s dinner table is just one way Jagel feels connected to the island’s farming roots.

She raises goats for milk, sheep for wool, chickens for eggs and turkeys for meat. Jagel is also a founder of the Trust for Working Landscapes, which aims to preserve the island’s agricultural land, and is a member of Friends of the Farm.

“There’s not many opportunities to follow through so literally with your convictions,” she said as two chickens, Fatty and Tiger, approached expecting an after-dinner treat. “But eating your own eggs…feels just so totally right. Growing food here, with Gail’s potatoes, I feel connected to that lineage. It’s an honor.”

But Jagel, her husband Erik and their two young sons plan to cut loose their Bainbridge roots this summer and transplant to another island.

“Bainbridge is becoming more city-fied, more urban,” Jagel said. “The rural character of the island has changed so much in the 13 years we lived here.”

Jagel and her family have acquired a larger spread on San Juan Island, where they can expand their growing interest in homegrown, organic foods.

Isle idyll

Born in Southern California and educated at a private liberal arts college, Jagel wasn’t set on a rural trajectory.

She lived for many years in Switzerland, teaching English and editing publications for the World Health Organization.

The move to Bainbridge Island in 1992 wasn’t an easy transition for Jagel. While her husband had long pined for the idyllic isle he had often visited on bicycling trips while studying at the University of Washington, Jagel had grown into a decidedly cosmopolitan lifestyle while in Europe.

“When I stepped off the plane I was wearing, you know, silk skirts and Italian shoes,” she said. “But you can’t wear that when you’re milking a goat. Now I dress like a Northwesterner. Now I wear wool socks.”

Jagel’s deep commitment to small-scale farming came gradually, as her profession as a writer drew her into the world of the island’s seed-sowers.

“I was working on these issues with the Bainbridge Voice,” Jagel said of the quarterly magazine she published in the late ’90s with photographer Joel Sackett. “It was writing for the Voice that provided the spark.”

The magazine’s third issue was focused almost entirely on island farmers.

But, even then, the tone of those interviewed – a farmyard vet, strawberry pickers, a lettuce grower – was bleak, with talk hinting at the imminent demise of island farming.

“Bainbridge Islanders have historically been bound to the earth and sea for their livelihood,” Jagel wrote in the issue’s introduction. “We grow further from our roots, yet we still value our past.”

While the preservation of “rural character” emerged in the late ’80s as one of the island’s top priorities, Jagel noted a growing arsenal of city ordinances to protect farmland was not keeping pace with development.

“(Is) there actually something there to protect?” she asked in the Voice.

Nine years later, Jagel has her answer.

“It’s almost like a novelty now,” she said. “People will always love the warm, fuzzy parts – the Harvest Fair, the farmers markets – but we no longer have the heart and soul. Farming here has become symbolic of the past. Look at the city’s symbol, strawberries. Strawberries on the city seal, on manhole covers.

“But Karen Selvar is the only strawberry farmer left.”

Jagel plans to take some of Gail Smith’s favorite potatoes to her new island home. Once settled, with her seeds planted and her goats penned in, Jagel says she’ll begin work to preserve a rural way of life she hopes will last much longer than it did on Bainbridge.

“This island’s agricultural heritage is very precarious,” she said. “I don’t think people have any idea how precarious it is. When I move to San Juan Island this summer, I’ll feel really good about some of this heritage traveling with me.”

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Islandwise

These profiles are part of an ongoing series on Bainbridge families and individuals, coinciding with a new project called Islandwise that’s looking for shared community values. To get involved in fireside chats on community values and vision, call Dwight Sutton at 842-3011, Rod Stevens at 780-1444 or Connie Waddington at 842-9483.