Here is what I know.. Life at times can be extremely challenging, the easy way is not always the best way, money doesn’t buy happiness, and for me ambition to climb a corporate ladder means spending more time away from family. Ironically enough defeating the entire purpose of the goal of providing a better life for my family when all it really would have taken was more focus on things that made us truly happy and made it a little less complicated which actually happened to be more time together. Crazy right!?
By far one of my biggest regrets was not realizing it sooner. I watched our son grow up in photos because I traveled so much for work.
Here we are 20 years later finally figuring out what is important. We have taken the lessons we have learned along the way and dumped them back into this big bowl of life and now rebuilding a very simple happiness. We are very much starting from scratch.
If you ask us what happiness looks like 100% hands down we would tell you we live for our nights and weekends. That is our free time to take action on our dreams. If only we would have lived a little more simpler and acquired less debt we could be spending all of our time fueling the fire of our dreams every day instead of just nights and weekends. Another life lesson.
Turning this Extreme Home Makeover house into an agritourism destination is the priority. We have spent the last three and a half years cleaning up the property. The progress is slow because in order to fuel our dreams our corporate careers are necessary. At least for a little while longer. It is discouraging some times because we feel we should be so much further along. It takes time and these days a lot of money. Remember debt free zone over here! That’s another priority for us and the farm. So if that means holding off or making adjustments to the goal to keep the purpose at the front of the line, that’s exactly what we will do. We don’t mind being intentionally broke if it means we are a step closer to reaching our goals.
Let’s unpack that a bit. In order for the farm to be sustainable it has to bring in an income. It also requires much of our free time to make that happen. That is why we carved out a space for our market garden, created a CSA, attend farmers markets and coming soon we will offer a farm stand right here on the farm. So this means starting seeds in the winter to prepare for spring. Prepping our garden for the season in early spring, creating a season extension so we can grow earlier and later in the season by adding greenhouses to the property, installing those greenhouses for the very first time, growing in them and taking all of these lessons and putting them back in the bowl to create a better garden recipe for the next season. Oh! And share all of this on our social pages when we can in efforts to keep our supporters in the loop and build excitement about what’s to come on the farm.
With building sustainability in mind we also know we need to create some form of passive income on the farm. So we stepped way out of our comfort zone…and bought a project to build a shepherd’s hut. We also know the amount of time that project takes so we jumped on another deal on a mostly completed Tiny House. We are now working on creating an inviting space on the property for it to reside along with working on making it a comfortable stay with amenities using all solar energy. This will be our future Air BnB. Eventually we will do the same with the shepherds hut.
We also understand the importance of bringing people to the property and being able to build a beautiful space where people will enjoy the scenery and want to come back because of the way it made them feel. This is why we are working on things here at the farm like the Wildflower project. We have been actively working on building micro environments for beneficial insects along with our bees by planting native wildflowers. We have been working on this space now for three years. It took quite a bit of cleaning up. This is such an undertaking considering the land it is being planted on just wasn’t taken care of for years. It will be beautiful once we perfect it and a great backdrop for the Tiny House.
Another venture we undertook here at the farm was something that really helped bring in an income for the farm. This was our pasture raised poultry. We didn’t do this last season due to predator pressures we experienced. We added additional farm security with bringing in a livestock guardian dog. He is still in a very much puppy mentality but starting to get an understanding of the job.
This is why we decided we will be offering pasture raised poultry on the farm again this season. We planted a pasture for our birds that we will graze them in mid to late summer. This took some time.. a lot of time but we learned along the way what we need to raise a healthy, happy bird.
The season before last Ryan and I did close to 200 birds on the farm with just the two of us. That season was probably the hardest I have ever worked in my life raising them while maintaining the garden, preparing for market, working our corporate careers, then getting the birds ready for our customers. Even with all of that.. it was worth it. That is why we are bringing it back.
We also know the importance of sharing our farm with others and bringing in the community to experience the current happenings. With all of this being said, we have been blessed this year with organizations reaching out to do farm tours and most recently asking if we can host an event.
The pressure we have put on ourselves to be better than we were last year is insane. Heck the pressure to be better than yesterday is our mantra. What I have realized is that in order to find happiness we needed to live through these experiences and have the courage to mix it back into to life when we knew we could do so much better. We are determined to leave our mark on this world and won’t stop until we accomplish extraordinary.
This is going to be a better season than the last! We took last year’s lessons and mixed those back in. We hope you pull up a seat at our table to enjoy what we have to offer, trust me there is a seat for everyone. Nothing wrong with starting from scratch or should I say experience.
Moral of the story… Starting from scratch is scary, especially when you may be half way through the recipe but was it ever really your recipe?? Have the courage to make your own♥️
-✌🏼Jamie
Moral Of The Story 