Farm Tour at Lutsen’s Klarhet
Lutsen’s Klarhet, which offers vacation lodging in eco-friendly geodesic domes, is expanding their mission to encompass sustainable farming, farm tours, and goat yoga.
Klarhet, which means “clarity” in Norwegian and Swedish, was founded in 2020 by Nicole and Kirk Leand. The couple built four domes on their 25-acre property, and are now developing a self-sustaining regenerative food forest that includes chickens, fruit and nut trees, and Nigerian dwarf goats. They hope to become an educational resource and marketplace for Cook County growers.
WTIP had the chance to take a farm tour hosted by Nicole Leand on March 28, along with a guest family staying in one of the domes. Find the transcript, photos, and full audio interview below.
NICOLE LEAND
My name is Nicole Leand and I am the co-founder of Klarhet in Lutsen, Minnesota, and we are sitting on our 25-acre food forest in our backyard. I have Fiona here with me, this is one of our laying hens, and we are also the proud owners of a number of Nigerian dwarf goats and a budding food forest. My husband and I moved up here in April 2020.
I was in my doctorate program to get my nurse practitioner degree. I have a specialty in women’s health and in integrative nursing, and so my passion has been food as medicine, leaning in toward more of a combination approach to wellness with conventional health care as well as natural medicine. It’s been a big passion of mine.
So I was completing my doctorate and my husband and I got really into Airbnbs to try and pay for my grad school. So we started flipping old houses in Minneapolis and turning them into Airbnbs and rental properties, and we just fell in love with it. We loved hosting people and we just we love the process.
So we then got pregnant with twins and it was February 2020, just before COVID hit. We went in for our scheduled delivery and one of our girls was stillborn. And it was just one of those moments in life where we just looked at each other and we’re kind of like, wow, we want to start living our dream. It’s time to live our life.
We did meet up in the Boundary Waters actually. We met on a college winter camping trip and fell in love with this area. So we always felt home up here.
And when everything hit with our daughter and COVID, the world felt like it was kind of shutting down. The only place we felt peace was here. And we decided to sell everything that we owned, literally everything.
And we moved up here with just the very basics. We lived in a shed with our premature newborn for a number of months. And it was quite the adventure.
So my in-laws were like, what are you doing with my granddaughter? They were very supportive, but it was definitely an adventure. We knew nothing about building.
We had never built anything from scratch before. We were total newbies. So we literally took everything that we had generated down in the Twin Cities and put it into this property down to the last dime.
And we ended up building, one by one, four domes. We lived in the first dome for a while. It was just a construction shell at the time after we finally were able to move out of that shed. We lived in there for quite a while while we finished out the other domes. And then we finally opened domes two and three in June of 2021. And then shortly thereafter, we were able to open dome four.
It’s been a long journey. We learned so much along the way. We made so many mistakes.
It’s just kind of comical to think about now. Very expensive mistakes along the way. But in the end, it felt like the right move for us.
Ultimately what we realized is, wow, we did our dream or what we thought was our dream. And now we just have more. So it’s really all about enjoying the journey along the way because you’re never actually done. So that was what that dome represented for us at that time. They all are really meaningful to us and kind of tell our story along the way for that part of our lifetime.
Down in the Twin Cities, we had chickens. We were really fascinated. We tore up our whole front yard in our little suburban plot that we had and turned it into a beginning, the beginnings of a food forest. I really have a passion for gardening. I love being outside. We knew when we got up here, we brought our chickens with us, but we realized that we were at the end of the supply chain when it came to food. And if there was an issue with the already fragile supply chain during COVID or at any other time in the future, we were in trouble.
So we knew very early on that we wanted to find a way to cultivate our own food up here for not only ourselves, but this community, because there’s a really limited amount of farmers up here because this is just traditionally not a place to farm. It’s a tricky area. It’s a really short growing season.
We’re on the big ski hill up here. So we have a very minimal soil to bedrock ratio, meaning we just don’t have very deep soil at all to work with. And so we knew we were going to have to innovate and do things differently than conventional farming. So we set out to figure out what that would look like. And I can, let’s walk back this way. It’s difficult to see under all this fresh snow.
We’re growing in something called hügelkultur. And hügelkultur is a German word, but it was an ancient form of growing that was, I believe, traditionally found in ancient Asia. And what they realized was that after mudslides or big catastrophic events, debris would pool in certain areas and it would create really fertile ground really fast.
And so what they did was they dug through it and they realized that the base was bigger logs, like the larger debris, then it would get finer and finer as it went to the top. So it was more of a branched layer than a mulched layer. Then it was starting to compost towards the top. And then a topsoil layer would grow on that. And essentially it was just a giant composting bed that was forming. And so we knew we needed to grow above ground.
We needed to do raised beds because we weren’t going to be able to go down with the amount of soil that we already had. And so we took, basically, we got a couple of goats. We got four goats to start out with to help us clear the land that we wanted to turn into our garden space.
And they did that extremely efficiently. They’re very good at what they do. They love to eat brush.
After they were finished, we cut down all the logs. We did that as our base layer. And then we built up our garden beds, essentially, in these berms or hügelkultur beds that will serve as all of our garden spaces.
