Salinity Presents: Mutiny Bay Blues

Our business is a farm.

We farm predominantly blueberries, but we've been diversifying in the last few years.

We started producing hay.

We have a growing flock of sheep.

We have a very much growing flock of chickens.

And we grow mushrooms.

And we spend a good amount of our time, especially our winter, making value-added products with our blueberries and with our mushrooms.

What kind of products?

We make granola.

We dehydrate our blueberries.

We dehydrate our mushrooms.

We sell some things you can only find at our store, like our hot sauce.

But what you'll find in Salinity is our granola, our dried blueberries, and our dried mushrooms.

Tell me, how did Mutiny Bay Blues get started?

In the early 2000s, my parents, my sisters and I moved here to Whidbey from the East Coast.

They wanted to get more rural, get in touch with the land.

And so they bought this parcel of property right by their house.

And at first it was just a fallow field and some barley and wheat was grown.

And it so happened that the soil is very acidic and generally good for blueberries.

Who else is involved in the business? The

important players, especially in the beginning, are my dad, Brett Fletcher, and Ken Petrie.

Ken Petrie has lived on the island for like 50 years, and he's been farming for that long.

And he's got a huge database of farming knowledge and machinery and road building.

And so between the two of them, they pretty much made this farm out of scratch.

It's been a farm for like 100 years or so.