Our journey to this point

So where do you begin? Where did we begin? Originally for us it was about reconnecting to my past. My great grandfather was a farmer in rural Missouri, Jill's grandfathers were as well, in rural North Carolina. They farmed out of necessity and not a career choice. But we wanted to create a homestead where we raised our own food and were comfortable with it's origin and now it was grown. ...[continued]



Over the past several years and even to this day there are recalls of everything from meat to vegetables. The fear of that was less of a factor and it was more of the assurance that growing our own vegetables would isolate us from these outbreaks and recalls.

In around 2005 we started with a small flock of about 12-15 laying hens and a 20' X 40' garden. We rotated crops and squeezed numerous vegetables into that small space, but the reward and bounty was great. It wasn't long before our desire for more space got the best of us and we moved further out into the "country" where we could have more room for a garden and more animals.

The first spring after we moved, I marked off and plowed a 1/4 acre garden, just because I could. My lofty dreams got the best of me, but I learned a lot during that time. I also came home with three piglets one day that first August, just because I could, and while they were cute, they did grow up and they were a hand full. We also raised our first batch of meat chickens that first fall and by the end of the summer of 2008, we were well on our way to being hooked (on providing for ourselves).

If you asked us what we were doing or why we moved, we would tell you we were striving to be as self-sufficient and self-reliant as possible. And we were, we just didn't have a clue what we were doing. See neither Jill nor I grew up this way and neither of us knew much of anything about anything about farming. But we are a quick study. We quickly took on tasks like making bread, canning and preserving, gardening, animal husbandry, animal processing, and many more skills. But despite how new all this was, we weren't deterred from moving forward.

As we took on more and tried to do more for ourselves, we found ourselves in a snowball and eventually, realized we need to take smaller steps and be more deliberate as we moved forward. We learned lessons like 1) don't bring home any animals unless you have proper shelter and containment for them (3 hogs), 2) don't overwinter hogs, 3) if you've never loaded a hog on the back of a pickup truck, you might end up having a fight like those folks you laugh at on "The Amazing Race", 4) raising hogs can teach you a lot, 5) a 1/4 acre is too large a space to be maintained by one person who works a full-time job, 6) container gardening is a wise choice, 6) no matter how many times you relocate a black snake, he seems to never forget where he found chicken eggs, 7) if a snake ate eggs and is stressed, they will regurgitate the eggs, 8) we aren't "dog people," 9) if you are going to design a rain catchment system, you need to have full buy-in of your spouse before you go through the effort of cutting gutters and installing the system, and 10) when building shelves in the pantry to hold all you bounty, make sure your air nailer is pointed at a stud and not a high pressure water supply line.

So, if you'll join with us, we'd like to share with you what we learned ; learn from you and learn together. There isn't a specific way to do "this" (eating locally), it's really whatever you can manage. But we do encourage you to take some steps toward finding local food sources and begin to move away from being dependent on people and industries for your food you don't even know.

~ Mark Watkins