Who we are

I, Selma Bjarnadottir was born in the city of Reykjavík, Iceland.  All my life however, I wanted to live in the country and be a farmer.  I spent many summers as an employee on a farm in Iceland where we raised about 100 sheep and 30 horses.  That was paradise to me.  That was the life I wanted to live.  Being creative, working with animals and being outside was where I wanted to be.

University brought me to the West Coast of the United States to study Landscape Architecture.  This is  where I learned to love trees and I really felt at home here in the Northwest.  The easy climate, friendly people and the natural environment was attractive to me.  It felt like Summer all year round.  Winter felt like a rainy Summer and Summer felt like a hot and dry Summer.  This was a comfortable place to live.

After meeting my husband and spending some years living and working in Iceland and on the East Coast of both Canada and the USA, we decided to venture back to the Northwest.  My husband was a true globe trotter.  Having lived and worked in many countries all over the world he felt the Northwest was a pretty good place to settle down in.  For the first few years we lived in Olympia, Washington, both working in our fields of expertise: Architecture and Landscape Architecture. But, the life of a farmer kept pulling me and we eventually looked for land and found this wonderful farm in Independence Valley, just 35 miles south of Olympia.  We moved here in the summer of 2000.  To me it was like dying and going to heaven.

We moved here with our two cats and two chickens that we had kept in our back yard in Olympia.  As we moved in, we adopted two puppies.  The first Winter we got the cows and the next Fall the sheep, more chickens the Spring after that and then came the bees.  We planted a vineyard and fruit trees and are getting to a point of being self sufficient.  This was all very hard work and having a full time job on top of it was just about too much.  I eventually stop working off the farm in 2007 and now stay on the farm full time. 

My husband, Markthor MacFarlane is my helper when I need one; otherwise he works still in his field of expertise as an Architect and Landscape Architect. 

This small farm has no other employees.  Just the two of us.  We work all the time and love it and would not trade it for anything in the world.

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