week 49: the story behind the story
this week on the little dream farm
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Today’s Farm Note is a series of stories behind the stories from this year. In reflecting back on the year, I’m finding myself sitting here beyond grateful for the way things turned out. This year, though, was a series of things not really going the way we thought they might…or depending on how you look at it, going exactly how they were meant to. I’ve chosen to see it all as a gift…all of it with grace…all just a part of the bigger picture.
The older I get, the more I’m beginning to deeply understand that life is not about fixing yourself to be this perfect version of who you expect yourself to become. Instead, I’m finding it’s so much more about unbecoming all the burdens we’ve carried so that we can rediscover who we’ve been all along.
A large part of what drove my decision making this year was this looming notion that my full time Air Force orders may not continue for another year through 2024. I’ve previously shared that I was given quite a bit of assurance they would, but I felt like it was smart for me to be thinking about what is next anyhow. It’s easy for me to see now, looking back, how that guided my thinking throughout the year.
As someone who has always had a lot of big ideas, big goals, big aspirations, and big dreams, I had lots of opportunities to throw things at the wall this year. Here’s a look back at some of those things and how they panned out:
Planting the seed
I’m remembering this past January like it was just last week. I was knee-deep in learning cut flower production with a hunch that I might like to grow flowers for seed production.
Selling flowers at local markets, working with florists, taking on wedding clients as a farmer-florist, or selling blooms wholesale didn’t feel like a good match for me. If my time would be spent as a flower farmer, I wanted that time to be spent with the flowers. Why would I randomly grow 1,500 plants in a patch of 11 4-foot-wide by 33-feet-long rows? Oh, my friends! Not random in the least. The initial idea was just to learn to grow flowers from seed and enjoy them. But as the wheels began turning the seed production angle really piqued my interest. So I dove into this year’s project as if it could be something bigger. I wanted to create the kind of scale that would give me a really good sense for whether or not this was something we might really like to pursue.
After spending the season starting and caring for 1,500 seedlings, hardening them off, transplanting them into the patch, and growing and caring for them all season, I can safely say I love to grow flowers—there’s nothing quite like watching their lifecycle from seed to full-grown plant to fully in bloom. It’s miraculous. But the more I learned about seed production and cross pollination and the bigger picture of seed production, the more I felt sure I’m fascinated by it all, but that it’s not the direction we’ll continue to pursue here.
As for all of the supplies that went into making this happen, it’s all reusable from year to year so we’ll use what we need for next year and store all the rest, but thankfully we’ve got all the growing gear we could ever want or need right at our fingertips! We’ll be making good use of all of it, as well as all the lessons we learned this year from growing flowers from seed at scale.
Next year the patch will be dedicated to all the dahlia tubers we have on hand from this past growing season. I’m in the process of sketching out those plans now and I already can’t wait to see next year’s growing season unfold.
That trip to Alaska
My other hunch was that I might like to try my hand at growing peonies at scale with the intent of selling blooms and roots wholesale. If you remember, I had the opportunity to take a trip out to Alaska during the summertime to work for a week on a peony farm and learn from a woman who has been growing peonies almost her entire adult life.
The summer came quite late for Alaska this year and the fields were very late to production. Here in the states the peony season generally extends from May-July depending on the climate but in Alaska their season is generally July-September. Two weeks before I was due to take that trip there was not a bloom to be had in the field and wouldn’t be for likely another few weeks. Once that coincided with our Cut Flower Patch being in full bloom, the trip began to make much less sense and the farmer and I decided it was best I cancel my trip altogether.
I was still very excited to get our little Peony Patch going here on the farm. I’d ordered 60 peony roots from a New York farm I was planning to plant in a patch of their own, until peonies had a very bad season both here in the U.S. and in Europe and my order kept getting pushed later and later and later until it was no longer feasible to plant them for the year. As I shared with you in the Week 46 Farm Note, I was able to cancel that order altogether for a full refund.
With that, I’m taking all the nudges as a clear sign that peonies aren’t the direction, either.
That big choice we were weighing
Back in the Week 32 Farm Note I vaguely shared about a big decision Chris and I were weighing about an opportunity that’d come up for us. Now that enough time has gone by and we’re very settled in the choice we made being the right one, let me tell you about it.
We came across a beautiful home, a Garden Center and Farm Market for sale in New Hampshire. It was a staple in this small town and had been for 20 years, run by the same man who made this little market a household name in the community and a well-known staple to summer vacationers to the area. They grew most of their own fruits and vegetables from the apple orchard, berry patch, three greenhouses, and four planting fields on the property; and inside the Farm Market, which was a full-blown storefront and commercial prep area underneath a 100-plus year old magnificent barn, they sold their own pies, ice cream, and tons of local goods from nearby farmers and producers.
This place is on a very busy, high-traffic road, close to a lot of lakes that bring a ton of summertime vacationers, and the business was profitable year after year.
We hopped in the car one weekend and went to see it, and seeing it in person only made us want to go for it even more. The owner, who was being forced to sell the business due to an unexpected illness, sat with us and offered to stay on and consult for the business at no cost while we got our feet under us in the first year. He and his wife told us they felt like we were the right people to take it over. They told us we had the right kind of passion and energy and where any of our knowledge or experienced lacked, they’d be there to help and so would the community.
