Megan Gilger moved to the top of a big hill in Leelanau County nearly a decade ago. On the side of that hill, almost entirely covered by ferns, she recently found something strange.
"I was just down here mowing, and I was like, 'Gosh, that looks like a grape,'" Gilger said. "And then I dug into the ferns, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, there's a grape here.' And then I just continued going, and it was like, there's another one, like, just five feet away."
She ended up finding about 20 small grape vines someone had planted years before she moved here — maybe to test out whether the hillside would be a good location for a vineyard.
The plants had somehow survived about 15 years of deer munching on them, ferns growing over them and dirt covering them from when Gilger and her husband excavated the land to build a home.
"So far, they're doing really well, and this is the most grapes I've seen on them," Gilger said, holding a tightly bunched cluster of grapes the size of blueberries — only bright green.
Gilger runs her own permaculture business designing landscapes and gardens. But these grapes were uncharted territory. Looking for some inspiration, she took a biodynamic growing class at Green Door Folk School taught by a local farmer and winemaker.
"I really felt like it pushed me to think, 'OK, yeah, I actually could do this,'" she said.
Now, Gilger’s working on getting the grapevines healthy again and figuring out what variety they are, with the help of the same winemaker who taught the class. She hopes one day to create a small batch of wine from these grapes.
That connection and exploration among neighbors is exactly what Kristina Schnepf wanted when she created Green Door Folk School.
Since Green Door first opened its doors earlier this year, the school has had classes on crafts like quilting, canning and carving.
"We've lost a lot of that," Schnepf said. "We can so easily order on Amazon and get exactly what we need, but to make that pillow or to make that spoon or to simply spend your evenings spinning instead of watching Netflix — people are really hungry for that kind of practice."
Green Door also offers classes on less tangible crafts, like healing and grief.
The school shares property with J2 Farms, a working farm with art studios and classroom space in Cedar. There’s also Airbnbs onsite for students visiting from out of town.
Schnepf founded the school after retiring from a corporate job in marketing and taking up woodworking and furniture-making. She started learning from Youtube videos but craved lessons in person.
"I couldn't find any classes locally, so I started looking more broadly and found folk schools," she said.
She traveled to different folk schools around the Midwest and then opened Green Door, which held its first classes in March.
Right now, the school is financed by Schnepf’s own money, plus class fees. The goal is ultimately to fund the school with the class prices alone, which are offered on a sliding scale to improve accessibility.
For now, though, the school is exactly what Schepf had been searching for herself: a place to slow down — to learn things in person with other people. She says she was reminded of the importance of that mission while sitting in on a spoon carving class earlier this year.
"Somebody said, 'The world doesn't want us to know how good this feels to just sit here and carve a spoon all afternoon.' She meant that we are driven to grind all the time, and that actually taking eight hours to sit with a small piece of wood and a little knife and just form a useful item has such a powerful effect on the human psyche. And we're not taught to love that. We're not taught to value that," Schnepf said.
It’s a lost art that the school is trying to revive, she said, whether it's through carving wooden spoons or figuring out what to do with rogue grapevines in your backyard.
