Changes… (Part 2)
Change, not always easy, sometimes sad, yet always necessary.
Change finds all of us at one time or another, and as it had many times in the past, it found us again in the future. Fast forward to 1998. We had 7years of farming under our belt, had jumped into farm loans for equipement, grown our herd to a respectable size and were so busy most days we didn’t know what time or day it was much less how we would get to the next to begin all over again.
My parents, upon retirement from a career in Florida, moved back to Vermont and for the first year of their retirement made their home on our farm. Sharing a busy farm household with 2 from city life, sure was interesting. My Dad however, loved our life, and my mom from a Farm Family, and #14 in the family line up, came from a rich Dairy farming heritage. Life was good!
Talk of our spring/summer garden was frequent and that winter, plans began in earnest. The first thing… expansion! After all we had 2 more mouths to feed and my dad loved gardening and I think he wanted to make up for all the years he was with out a garden in Florida. My mom was very keen on cannning as she did a lot of this when I was but a little tyke to teen in my small town world. So pour over seed catalogs we did! Spring came and the seeds one by one started going into the ground. The harvest was plentiful and my dad loved weeding so we had it made! That fall, toward the end of August, it became evident that we had planted way too many tomatoes, and due to my dad’s wonderful garden husbandry, we had a bumper crop of tomatoes.
What to do with all of them?
A Table… The end of the driveway… Some 5 gallon buckets…and a “FREE” sign….
Several buckets of tomatoes dissappeard quickly. So many were delighted to grab them up and turn them into a winter’s full supply of sauce. We were delighted and it wasn’t until a few months later I realized and grabbed ahold of the dream to maybe sell some tomatoes, as well as a few other forms of produce the following summer. Could I pull it off? … could we pull it off? … was it the right timing?
Our very first “Farm Stand”….
After garden clean up, life took a sudden sad turn. My dad, diagnoed with very agressive colon/liver cancer was in a fight for his life, which heartbreakingly he didn’t win. That next February of 1999, he passed away. The memories I will hold in my heart, and the inspiration I have kept close by has formed much of where we are today on our farm and certainly was the birth of Somers Family Farm Stand. That next spring, our very first makeshift greenhouse was built, the garden again expanded to what I thought at the time was HUGE! (so much for thoughts) and that summer we began selling a few mixed veggies on the side of the road, at the end of our driveway.
Beginnings are always just that…. expectations almost always never turn out the way you wish… reality, takes on a shape of its own… and resilliance, endurance, and motivation come from deep within, based upon past life experiences that teach you sometimes the hard way how to forge forward…
Stay Tuned for the rest of the story….
Farm on!
Kathy
