LAKEWOOD — What started as an artistic jewelry business and a dream is now a flourishing farm, a pond, a honeybee hive, an orchard, and a reality.

Ebb and Flow Organic Farm began as the homemade jewelry business of Jocelyn Hoch nine years ago, joined three years later by Forrest Shafer.  After spending some time touring the east coast selling their jewelry, cut from precious gems and made with hand-crafted gold and silver.  Hoch and Shafer describe it as “wearable art”.

If their jewelry is wearable art, then one might consider the food from their farm “eatable art”, as these two have created an organic farm combining ancient agricultural theories with innovative biotechnology.

Having no formal training in the advanced farming techniques they use, Shafer says they, “are students of the school of life.”  After doing a nine-month apprenticeship on a farm in Hawaii, the two returned to the East Coast and began planning for what is now Ebb and Flow Organic Farm.  The apprenticeship gave them a chance to research permaculture, which is “an essential balanced life-cycle,” according to Hoch, and biodynamics, a technique that involves using the moon cycles to determine the best times to harvest different crops. 

They also use mycorrhizal applications on their crops which use fungal spores to interconnect all of their crops and the soil that runs through it.  To Hoch and Shafer, “the soil is an organism too.”

Among their crops are kale, cole rabe, broccoli, four different varieties of tomatoes, green beans, potatoes, pumpkins, and myriad culinary and medicinal herbs.  As of next week they will also have a honeybee colony from which they will begin producing their own honey.  Next year they hope to refurbish the apple orchard that came with their land and add apples to their list of available produce.

Aside from farming and making jewelry, the pair are working with legendary mushroom expert Paul Stamets, author of “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World”, among his numerous other works, to develop a special strain of mycelium that they will use to filter pollution out of the stream that runs past their farm and feeds into the Delaware River.  “The upstream pollution is creating all kinds of diseases that scientists and pathologists can’t even figure out,” says Hoch,  “and it’s going to find it’s way into all of our waterways.”

Ebb and Flow supports organic living “because it ensures a healthier planet”.  In a future with a foreseeable energy crisis and looming food shortage, with any luck (and alot of research) farms like this will be the norm and not the exception.  For more information you can contact Ebb and Flow at 610-741-4909 or on the web at ebbandflow.bluestonestudios.com.