More About Us
In 1986 my parents bought a very small house perched on a 5 acre hillside that had never been managed...
The land was choked with thick trees and blackberries and my family was poor, so my mom and older brothers cleared the land with nothing but hand tools and sheer determination. By the time my memories start, they had already built a large barn and fenced pastures, established a large garden/orchard, and built up a sizeable assortment of livestock.
That is the world that I grew up in, and I have loved it from the beginning.
When I was 11 my parents split, and by 15 most of the animals were sold. I moved away at 18, and for a few years I lived a much more "normal" life. Once I got my fill of that, I suggested to Mom that we pull the farm back out of the weeds and start homesteading again.
We started nearly immediately in the summer of 2013, and once we started, nothing could slow us down....
Neither of us had much money, but luckily we already had a lot of the infrastructure. We just had to rescue it from nature (which was no small feat, let me tell you)... But if nothing else, we still had that good old-fashioned determination, and a can-do attitude. Combining that with some talent for trading and negotiating, and we were off to the races!
By the end of that year we had goats, pigs, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and a horse.
The next year we added cattle and sheep, and started reclaiming the garden.
Once the animals and garden were established, then came the food preservation!
Sooooo many different methods of food preservation...
And of course we were always trying to upgrade our off-grid power setup, improve our spring-fed water supply, build new structures and install cross fencing around the property, update mom's house, etc etc etc...
All around our jobs, of course.
Every year we've upgraded, refocused, changed things and improved... Nothing stays the same for very long.
For years I continued living in town, but spent every day working with mom on our little piece of land...
Finally, in early 2020 my daughter and I moved back onto the farm, and a few months later my boyfriend followed. And boy, does Cody fit into our lives like a glove... The one thing we've struggled with for years is the mechanical side of self-reliance. Neither Mom nor I can be convinced to mess with anything made up of grease and gears. Blech. Luckily, Cody's love of tinkering has rounded out our farm in such a natural way; and his calm, mellow demeanor enabled him to integrate easily into our established trio of stubborn farmer-women.
This journey is a never-ending growing experience; and to me, nothing is more exciting than that...
