Home sweet homestead Greene County family adopts ‘homesteader’ lifestyle
Bob Von Scio holds a handful of strawberries that are part of the edible landscape that surrounds the family home.
Food from Bob Von Scio’s farm and garden include bacon, pickles, beans and edible flowers.
Bob Von Scio lets his chickens out of their pen at his home in Sycamore.
Food from Bob Von Scio’s farm, from left, ham, bacon, pickled pork tongue, duck breast prosciutto and duck liver paté.
Bob Von Scio, holding son Sebastian, 2, poses with wife Sara and son Chaucer, 6, in front of the pigpen at the family’s home in Sycamore.
Chaucer Von Scio, 6, plays with the pigs in the pen at the farm.
Bob Von Scio dries pork, which is an 18-month process, in his barn at his home in Sycamore.
Sebastian, left, and Chaucer Von Scio pose with some of the crops from the early fall harvest.
“They’re pets until they’re food,” Bob Von Scio said of the rabbits and other animals on Tabard Farm.
Bob Von Scio prepares a turkey for butchering and processing.
Bob Von Scio prepares to butcher and use almost all of a pig’s meat “from snout to tail.”
Chaucer and Sebastian Von Scio play in the creek behind their house as they watch the family’s ducks.
Rabbits have shed more of Bob Von Scio’s blood than the other animals on the farm.
“Congeal – now there’s a word that sounds exactly like the process it’s describing,” said Bob Von Scio as he examines a drying piece of lard in his miniature barn. He’s explaining how he’ll later make head cheese out of a pig’s skull organs by boiling eyes and all. The product is one of the more extreme examples of Von Scio’s “snout to tail” philosophy of using nearly every part of the animals he raises on his 15 acres in Morris Township.
Von Scio, 32, has a fascination with words – he graduated from Washington & Jefferson College in 2006 with an English literature degree – and has been imparting that love upon his two children, Chaucer, 6, and Sebastian, 2, the former of whom was named after Geoffrey Chaucer. He’s even nicknamed his homestead “Tabard Farm” after the tavern in “The Canterbury Tales.”
Von Scio and his wife, Sara, 31, are high school sweethearts from Trinity who’ve made it their lifestyle to live off the land. The unlikely adaption to country life was always a plan, but not as soon as 2013, after the former digital marketing consultant traded websites for shovels.
”This was my grandparents property, which we came into after they passed a couple years ago. I was always here when I was a kid and had exposure to gardening and farming, and Sara and I always knew we’d be for going off the grid as much as we could, but we didn’t realize it’d be happening so fast,” Von Scio said, “The first scenario we tried out was going to a low-cost tropical location, like Belize, but the Internet situation wasn’t ideal in Central America to allow the work-from-home stuff I was doing at the time. But my grandmother’s cancer diagnosis and quick decline to death was unexpected, and that led us back here.”
The Von Scios aren’t completely “off-grid.” They’re still tapped into the electrical grid and have telephone service with slower DSL Internet, but no public sewer tap in, nor municipal water or gas hookups or cable or satellite. The solutions are a rain-collecting cistern, a water well, solar panel arrays and a wood-burning heater. Society isn’t too far away, either. Sara refashions old furniture and helps coach Chaucer’s soccer team; Bob takes a monthly trek to Starbucks to download media like a 21st-century hoarder of digital groceries.
“The kids are still at an age that they lock into one or two (movies or shows) at a time and watch them over and over, so that helps,” Bob said.
The Von Scios are effectively retired, living off an investment fund and harvesting their own meats, fruits and vegetables from their “edible landscaping” they’ve cultivated over the past two years.
“Planting our garden, it’s a lot of stuff you want a lot of – tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, beans, potatoes – as well as stuff that grows so easily and quickly you plant it just because. Radishes – nobody really likes them, but your kids can sprinkle a pack of seeds and in 45 days pull a bright, red bauble out of the ground. Then round it out with stuff that grows so abundantly that if you don’t want or need it – like zucchini and spaghetti squash – you can just dump it on the pigs and they’ll turn it into bacon,” Bob said as he laid out a charcuterie board of meats.
One of Bob’s three pigs – Bricks, Sticks and Straw – was slaughtered in August, and by this publication, Von Scio said all three would be butchered into various products. The board also had products like ham and sausage, dried duck breast prosciutto, duck liver paté, brined pork tongue and cured “tuna pork.” The sautéed duck hearts stayed in the fridge.
“The longest project is the ham drying in the barn. By next Christmas we’ll find out if it’s sweet, awesome goodness or eight pounds of pure, putrid evil,” he said.
The family’s lifestyle goes beyond mere sustenance, and they’ve made arrangements to live mostly independent of society if it comes down to it. But Von Scio said they’re not of the “doomsday prepper” mindset.
“The self-sufficiency thing is a plan against inflation, but it’s also pretty cool to say a majority of what you’re eating you’ve raised or grown within 500 yards of your house,” Bob said while explaining that feeding his kids the fruits – and meats – of his labor is an ongoing education.
“I liked the fried duck tongues we had,” Chaucer said at the table, before his dad explained he had to debone them and fry them to make them more palatable.
“Food is a conduit to culture, to understand ourselves. I want my kids to understand the work that goes into making things. You can go to Wal-Mart and buy bacon, but you can also make bacon that is really, really good. And to know that ham doesn’t just happen in its nice, presentable form; that this came about to keep pork products as long as they could before refrigeration,” he said.
Von Scio said there’s no mystical process by which he learned how to raise, butcher and cook animals – he just reads as many books and online blogs as he can on the subjects and dives in.
Some chickens have been butchered, others kept for their eggs. Turkeys and ducks have met similar fates, but future animal denizens won’t roam the property again until spring. Yet there were still dozens of rabbits penned up awaiting harvest.
“We started the rabbits so that Chaucer can take this over as a side job when he’s a teen instead of him working at Taco Bell,” Von Scio said, “so yeah, we’re going to eat them, but they’re adorable, so we treat them as pets. They’re pets until they’re food, like all of our animals.”
The rabbits aren’t technically the most dangerous animal he keeps, but it’s turned out that way.
”Two-hundred pound pigs and turkeys with spurs, but I’ve shed more blood over these little guys than anything else. They just ‘spaz’ out sometimes, and each claw is like a razor blade,” he said, showing off fresh, bloody scratches.
Rabbit waste is used as fertilizer, and organic scraps go to the pigs on the hill above their house, where they roam in a large enclosure.
“They’re happy. They’re like dogs made out of bacon,” Von Scio said with a laugh. “People mistakenly let the cruelty inherent in the killing bleed over into the act of nurturing an animal to maturity and the care that goes into turning them into food. There is one second of cruelty injected into months of love and care, and not one ounce of malice.”
But all is not always well at Tabard Farm. Sometimes the chickens, which roam free after they meet Von Scio’s “three egg ransom rule” to prevent a daily egg hunt in the yard, are roosting in hostile territory.
“I thought their enclosures were like fortresses, but the raccoons found a weak spot. One day I had 27 chickens, and the next, it was a massacre,” he said.
“It’s like the ‘One Percent Doctrine,’ where you treat that one percent chance of something happening as inevitable. I have to plan as if I know the raccoons and possums are coming out every night.”
Von Scio’s blog can be followed at www.tabardfarm.com.