First, thank you to all of you who graciously indicated you'd like to read about life on our little farm.
Since this is the first official blog of the farm there are a handful of things I'll need to tell you. First, there’s two of us, my husband and myself. We can be Mr. and Ms. Farmer, or maybe Thing 1 and Thing 2; either way I’ll talk about both of us. My husband and I live in Charlestown Township in Portage County, Ohio. I need to share a little about the history of our farm so that you'll have a understanding of the stories that I’ll tell you. We live on a 3-acre property, and through a bit of luck we learned that an 8-acre property near our home was for sale. My husband had just retired and had the idea that he was this century’s Johnny Appleseed. He talked me into the purchase, saying he just wanted a little more room to plant apple trees. Mind you, we already had several around the house, and our lawn was more like some reality show obstacle course than either a lawn or an orchard.
So, in 2019, we purchased the little farm as a retirement project. Why we thought we'd need a retirement project is a question I wish I'd thought more about way back then. You know, that whole “hindsight is 20-20” thing… . We've always been gardeners, abet not always good gardeners, and we're still not always good gardeners, but we are learning with every challenge. I thought if my husband was planning to plant that many apple trees I'd need something to do too. So, I said fine but the house belongs to me. (I'm a firm believer that negotiating is the foundation of every good marriage!) I've since claimed a lot more than just the house as my territory, and it turns out, it's taken both of us and a lot of help to keep this project alive.
The farm included a house, almost 150 years old, that was falling down and full of layers and layers of everything imaginable; a giant barn and several outbuildings straight out of a depression era movie and knee-deep in several generations of junk, trash and other stuff I’d rather not identify; and the fields hadn't grown anything but weeds and multiflora roses for some time. There was literally nothing that didn’t need some sort of repair, nurturing or burning to the ground. There were, and continue to be, several lifetimes of retirement projects. This is where our story begins – of challenges and rewards, choices to be made, and disappointments to get over, new friends to make and a commitment to the future.
As it happened, barely three months after our leap into farm ownership, Covid also leaped into our lives. Our new lives as retirees and future farmers began in isolation, loneliness, uncertainty and nothing better to do than begin the massive clean-up of what appeared to be about 100 years of garbage. I’ll write more about the clean-up another day, but for now, thinking back, it may have been this mess that kept us rooted in reality, avoiding the apocalyptic fears and sense of helplessness that shadowed every single day. Sifting through years of the remnants of past lives offered insight into the resilience needed to just keep going, choosing to believe another day would arrive. Not rocket science, but a deep feeling that if people survived the past to get us to the point of cleaning up their messes, we too would survive to leave our mark on this farm.
That’s all for now. I think that next week, I’ll tell you about my wildflowers.
