Vegetables, flowers and pumpkins grown on the valley floor between Kent and Auburn — between the Burlington Northern and Union Pacific lines. A weekly CSA, and fields you’re welcome to walk.
Shelley always wished she’d grown up on a farm. At ten she was begging her parents for farm animals. Then, in 1996, she toured a CSA farm — and she was hooked.
She started farming next door to the farm’s current home. At its biggest, Whistling Train grew to 25 acres, with a five-person crew feeding a 200-member CSA, restaurants and three farmers markets. Today it’s a modest four to five acres, worked with the help of two part-time employees.
“Simply stated: CSA members share in the risk of growing the food that they eat, and ensure that farms and farmers continue to exist.”Shelley, on the CSA
Members prepay before the season begins, which buys the seed, the fertilizer and the payroll months before the first harvest. In return, a share of the farm comes home every week — usually enough for two adults, with or without kids.
One share size. One long season of weekly pickups from mid-May through November — or a “Summer Only” share, June through September.
At the farm on Tuesday afternoons, 2:00–8:00 pm, or Saturdays, 10:00 am–5:00 pm. Seattle members can join a share-pool in North Seattle or West Seattle, and there are Saturday-morning drop sites in Columbia City and Skyway.
Eight boxes, roughly monthly from July to November, of the crops that are made for canning and freezing — picked as each one is ready.
Every CSA member — Pantry-Builder subscribers too — is welcome to the U-Pick Cutflower Garden, the Sunflower Patch and the Pumpkin Patch, free, all season.
The farm is an urban-fringe farm on purpose: come out on any Tuesday or Saturday during pickup hours, put a face and a place to the food you feed your family, and stop at the Birder Kiosk to see who’s been visiting.
Every row is marked with its name. We have the clippers and three sizes of containers — no need to bring your own, and you take the bucket home with your blooms.
Open every day, 10:00 am to sunset. Pay at the farm with Venmo, CashApp or cash (no checks). Cut in the morning or evening for the longest vase-life.
It started as a bonus for CSA members — a flower garden, then an acre of sunflowers sown in the spring of 2020 to smother a weedy patch of grass. It became a haven that first pandemic summer. Now the public is welcome too.
Since 2008, a share of the farm’s harvest has gone to families in the area who could use it — people fighting illness, a family with a new baby in the hospital, a single mom going to college, people who lost their income to layoffs.
Tips paid through the online store, beyond what covers the payment fees, go toward these shares. If you are, or know of, a family that could benefit, Shelley would like to hear from you.
From I-5, take the 272nd St. exit east; it becomes 277th as you drop into the valley. Past Smith Brothers Dairy, over Hwy. 167 and the Union Pacific tracks, turn left at the light just before the second set of tracks onto 78th Ave. The farm is half a mile down on the left.