"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller.

Daring adventure it has been! Twenty-four years to be exact… It would take literal years to hear all the details, so how about just the highlights…

Our Jersey herd grew from a few in those early years, to a barn full of cows, heifers, and calves numbering close to 100. Our girls grew as well, went off to college, married, and have gifted us with ten beautiful grandchildren… with hopefully more to come. Seven greenhouses, and three gardens, in addition to the cows, and an official farm stand, along with two exhausted farmers!

Brian and I….

Right back to where we started… minus 3 littles to raise… just the two of us, living out all of our dreams and a few life circumstances we never quite could have dreamed up in our wildest imaginations. This is what has led us to 2025 and yet a massive change, which we will chat about in part 4 tomorrow.

All was running like clockwork, well as “clockwork” as a farm can run… (you know if you know) … there was not much time to focus on personal time, or sleep, and “Vacation” was a word we just never spoke or talked about. My sweet Father-in-law always said and held to the fact that “Vacation was just doing something different” and well… on a farm… everything must have been a vacation, because our days held a vast amount of “doing many different things”.

My mom, now a widow, and elderly required care, and had now moved in with us. Brian’s plate with over 160 acres of hay, to manage in the summer, and more hours of barn chores in the winter than a single human could and should be doing, was stretched to the max. Kathy, giving full-time care to her mom, having a garden that really could have used 4 full-time employees to manage properly, and also spilling over into the dairy farm with bookkeeping, management, and labor…. well, we were both maxed out.

The love of harveting those first greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers!

It would be amiss to not include in our story and this blog post that in the early spring of 2019, life took a serious turn and wake-up call for both of us….

It was once told to me, by a dear friend, mentor, and business coach, that two things in life are make or break. From his perspective, his answer to this was health and cash flow. It takes both to make a farm work, because without either of these two things, life simply does have a way of falling apart, but more importantly a business. We were challenged to the very core on the health front as I almost lost my life in a very serious health event, not once but twice over 2 years. It certainly, did shift our perspectives and goals quite a lot, and the past 5 years have been by in large, those years of clawing our way back to normalcy, all the while realizing nothing will ever quite be normal again.

Owning, living on, and working full-time on a diversified dairy/vegetable farm, all the while working it when one of the two owners and major players, is truly disabled on many fronts, can create a world of chaos, stress, exhaustion and so much more… I would be amiss at this juncture to not give 100% acknowledgment to God, whom we hold in our hearts as the glue that has kept all we have lived through these past 24 years intact. Also, so many of our community members… (kudos to small close-knit communities) who also have made it possible for us to continue in our farming adventure, both by way of care, and support in purchasing our flowers and veggies, but also through time, encouragement, and care have played a major role.

The entire concept of our Farm Stand from day one has been to provide healthy, fresh-picked food for our community, not just to help make “ends meet” but also truly to give back, by way of support for the community where you live and work, where your friends reside and where you feel at home! Also, for the health needs of our neighbors, friends, and small-town family. To have a place with ease of access, where one can drop in quickly, grab what they need, and be on their way to put it on the dinner table.

2024 ended with a major change, or should I say a “Daring Adventure”…

Life truly is either a daring adventure or nothing - Helen Keller

Part 4 Tomorrow…

Farm on!

Kathy

The Adventure… (Part 3)

A New Beginning of Sorts - part 4

Changes… (Part 2)