They say if you do what you love you never work a day in your life.. I never really fully understood what this quote meant until our very first farm tour.
Farming isn’t our full time gig. Ryan and I work in corporate America with the flexibility of work from home careers. This right now is what fuels our farm. Some might be thinking you both work from home which means you are together almost 100% of the time. Yes, yes we are. He is my best friend and we sometimes finish each other’s sentences and yes we get on each other’s nerves. We are also the driving force behind each other’s goals.
What does this have to do with the very experience we had together that made me put in my two weeks notice to my old mindset?
Everything… it was the summer of 2022 this was the 2nd year of us participating in the Reinbeck’s farmers market. The market thought it would be a great opportunity to get the community involved by giving them a glimpse into their local gardeners and specialty crop grower’s worlds. They were absolutely right!
We at that time were just two years in on owning our property that needed so much work and still does. This farm tour catapulted our drive to take action faster. I remember waking up before our corporate careers began and going 100mph in the morning working until our alarm’s went off letting us know we had 15 minutes to commute to our desk jobs. We would do the same thing on our lunch break and as soon as we wrapped up our corporate day we were hitting the soil until it was too dark to see what we were doing. We were loving every minute of it even though we were worn down and so unbelievably sore.
When the date arrived for the farm tour I can honestly say we were less than ready although we were working so hard every day to a point our bodies could barely move. We knew we had so much more in the works. Ryan and I talked about what we were going to say and how we were going to give the tour on a very unready farm.
I remember people started to show up and Ryan was no where to be found. I had to go find him.
What you didn’t know on that day was that Ryan doesn’t do crowds. He gets anxious and avoids those situations at all costs. He worked up the courage and I took lead. What you may not have known about me is that I was barely getting my feet wet in the farm scene and you were experiencing the tour through my very unsteady confidence in what we were doing. I later found Ryan in the tour sharing his vision with the crowd with no anxiousness or nervousness. His vision was just rolling off the tongue as he was smiling and laughing with our community. That was such an incredible sight to see. Considering less than an hour prior he was clamming up on me.
Seeing all the people that day not really caring that we were not experts but just genuinely engaged in our vision of the property and seeing the work we were putting in to make this property what it should be was something that changed everything for us. Right then and there I was bought into the vision.
We walked the community through the plans for the property and one of them happened to be the barn project. We were selling shirts that day and the community was there for it. The money for the shirts all went into the barn project. It took us two years to get the barn moved but it was a feeling of accomplishment because we told our community that was part of the plan. We have so much work to do on this property it is overwhelming. The property looks completely different than what it did on that farm tour.
We will be offering a farm tour this season to share our progress! We will also be participating in Reinbeck Farmers Market Garden Tour this season. I don’t necessarily know that we have had an opportunity to thank the amazing people who setup that tour for Reinbeck that year or really shared the impact that the community had on us that day but you changed our world. We have not stopped working towards those goals we shared since that day.
So yes it is so unbelievably true.. You never work a day in your life if you love what you do!
Moral of the story.. You often find exactly what you need on the most unsteady path. Find the courage to take that path, you never know where it will lead you and who you will meet along the way. ✌🏼- Jamie
Moral Of The Story 