Libby Masaracchia

Farmer and flower enthusiast

Libby Masaracchia is what one might call a Jackie-of-all-trades. She’s dabbled in a bit of everything – from performing in musical theater to running chainsaws in the backwoods of Utah, learning the art of wooden boat building to becoming a bookkeeper for the county government.

But despite her tendency to wander, her heart has always been tied to the soil, and her love of flowers and gardening has never waned.

The Story

Libby got her love of flowers from her mother, whose gardens in Ann Arbor, Michigan were stuffed full of hellebores, hydrangeas, and hostas, and who taught Libby all she knew about growing a lush backyard.

But when Libby moved from Michigan to the Olympic Peninsula, she vaulted from garden hobbyist into the world of regenerative agriculture.

In 2021, Libby met sweet pea farmer Denise Pranger, who operated Essential Blooms and grew hundreds of pounds of sweet pea seeds each year. Denise tutored Libby in flower farming, seed harvesting, and floristry, and in 2023, Fogwitch Floriculture was born. 

The Land

Fogwitch Floriculture is part of the Finnriver Farm Collaborative, and operates on a half-acre of land at Finnriver Farm & Cidery in Chimacum, WA. This bit of land has a special history – thousands and thousands of years ago it was covered by thick glaciers, which melted over time and created the valley and its fertile soil.

The valley is the traditional and contemporary territories of the S’Klallam (Nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕) and the Chemakum (Aqokúlo or Čə́məq̓əm) since time immemorial. In more recent history, Finnriver Farm was once home to the Chimacum Dairy, and the fields were fertilized by herds of cattle for 50 years.

The Name

Like most of us, Libby comes from a long line of homemakers. These are the mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers who have passed on to their daughters the practices that we still use in small farming today: Growing food for their families, flowers for their home, saving seeds for the next year, and taking care of the land and the soil they work on.

The reason Libby incorporated the word “witch” in her business name is a reclamation of the title given to women who were studying the science of growing things and using plants as medicine for generations, but who were misrepresented as mystical or magical. In actuality they were scientists. (The fact that Libby comes from a line of women who have particularly witchy noses may also play a part in it.) 

The Fogwitch is a marriage of both Libby’s genealogy and her present life – the witch represents her and all the women who came before her, and the fog represents the Pacific Northwest, where the fog rolls over the valleys and bluffs each morning.