It’s Been a Long Time
So, it has been a long time since I have blogged. It's been a long time since I have shared. Honestly, life has been tough. Things have not been what we would have wanted or expected. I guess that it how life goes though. No one knows what will happen the next day, the next month or the next year. We have been through a lot of tough times. We have had a lot of personal struggles. Over the past year we have had health issues (and yes, some of them related to COVID). I had 2 miscarriages. We
One Day at a Time
Life has been completely crazy over the last few months for everyone. Our entire way of living as a society was changed and came crashing down for a lot of people. I think my version of these last few months was probably very different than most people and I am very thankful for everything that we had. That doesn't mean that it has been easy though. The past few months, life has been busier than ever before for us. My husband is working a job full time from home and helping us to make our farm what we have
Update After Awhile
With the way that the world has been lately, we have gotten away from taking the time out to write a blog. As I thought about it, now, probably more than ever, we should be blogging. This is an unprecedented time for us, for our children, for our farm. My husband and I are both healthcare workers. We work a lot of hours and are so very thankfully that we have jobs during this crazy time. At the same time, we so badly wish that we could be home and taking care of our children consistently and offering them
The Times They Are A-changing
The times, yes they change. But we can choose that we will either change with time, or we can get stuck in a rut, spinning our tires, and never moving on from where we are currently at. My wife and I sat down a week or so ago and had a long heart to heart about our farm. As we talked and really communicated with each other for the first time in quite a while about the farm, we realized that we were both overwhelmed and not happy with the way things were going. So, we decided to make
Getting Started
Neither Sandra nor I come from what you would call a “farming” background. Yes, both of us had grandfathers that farmed on a small scale, but nothing more than what one would call a gentleman’s farm. I lived on a small farm until I was 7 years old, and my parents had pigs, a horse here and there, a cow occasionally and a smattering of chickens. Both of us have a love for farming, but neither of us had a farm and the equipment passed on to us or available for us to use as we started farming. Getting
And For That, I Am Thankful: Choosing Gratitude Amid Life’s Challenges
After a rough weekend, and some soul searching on my part, I find myself today deciding to be thankful. My wife this morning called me out for some negative statements that I made and said “Negativity breeds negativity”. You know what, she is right. Focusing on what is wrong, and the things that may not be going right leads to feeling bad about everything, and only noticing the bad. I wrote yesterday about random acts of kindness, and how they have blessed and lifted us over the last couple of days. We have so much to be thankful for, and
Random Acts Of Kindness
Sometimes it is easy to get so focused on the bad things that happen in our world that we lose sight of the good things and good people all around us. This has been one of those weeks for us. With the theft of our signs from our stand, both my wife and I were pretty disappointed in the world and the people in it. We couldn’t get past the heartless individual that felt so entitled that they would take signs that not only made it possible for us to sell our produce, but also held deep personal significance for
FRUSTRATION
We put a lot of time and effort through the spring, summer and fall into our produce stand. We grow some of the produce in our own garden, which anyone who gardens knows, takes time and effort. The rest of the produce comes from various Amish and Mennonite auctions throughout the Finger Lakes region. It takes an hour to an hour and a half to drive to each of these auctions, typically 2-3 hours at the auction evaluating and buying produce, then the drive home. Once home we have to move the produce into storage and get it out on
The Agony of Defeat
Some days in farming you are on the top of the mountain. Everything seems to be going right. The chores go easily, the gates all close, the fences don’t have holes, all of the water troughs are full. Some days the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the views are amazing and everything seems perfect… And some days it storms. I had one of those perfect days the other day when I wrote the traditional family post. Not everything was going right, but everything felt perfect. Then, yesterday happened. We had a huge thunderstorm go through, with winds out
Hobby or Not
My wife and I were talking a little while ago about how to describe our farm and what we do when we are talking to other people. For a long time she has been describing us as a “hobby farm” and us as “hobby farmers”. I told her that we probably can’t describe ourselves that way anymore seeing as how we spend more hours every week working on the farm than we do working our “real” jobs. So we aren’t a hobby farm, but what are we? We aren’t a full operational commercial farm. They typically operate in many ways