So the beauty of that is not only are we using all of the material that we already have on site naturally to build up our beds, it’s way more cost effective than having to, you know, build out raised garden beds, essentially. But we also can build them anywhere. And they can become beautiful shapes and curves and kind of create a really interesting landscape design as well.
So let’s keep walking this way. And I’ll tell you where the garden space is. This area right here, we’re clearing for our education space.
It’s going to be a zome build. The difference between a zome and a dome is the zome has a little point to it, essentially, and it’s going to have clear windows at the very top. So it’s going to be amazing for stargazing at night.
We’re going to do a lot of different classes in there. And we’ll basically have an indoor space to do whatever type of teaching we want to do. So we’re looking forward to that.
As soon as the ground thaws, we’ll be putting that up. It’s already done. It’s built in our workshop already. We just need to put it up as soon as we can this spring.
The ultimate goal of this property is to turn it into an education center. So we only have 25 acres. We’re not going to be able to grow enough food to make a huge amount of impact from a commercial standpoint, and we know that. We eventually would love to have a bigger property where we could do something more on a commercial level. But we really want to turn this into an education center where people, locals especially, and anyone who’s interested can come and learn how to grow food themselves to just make their own little urban plot in Grand Marais, an area where they can grow their own food.
You definitely can grow enough food on a city lot to support your own family all year round. It’s very easy to do if you know what you’re doing. So that’s ultimately what we’re really interested in.
(Come on guys. Come say hi!)
So this is our temporary barn. We put this up last fall. There are does, meaning females, and males in here that are castrated. Typically the boys are actually the most social.
This is Bert right here, and his twin brother Ernie is right there. They’re two of our original boys that we got to help us clear our land. And then we’ve got lots of fresh babies over this way.
The mamas, this is where we bring them out to milk them in the morning. And so this is Goldie. She is our namesake goat that’s going to be the name of our new restaurant that we’re building.
(Who wants to hold her? Just give her a little hug. Just like that. Perfect. Oh, she can give you a kiss.)
So we have goats for a number of reasons. These are Nigerian dwarf goats. We like them because they’re small. They’re really easy to manage. We are brand new to livestock. So we wanted to get a goat that was easy to manage.
And they’re super friendly, social. They love people. They’re extremely, you can just tell they just want nothing but love. So we really like that about them. They also make the highest butterfat content milk of any milkable animal. And so they make excellent cheese, which is what we really love.
Cheese and yogurt is what we’ve been really working on lately. So that’s what we’re ultimately excited about with them. The other big benefit and the biggest benefit that we’ve had from them so far, by far is their manure.
They make an incredible amount of poop and they waste a whole bunch of hay. You can see in here, this is all from this winter. We leave the hay waste during the wintertime and we let it build up because it starts to compost and actually makes a heated bed for them during the wintertime.
It’s nice and warm and keeps them insulated. So they do just fine. They’re from Nigeria, but they make a undercoat that’s cashmere. That’s actually where cashmere wool comes from.
Like I said before, one of our biggest challenges, we don’t have soil up here. And so we knew early on, we were going to need to make all of our own soil. And so the goats are a huge component of that. So what we do is, we’re going to clear all this wasted hay out. We make a big pile. In the summertime, we clean their barn out every single day and add it to a big manure pile out there.
We are then starting to collect food scraps from throughout the county. So there’s no composting program up here right now. And so we are trying to become a drop site for all locals to be able to bring their food scraps for us. We already are collecting from a number of grocery stores and restaurants in the area. So we’re collecting roughly about 200 pounds of food scrap a day when we’re able to go and get it.
So it’s just, there’s a ton that’s available. And what we’re doing, because it’s not all organic, we want to make sure that we’re protecting our animals and ourselves from any potential pesticides that may be still on the food, is we’re fermenting it first. The goal this year is to have the goats and chickens be 100% self-sustaining.
We’ve really amped up our egg production. We’re selling a lot of eggs out of our farm store now for everyone. Anybody can stop by at any time. The store is always open. It’s self-serve. So you’re welcome to come in and get eggs from us. And we also do a locals discount. So it’s $2 off for locals.
We’re actually working with the head chef that previously was the head chef at The Strand, Jennifer Guerrera. She’s an amazing woman who has just done a ton of amazing things already. But so she’s been volunteering with us for months. She started this year milking our goats for us every morning. And we have just really fallen in love with her. She’s just an amazing person. And so she was fascinated from the very beginning of where the food was coming from.
She is going to be our head chef. And we’re going to be doing farm-to-table food and a lot of outdoor cooking over fire. So a lot of traditional type of cooking.
So she’s milking still every single morning for us. And she’s just, she’s basically building out this entire restaurant space. And the goal long-term is to turn it into a food hub so that we create a market for all local growers to be able to have a consistent market essentially to sell their product and their food.
We want to utilize as much local produce and, you know, meat or anything that we can find essentially up here within our restaurant. So that’s really the long-term goal is to create a space. Once again, using tourism, using that, you know, the natural draw that we already have up here to try and support our local agriculture system.
So that’s our long-term mission.
CHUCK OLSEN
Super exciting.
NICOLE LEAND
Yeah, we’re really pumped. To have food is like, finally, it feels like the holy grail for us. Like we’ve been waiting for so long.
CHUCK OLSEN
For WTIP, I’m Chuck Olsen.
Chuck Olsen April 10, 2024