Our minds were seeing all the ways this could’ve been a really fun, really challenging, incredible venture (and adventure!). My idea wheel was spinning for branding our own products, hosting local events and classes, and ways to take the business even further (they weren’t even on social media yet…can you imagine the growth?!). We were so floored by the opportunity to impact a local community in such a big way and to carry forward the business this farmer spent 20 years creating. We talked about keeping the LDF but moving all the animals to New Hampshire with us (the property was a total of 15 acres), and we ran all the numbers and talked very seriously about making an offer and going for it.
What Chris and I ultimately settled on was the advice from Pastor Jay, who lived here on the LDF with his wife Linda and their children and then sold the farm to David. That was, just because you can do a thing doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
I recently came across a quote that said, “When you can’t decide, the answer is obvious.” I wish I’d had that little bit of wisdom at my fingertips while we debating whether or not to go for it. That alone would have saved me many days of mental gymnastics about pursuing a really cool once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or leaving it on the table.
With a few months behind us we can both confidently say it was the perfect opportunity, but for someone else.
The plans we were making
We started off the year with a gusto about making some decisions about the future of this farm. After speaking with our local Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and a few local farmers, we were moving full speed ahead on wanting to put some conservation projects in place for the farm. We learned a ton from the process, we met with a ton of other farmers in the area, we learned as much as we possibly could about the programs offered and the opportunities and possible funding available to us, and got a really good sense for the ways we could potentially improve this farm, from fencing to pond restoration to pasture health management.
The only way that any of these projects make sense, however, is if we were running this farm like a business and it were producing an income for us. As landowners, we care a lot about the health of our pastures and our soil health and the biodiversity of the farm and continuing to improve it over time. But in order for us to continue doing that, it would require major upfront capital investments from us and continuing to pour money into the farm without having a means to see some kind of direct return on those investments.
Midway through the year this was feeling like the wind being taken out of our sails. But from where I sit now, I can appreciate that we learned so much about every possible angle we can pursue, and that ultimately none of those things are a good fit for us for now. It’s not a bad thing in the least, it just means we’ll continue to more of what we’re currently doing, which is leasing the land to a local farmer to graze his cows, have our neighbor mow the pastures each year to keep them well-maintained, and having the big field hayed each year.
We have a tendency to look at the “good” things in life with a certainty they were meant to be. This year taught me that things not going the way you’d planned, hoped, anticipated, or expected, can also serve as incredible blessings, too. As I thought about each of these stories above (this is just a few of a longer list), it first felt like, Man, none of these things really went our way this year! But I’ve since changed my perspective.
Instead, reflecting these stories back is reminding me that the Universe is always speaking to us, and often that rejection or redirection is simply the Universe’s way of saying, No, not that OR No, not that way.
Up until…just recently, really, I’ve held myself hostage for many years for not having things more figured out by now. If I could go back and hug my younger self at 25…28…32…35…and all those years in between, I’d tell her she was not behind, that she was not off course, and that, to date, I’ve never actually met someone whose had it all figured out.
I’ve thrown a lot of spaghetti at the walls over the years and that used to give me this twinge in my stomach like, Why can’t you just pick one thing and just do that? These days, I’m finding myself feeling really proud of the breadth of things I’ve had the opportunity to consider through the years. Like, the things I talked about and listed above are all really cool, really unique opportunities! Today I can see more clearly and find comfort in the fact that life rarely makes sense looking forward, but the picture gets a heck of a lot clearer looking in reverse.
So what’s next? Well, friends, that chapter is currently being written.
But I’ve always loved the saying, “It’s this…or something better.”
I’ve upped my writing game a ton this year. Between this Farm Note, sharing my book-length captions on IG, and doing a lot of my own personal writing (in the process of deciding where/how to share this!), I’ve been feeling the strong nudge to keep pulling this thread…keep going in this direction. If you’d like to pick up a copy of my first book, Such is Life, you can order both a paperback version or an ebook version. Let me know if you grab a copy so I can be sure to personally thank you!
Speaking of writing. I’ve also journaled this year more than I have in many years. At the rate I’m going, I’ll need a handful of them for next year, and I’m obsessed with this one type of journal…it has the right line spacing, a threaded page marker, some of them have gold-foiled page edges, and they’re just simple, pretty, and perfect. I picked up this one, and then this one, and then this one for my 2024 journaling and think you will love them for yourself and might also like to gift them, too!
I get asked about this shacket every single time I wear it. And I love it so much I have it in both “3-khaki” and “3-grey.” There’s limited sizing for the khaki colorway but here’s a similar one to it if you prefer it over the grey. This fits true to size, goes with so many things, and it is so cozy you can even just throw it on while hanging around the house.
I’ve never loved a set of pajamas more! It’s this top and these bottoms and they’re the perfect cozy fit for winter—warm enough to hang around the house but not too warm to sleep in. I love that they’re more like a jogger or athleisure set and less pajama-like. These are my go-to PJs in the winter months!
I can’t say enough good things about these wearable headphones I recently got! They’re designed so you can wear it to bed and it sits as a headband rather than an eye mask, which I love, because I can also wear it as a headband for walking outside in the cold. This week I tried it out over top of a hat and I could still hear the headphones loud and clear through the hat! I love that the headphones sit near your ears rather than in them and the volume for music, calls, podcasts, etc. is great. It’s such a steal for how great of a product this little headband is! This would make a perfect little gift, too!
*Note: Not all, but some of these links are affiliate links. That’s no matter to you, as it costs you nothing. However, if you make a purchase, we -may- receive a teeny weeny commission.