THE OLD "Swanson's Tree Farm" sign still stands at a curve of the long, winding road into a 200-acre historic Whidbey Island property of bluffs, beaches and forests.

Stan Swanson grew up on the property, and his wife, Lynn, comes from a long line of farmers. The two built their house here 25 years ago, and like everything else this resourceful couple undertakes, they did the work themselves. "Stan cleared this spot for his house when he got out of dental school," explains Lynn, "but the alders had grown up by the time we seriously started building."

History and innovation blend harmoniously on the family homestead. The old hay barn, for many years the site of a summer camp for island children, is now backdrop to Lynn's prolific vegetable garden. The garden's raised beds are built of wood slabs from the family's sawmill. Down a meandering trail toward the beach, on the property's sunniest promontory, Stan is finishing up a solar dairy barn and milking parlor for Lynn's flock of 92 sheep.

Repurposing is a way of life for the Swansons. "All this concrete comes from the old high-school tennis courts in Langley," Lynn says. "Stan built the root cellar walls from it." When a neighbor's redwood crashed down in a storm, Stan salvaged the wood to build a thick, hobbit-worthy door to insulate the root cellar. Built into a north-facing slope, the subterranean rooms stay cool due to the mass of the thick door and concrete walls. Fresh air vents and the vaulted ceiling, made from an old metal culvert, help the air flow freely. "You don't want moisture to condense and drip, and the curved ceiling helps that," explains Lynn. "We haven't had any mold in here so far."

The "cool room" has a concrete floor and is lined with shelves filled with jewel-like jars of apricots, peaches, golden pear sauce, blackberry jelly and huckleberry jam. Lynn, working from her grandmother's handwritten recipe cards, cans lobster mushrooms, clams and clam broth. She makes pickle relish out of cucumbers, onions and peppers; she pickles beets, makes dilly beans and puts together chutneys from green tomatoes, eggplant and apples.

Tucked farther back into the cool of the slope is the "wet room," with a floor of bricks pressed into sand to keep the humidity up for the root crops. Big bins, slotted on the bottom for air circulation, hold piles of beets, potatoes, carrots, turnips, parsnips, celeriac and kohlrabi. "We go shopping in our root cellar year-round," says Lynn.

Up at ground level, she starts tomatoes, eggplants and peppers in her little greenhouse; 'Sungold' and 'Seattle's Best of All' are her favorite eating tomatoes. The strawberries, blueberries and raspberries are caged to protect them from birds; a lusty hedge of potato plants surrounds the berries. "Stan is so good at scrounging," says Lynn admiringly, explaining why she's growing strawberries in big, metal hanging baskets garnered from an old cannery in Toppenish.

Lynn, Stan and their son, Eric, have recently joined the micro-dairy business. Their new sheep creamery and cheese-making venture is called "Glendale Shepherd," and soon enough sheep-milk cheeses will age on the shelves of the root cellar along with the jars of fruit and vegetables.

"I like growing food . . . it's all about food," says Lynn, pointing out the sign on the back of the farm gate that reads "EIEIO since 1949."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "The New Low-Maintenance Garden." Check out her blog at www.valeaston.com. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.