About My Farm and Myself

As I lay under the warm quilt in bed this morning at 4AM, listening to the wind as it roared around the house, I thought about how to write my introduction. I often lay warm under the covers after waking and think about what I need to do during the coming day. It’s even better if it’s cold and I can hear the wind or rain outside the open window. The security of being warm when it’s cold outside.

We have a small homestead farm in the beautiful Connecticut River valley. We bought the 8.5 acres and a tobacco shed in 1983 and have literally built everything here by ourselves, except the shed. We’ve renovated that 3 times: a boarding stable into a retirement boarding stable then into a barn for cows, pigs, and chickens.

We are very lucky to have this piece of land on the 7th best soil in the world, per National Geographic survey. It has been continuously farmed since 1670, mostly as corn or tobacco. As a result what once was 4’ of topsoil is down to 1 – 2’ now. We have been working for decades to remedy that. That may not sound lucky, but we have literally no stones here. We have to import grit for the chickens. And that makes working the land a joy.

Most of what we’ve done here, while appearing very “green”, is mostly because it’s also the cheapest thing we could afford. Our first side of the house was a Green Mountain passive solar house. It was the only house we could afford at the time.

We do not contract out any work of any type but do it ourselves or teach ourselves how to do it. So our last car, a 2000 Subaru Outback, finally died with 336,000 miles on it. We’d bought it in 2003 with 36,000 and had kept it running all this time. We have heated with wood exclusively because we’d buy log lengths and cut it up ourselves. It was what we could afford and saved us thousands in heat bills.

We do all our own butchering here, after building a cold room and butchershop in the barn. It was cheaper, plus it meant no animals had to be shipped away. We could insure their lives were the very best, until they had 1 bad day.

We came across The Tightwad Gazette and Your Money or Your Life decades ago and it prompted us to follow a much more frugal lifestyle. I was able to stay home and homeschool our son.

Both of us have invisible chronic illnesses and raising the most nutrient dense food we can is our treatment for it. The flower gardens were started in 1984 and the vegetable garden was started in 1993 and. The herb beds were put in during 1992 except for the New Herb garden which was created in 2016. I can not buy the quality of food that I can grow here.

This is what our farm is all about. We are learning to work with the natural world, finding our place in its rhythms; learning to respect the life that feeds us and allowing it to live, and die, in as graceful a way as we can provide. We are always amazed when people visit us that the first thing they say is: “It’s so calm and peaceful here!”