About

When we started way, way, way back in spring 2016, I wanted to plant some vegetables. No big deal; not looking to start a movement or save the world. I had a small vegetable garden about 20 years ago and it was fun. And honestly, I didn’t expect all this. In fact, in spring 2016, I didn’t even EAT a lot of vegetables (a fact one friend kidded me about a lot). I just wanted to grow something. But then we both started to watch YouTube videos and read books and blogs and we started to see the really cool things other people were doing. Some were just growing food and raising animals for themselves, some were raising food to sell, some were fairly casual in their approach, others were living almost completely off-grid.

At first it was just appealing to build a raised bed, but by the end of the first growing season, we were asking ourselves, “What about growing this vegetable, and that one, and another. What about fruit bushes and trees?” We started thinking it would be great to have chickens. Herb became interested in raising honeybees. We vacillated (and still do) about wanting dairy goats or meat animals like rabbits. Eventually, we realized that we really wanted to have a hobby farm. So that has become a formal retirement goal. We spend almost all our free time reading and researching. We’ve thought long and hard and had countless hours of discussions about it all. Where do we want our farm to be? How many acres? Build a house or find acreage with an existing one? Do we need a body of water on the property? How much does it cost to clear treed land? The questions are truly endless. The learning curve is also an extremely long one and that’s why we’ve decided to start learning now about growing food. Due to city regulations, the livestock part will have to wait until the farm, but we can certainly learn an enormous bit about growing fruits and vegetables over different seasons, how to build up our soil to be healthy and sustainable without the need for artificial fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides, building structures like compost bins and greenhouses, preserving our harvest by canning or fermenting, and making other foods like bread and cheese.