Farm work is hard work, especially for farm kids. In the summers, during harvest, around 14-15 boys would stay in the Matsuda barn, rising at 5AM and working until 3:30 in the afternoon. Mitsuno would serve them home-cooked meals, often using fruits and vegetables from the garden. The barn still remains with penciled graffiti comments from the boys who stayed there, including Mary Matsuda Gruenewald’s sons Ray and David.

Yoneichi’s four daughters (Kathryn, Marlene, Sheila, and Marguerite) also worked long hours on the farm; they knew that they were expected to help with the work. In fact, despite growing up on Vashon, they never attended a Strawberry Festival, as these usually occurred during harvest time. One winter, when their father moved the barn from one portion of the estate to another, the daughters remember that they too were enlisted to help: they spent long hours sifting bags of sand in order to make the barn’s new concrete foundation. Although they all moved off-Island after graduating high school, the daughters now credit their father with creating a solid work ethic as a source of strength for building their lives.

How do you grow strawberries on Vashon’s glacial soil? Strawberry plants require proper irrigation methods, and Vashon Island’s growing conditions can make berry harvests difficult. The Island’s open, porous soil at the surface does not hold enough moisture during the growing seasons; moreover, the hardpan beneath the surface hinders proper drainage for the roots. To solve these problems, Yoneichi Matsuda created an extensive system of water storage and irrigation. He had a pond dug in the 1950s, possibly by the same man who dug the Fujioka pond on Vashon, connecting it with a network of grassed waterways which drained into the pond. The pond contains approximately 1,500,000 gallons of water at capacity. Yoneichi’s irrigation and water storage practice, combined with his crop rotation practice (keeping one field planted with grasses and legumes), earned him the Conservationist Farmer of the Year award from King Conservation District in 1957.

Source: Seattle Times article, 1957

As Mary Matsuda Gruenewald tells it, the Matsuda family forest started with some Canadian acorns. On a visit to Vancouver, British Columbia, her older brother Yoneichi brought back a bag of acorns from his in-laws’ tree. He planted a few in his garden, and was surprised to see a row of red oak trees appear shortly afterwards. He did transplant one of the seedling oak trees outside the garden. His nephew David (Mary’s older son) asked him if he was going to plant other trees. Smiling, Yoneichi described a “150-year plan” where he would visit the forests in the Midwest or the Eastern seaboard and gather other seeds. His untimely death in 1985 forestalled the completion of his plan. Mary inherited half of the 12-acre estate after her father’s death in 1970, and did not think much about the land use until 2006. Her younger son Ray had the idea to plant a native forest on the 5 acres, and Mary agreed. Together they used work parties to plant close to 1000 trees, including Douglas firs, cedars, hemlocks, and eventually wild alders and madrones.

Sources: Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, Becoming Mama-San: 80 Years of Wisdom