Portfolio: Web design is her work, farming her passion

Jenna Woginrich has serious Pennsylvania connections. She grew up in Palmerton in Carbon County, a place she's described in interviews as "a small town with street lights, sidewalks and Wonder Bread and mayonnaise." She also graduated from Kutztown University.

Perhaps those stolid roots inspired the homestead dream. For although Woginrich makes her living as a Web designer for Orvis in Sunderland, Vt., she's also a farmer - and now the author of Barnheart, a memoir about "the incurable longing for a farm of one's own."

Woginrich raises chickens, sheep, bees, rabbits, and geese; she grows her own vegetables and bakes a lot of bread. All of it is fodder for Barnheart (Storey Publishing, $14.95), along with the earlier Made From Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life and Chick Days: An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Raising Chickens From Hatching to Laying.

This engaging gal lives to farm, and she's carried her longing from Tennessee to northern Idaho to rural Vermont, and finally, to her cozy cabin "in the middle of nowhere" in Jackson, N.Y., on the Vermont border.

Besides the books, Woginrich blogs about her experiences on coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com, the Huffington Post and Mother Earth News. And you'd better believe she has fans.

They call her by her first name, sister to sister. They rejoice in her successes and mourn her losses and missteps. It's easy to see why.

She's so darned earnest. "True wealth is not about money. It's about independence. Gardening gives you back that basic freedom," she writes, while describing the joys of making a year's supply of strawberry jam in an afternoon when the berries are in season.

It sounds so romantic. But our heroine gets tired, too; her arms ache from weeding. She gets discouraged.

We cheer her on, knowing tomorrow is another day. And that next year's garden will her - and our - best yet.

- Virginia A. Smith