I can’t really remember exactly how it kicked off. I have always been a ‘city boy’, and while there was an allure to the more natural places, I enjoyed the nature of extremes (forests, mountains, shorelines) and wasn’t one for the tranquil simplicity of the pasture life.
Unfortunately, life decided that while I was settling in and becoming a master of my universe, it would be a fine time to throw a wrench into the plans. The first was an existential crisis when visiting the island nation of Cuba, pulling me away from the desk and the rat race of a young startup. The second was felt by more people. It was Covid. Remember Covid? Barely? Yeah, it was awful.
Spending a couple of weeks in Cuba made me realize a few things. The first is that the way we use technology to be in touch constantly made me miserable. No one was calling and offering cookies or something. Every time I received a text or call, my heart palpitated a bit. Some emergency, somewhere, needed my attention, and someone, somewhere, thought it drastically important. Being in Cuba put me out of reach, and I was thankful for that. I met some wonderful people, even folks from back home, and one of them mentioned I should maybe get back into teaching a bit since there was an obvious lack of fulfillment from the typical office life.
So I closed my part of the office and took a job teaching woodshop, parlaying my trained skills of making weird things. As long as I was honest with the students about not knowing how things went together but showing a willingness to learn, everything was going fine. The only thing that was a question was the commute from a very dense, urban area on one side of a major city out to the rural suburbs on the other side of the city. Roughly 45 minutes one way. Not a huge commute for the States, but enough that it was annoying and exhausting.
About this time, a variant of a virus decided to shut the country down. Living in a dense urban area where there wasn’t much to do because everything was shuttered wasn’t much fun. Going out to restaurants, wandering to local bars, seeing concerts, meeting friends out at gallery openings, etc, all went away. Instead, we were paying urban rental prices for a severe lack of amenities. Also, a strip mall-type place went in next door and destroyed the veggie garden I had been running on a landlocked extra parcel (that I didn’t own). I’m not at all bitter about that.
We went looking for land. Specifically, a small house on a large lot. Something with trees, and water, and space to wander and do “stuff”. Like, make weird stuff.
In 2020, we moved to a small unincorporated rural(ish) community on the east side and rode out the pandemic in a house that is a bit too big on land that is less than I wanted. I started baking, taught classes online (don’t ask how someone teaches a woodshop class online, it isn’t pretty or fun). By 2021, I was scheming for a garden. Something that could supplement the local farmers’ markets’ offerings, and also something that would allow me to dig around in the dirt. By 2022, we were growing sweet corn and chasing chickens around. The rest is sort of history.
Which is why this stuff is here. Sort of an extension of tracking that history. I’ll be trying to hold myself accountable for the litany of mistakes made, tracking progress, and watching things develop. I made a bunch of assumptions because I didn’t know any better. I was getting information from YouTube and people who were not only professionals but were raised by professionals. Getting started from scratch is a different critter altogether.
The goals are simple. Supplement the diet and grow enough to figure out how to can, freeze, dehydrate, or just give away food to neighbors with the end goal of eventually developing some sort of income stream when the time comes. Or doesn’t. Mostly, this is an excuse to dig in the dirt and watch things grow.
From here on out there will be some posts of current occurrences mixed in with some historical context of past moves and mistakes that brought us to this point.
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