on Orcas Island, Audra Lawlor is preserving
agricultural heritage and putting down roots
STORY BY SARAH BARTHELOW
PHOTOS BY TARA AUSTEN WEAVER
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Audra Query Lawlor’s young son, who bears the name Life, was born last December. The name had been in her family for generations, but it also symbolizes the miracle of birth after a heart-wrenching five miscarriages over three and a half years. “My son is a big part of why I launched this business,” Lawlor says.
The business—Girl Meets Dirt—creates handmade, small-batch artisanal preserves that are designed for savory pairings with cheese or charcuterie. Lawlor walked away from a career on Wall Street, trading in the wilds of Manhattan for the pastoral scene of Orcas Island.
She and her husband left without a clear plan, but Lawlor knew she wanted to live closer to the earth and do something where she could work with her hands. “New York just ate away at my soul,” she says. After debating West Coast city options—San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle—the couple decided to take a more serious leap and move to the San Juans. “We decided if we were going to turn our lives upside down, let’s go exactly where we want to go,” she explains.
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Lawlor had grown up in the Northwest—in Vancouver, Washington—and had spent time boating in the San Juan Islands with her parents. “I always harbored a fantasy about being out here,” she says, “but it never seemed practical.”
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Lawlor and her husband, Gerry, weren’t sure what they would do on Orcas, but after falling in love with a farmhouse with a chef’s kitchen, Lawlor spent her new-found free time cooking and canning the windfall harvest that came in from the five-acre “farmette” they had bought. She didn’t have a background in canning—the first time she preserved anything was four short years ago. But surrounded by local fruit, she taught herself to preserve what the seasons provided. Girl Meets Dirt’s “archipelago preserves” were born during a period between pregnancies.
“The business was part distraction, part inspiration,” she says. While caught in a cycle of loss, Lawlor took solace in the rhythms of the natural world. “Every year, no matter what was happening in my life, I could count on the barren trees in the winter, and then the buds and the blooms and then the fruit…I found inspiration in the natural world around me, particularly these old fruit trees.”
Orcas Island is home to scores of heritage orchards, remnants from the island’s days as a major fruit producer in the early 1900s. Before the Columbia River was dammed and eastern Washington was irrigated, Orcas served as fruit basket for the region. Today there are 100- year-old fruit trees that are still producing, including the native Orcas pear that was discovered on the island in the 1970s.
“The Orcas pear is a tree that adapted to the island,” Lawlor explains. “It’s really beautiful— golden yellow with an orangey-red blush. It’s a good pear for eating and it’s also good for preserving.” It is this fruit that is featured on the Girl Meets Dirt label.
Lawlor sources all her fruit from the San Juans, exchanging pruning work for the Bartlett pears from her neighbor’s trees and offering islanders a place to sell their Italian plums or crab apples each fall. She travels to nearby Guemes Island to purchase quinces that make their way into her quince marmalade. Now fruit finds her through word of mouth, like the figs she’s thinking of experimenting with under her reserve label.
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What happened to all this fruit before Lawlor came along? “The deer got a lot of it,” she laughs.
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“Most of the trees are on old family properties,” Lawlor explains. It’s taken her some time to make connections. “You don’t just call people up—it’s been a process of being introduced by other people and establishing trust. I send samples of my jams and people have gotten excited about what we’re doing with preserving the agricultural heritage of the island.”
Last year Lawlor brought in three and a half tons of fruit and made almost 6,000 jars of preserves. This year she hopes to double that. Her method is inspired by the tradition of French preserving. She cooks small batches in copper pots and crafts what she calls “cutting preserves” (European-style fruit pates) and “spoon preserves,” which are similar to more traditional jams. Each is made with only single-varietal fruit, sugar, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a garden-grown herb. The fruit’s natural pectin thickens the preserve, with a 24-hour maceration followed by hot processing.
The result is fruit-forward and chunky with unusual flavor combinations that highlight the versatility of fruit spreads: Burbank plum with star anise, or Orcas pear with fresh bay. These are preserves that play well with dinner or on a cheese board. The pink Bartlett cutting preserve, made with spicy pink peppercorns, pairs nicely with an aged blue cheese, while the Shiro plum with mint tastes like it belongs glazed over a roasted leg of lamb.
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Girl Meets Dirt is still essentially a onewoman show—albeit, Lawlor is quick to note, with tremendous support from her husband. “I was in the first trimester of being pregnant last year when the rhubarb season hit,” she says. When nausea kept her away from the stove, Gerry took over production of her popular rhubarb and lavender preserves. “He learned the recipe and did it all himself,” she says.
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Lawlor not only picks the fruit and makes the jam, she does all the marketing and distribution as well. When she was starting out, she took classes at the annual specialty food show to learn about retail and wholesale pricing and researched the market. “I didn’t have any background in running a food business,” she says. “My parents were a little worried,” Lawlor laughs—“‘You’re going to make jam and sell it at the farmers’ market?’” It was quite a departure from her previous career in finance on Wall Street.
But those early lessons have proven useful. “I don’t think I could have grown the business the way I have without the experience I had in New York,” she says. Her big city background has paid off in unexpected ways as well. When the buyer for Murray’s Cheese ended up on Orcas Island for vacation, Lawlor convinced her favorite New York cheese shop to carry her preserves.
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Lawlor is looking forward to what might be next for Girl Meets Dirt. She’s just moved into a new commercial kitchen in Eastsound, which gives her greater flexibility (previously she rented a commercial kitchen two days a week). She’ll be able to increase production and has plans for a retail section. Her little boy, Life, will have a play area as well. “In many ways, the business is my first baby,” she says. Husband Gerry’s office is conveniently located next door.
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It’s a far cry from New York—Lawlor’s cityslicker dogs find deer antlers in the woods she once paid $20 for in a Manhattan pet shop. But she and her family have found a warm welcome in this small island community. “If you would have told me six years ago that I’d be running a jam company I would have laughed my head off. And loving it? Never would have guessed that.”
These days, afternoons may find her out in an old orchard, picking crates of fruit while her little boy plays on a blanket in the shade and deer graze across a meadow. In these moments of rootedness and connection to natural cycles and seasons, Lawlor seems to have found exactly what she was looking for.
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Girl Meets Dirt preserves can be found at Calf & Kid, Beecher’s, DeLaurenti, E. Smith Mercantile, Marx Foods, The Pantry, Pear Delicatessen, Picnic, Sugarpill, and online at girlmeetsdirt.com.
Sarah Barthelow is a freelance food writer and the voice behind the popular food blog Little House Pantry and bi-weekly food podcast And Eat it Too! She grew up on Lopez Island and now lives in Seattle.