Lifetime gardeners grow backyard businesses together
They met at a festival where Will Dobkins was pitching his hand-forged garden tools and Jamie Jackson was selling her herbal products. She needed a better way to pry tough roots out of the ground. He had just the thing.
“I like to dig up dandelion and chicory roots,” Jamie recalls. “He was going over all the tools, and I remember he said, ‘You can get the dandelions right out of your garden with this one.’ I still have that trowel he sold me.”
For eight years they were just friends, helping one another at homesteading festivals and drawn together by a love of gardening. Then they began dating, married and made official a home-based business partnership that is flourishing near Squires in the Ozarks.
Will’s Homestead Iron draws on the knowledge passed down from three previous generations of blacksmiths to make gardening tools purpose-built to stand the test of time and hard use. From his forge comes tools made to last generations.
Will heat treats all of his tools by heating the steel to critical temperature and then quenching the glowing steel into an oil bath. Here he gauges the temperature of the metal as the oil burns off, tempering the material for toughness. His Homestead Iron tools come with a lifetime warranty.
Jamie launched Missouri Herbs to provide relief for people suffering from a variety of ailments with salves made from organically grown or wild-harvested plants. She uses recipes once common among rural people, and plants others would consider weeds. “And what drew us together was our love of gardening,” Jamie says.
“Our businesses really do puzzle-piece together very well,” says Will. “Her business is slow and steady. Where mine is feast or famine. I’ve got from the end of February until midsummer to make money. Then I’ll have another short run from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and then everything dries up. Missouri Herbs is consistent, all year, all the time bringing in that little bit to pay the power bill and grocery money.”
Jamie shows off the salve she makes from herbs and local bees wax.
The two businesses, which are served by White River Valley Electric Cooperative, dovetail in other ways as well. For example, when Will comes up with a new design for a garden tool, he takes it to Jamie’s garden to get her opinion on whether it functions as promised.
“It makes it real easy to dial things in, because I can give it to her and she can tell me, ‘No, the handle is too big for my hands,’ or ‘It’s too heavy, ’ ” Will says. “I can run right back up to the shop and reprototype it.”
Will was raised near Steelville but moved away from Missouri after high school. His roaming took him to Canada, where he worked in the aviation industry. When that career ended, he bought a piece of the Ozarks sight unseen, largely for the shop building where he planned to make tools.
“I don’t like living in the city, and working in aviation, you are going to be in some big city,” Will says. “I moved down here, started my own business and it was touch and go. I was doing architectural ironwork, anything I could to stay busy.”
He points out that the garden tools he makes aren’t new inventions, but improvements on old designs. His versions start with high-carbon 1075 steel. The basic shape is cut out, then heated in a gas forge and pounded out by hand on an anvil or under an air hammer.
Will grinds the tools by hand to ensure a sharp cutting edge. Then the tool is tempered to be both hard and tough. The last step is to add a hardwood handle that is protected with linseed oil.
The result is a tool that is guaranteed for life. “It’s intended to be handed down through the generations,” Will says of his tools. “The value in handmade tools is I have complete control of what goes in them and how they are made. There is no one pulling my string and saying you need to cut costs here.”
His website lists more than 30 styles of tools, designed for every type of soil and weeding challenge. Some are classic designs any gardener will recognize such as the American Hoe. Will’s version includes a tool-steel blade ground extremely sharp, a shank that is precision tig-welded to the blade and a heavy ferrule that is shrink-fitted so that it won’t twist or fall out. The handles are 60 inches long, 6 inches longer than most hoes.
One of the more unusual tools he offers is the Ho-Mi Hand Plow, a Korean tool that can be used to hoe, weed or lay out furrows with ease. “That’s one of my favorite tools to make,” Will says. “It’s a one-piece forging, so a lot of time at the anvil.”
Jamie puts many of these tools to work in her business. “He has one called a Scuffle Weeder,” she says. “It has a diamond head. You just plop it down and slide it back and forth and cut the big weeds, just like mopping.”
Poke root is one of the natural ingredients she uses in her salves.
Like Will, Jamie left the corporate world behind to live off the land. “When I bought my farm, I looked around to see what grew in abundance without any effort on my part,” she says. “I noted we’ve got roses, junipers, monarda, plaintain, dandelion and poke. So, I made products out of that to start a little business with.”
Her focus is on products that clean the skin using castor oil infused with the roots and herbs she gathers. Her facial butters are so concentrated it takes nearly a year to finish a jar.“I make face butter out of wild carrot seed, and I make face cleaner out of rose petals and yarrow,” Jamie says. “The face butter has rose hips for the Vitamin C and coriander.”
While her facial creams and cleansers sell well at festivals, it’s her salves that bring people to her online store at all hours. “Our grandparents learned to make healing wax and create salves,” she says. “We take organically grown and wild-harvested herbs and infuse them in oil for six weeks. That oil will pull the fat-soluble vitamins out, and then you add wax to it. We’ve got all kinds of beekeepers around here. We get the raw wax and clean it on the wood stove in the winter and I make salve out of it.”
If Jamie leaves her phone on at night she can hear the sound of new orders coming in at 2 or 3 in the morning. “It seems people are going down a rabbit hole looking for solutions to skin problems, cysts and tumors and somehow find my stuff,” she says. “They are up, they’ve got a problem and they are buying stuff.”
It’s not easy earning a living the way Jamie and Will do it, but they are happy to be living off the land and raising kids in the country. “People at events ask us, ‘So you all make a living at this?’ ” Will says. “And we do, but first let’s define a living. There’s no new bass boat out there. But we are content. We are happy with where we live and how we live and feel like we kind of got it all.”
For more information send email to herbsandiron@gmail.com or visit www.homesteadiron.com. Both businesses are also on Facebook.