I Think We Made It.
We may still have a long way to before it’s perfect, but it’s home and we made it! 💛
As the seasons change, there isn’t much about our lives that isn’t changing with it. We have each other as the constant and the promise of winter around the corner. Something we are reminded by regularly whenever the bitter wind blows. As we add layers and our sandals get replaced with tennies and boots, our journey to bringing our little leafy dream home, to its and our forever home continues. Every day is another day closer, every day is more work and a little progress, new lessons, and new friends. But with it comes more love and more laughter, and most importantly another step closer to bringing the full scale of our little leafy dream to life.
It really is harder than I expected to put into words the whirlwind that has been the last six weeks!
We purchased our, soon to be, new home just this past September! Now as we waltz into the first week of November our once beautiful empty lot is bustling with glimpses of our future! One baby step at a time we have officially begun phase one of the leafy expansion!!
Since purchasing our property we have managed to lay our first gravel pad (which we had to tamp and level by hand), bring in a shed to be converted into our tiny home, haul out a massive fallen hackberry tree, start clearing brush and branches from the wooded portion of our property, discovered a couple of partially condemned buildings full of unimaginable treasures and even more unimaginable amounts of garbage, framed out our first wall, had the bottom of the cottage insulated, and trenched for electrical to be installed! The best part? We haven’t even scratched the surface of our to-do list! This update is just a few pages of what is bound to be quite the chapter of our little leafy adventure! We have been amazingly lucky to have some great friends and neighbors who have helped us exponentially and without them we definitely wouldn’t have been able to make the progress we have!
Nick and I can both openly admit that the total off the grid living, isn’t our favorite experience of all time but it is kind of fun. Campfires, cooking over fires and eating by flashlights and candle light. It has a romantic ring to. But the lack of running water, not being able to flip on a light so you (I) don’t trip on some invisible object, not being able to have a fire when it’s cold and rainy.. all very superficial first world problems but it certainly takes a little getting used to.
We were able to borrow my parents camper which helps with the warmth, and we’ve managed to borrow a couple generators so we have a little light and the have the ability to charge our phones and laptops and thankfully I have family and we have some friends nearby that are kind enough to allow us to bathe at their homes. In many ways it’s like being at camp, except you live at camp and go into society to do our laundry and wash up.
I will say, as “annoying” as it can be from time to time to live without power and running water, there is something very peaceful about the stillness found in lacking these amenities . At night, when we sit by the fire and talk, share ideas or just play around the only sounds we hear are those of the world around us and the crackling of the fire. We have so much wildlife. I think the deer have realized that we aren’t hunters which is a rarity in our area and they seem to gather around us as if they’ve all declared our home a safe space. We have foxes, deer, coyotes, cats… we were told by a neighbor that people tend to dump kittens in our area so we will likely see many more. We have two that frequent our yard at the moment looking for scraps of food. The are timid but they come by daily, and take care of any mice that may be trying to sneak their way into our little cottage. We have several rabbits of all ages and of course the occasional raccoon or possum. It’s obvious that the animals are used to our land being empty. I’m sure they feel like we’ve invaded their home but we mean them no harm and it’s really nice to see all of their activity on a daily basis.
We have a family of deer that seem to have made friends and we see them all grazing back by the pond or their little eyes flashing in the lights of our flashlights when we walk outside, but all in all, they don’t seem to fear us. Hesitant of us to some degree, but its nice to know that they seem to understand that we aren’t a threat to them.
As with all of our adventures we have a fairly large learning curve. It helps that we have already learned so many lessons the hard way when we first purchased our farm and moved it to Lacona. But building a home, running electrical, massive tree removal, we would be at a complete loss without the amazing people we have helping us on this adventure. We are using local labor, or ourselves for every project. Our electrician is a friend we used to work with, our tree man is a friend of Nicks, our neighbors who have been helping us acquire the large equipment needed for these projects have quickly become great friends. It really is so special to see our new and old community come together to help us achieve this. For Nick and I these are all more signs that we truly are on the right path and it would seem that we have the community on our side.
My biggest fear when we started leafy was how traditional farmers would feel about the work we are doing. I come from a family of farmers. My parents have land, they’ve had chickens and sheep over the years, I grew up in a garden. Being outside, working the land, providing food by growing it is just a natural thing for me. I’ve never been afraid to get my hands dirty or put in a day of really hard work. My body didn’t always allow it, there were many years that any of this life we are living would have been impossible for me in a very real way. But as the years pass and my strength continues to grow I give the credit to my progress to leafy. This company, this passion has in so many ways brought me back to life. Having Nick being the little tech guru he is, makes the technical aspect of our farm possible. It has brought us closer together, bringing it to our community has helped me get out of my shell. I love taking to others about what we are building, out little leafy dream that just keeps getting bigger and bigger with every passing month. For the most part, the feedback we have reciieved from the farmers we do know has been fairy positive. I’m not sure they all understand it necessarily. Farming works, we know that as it has been the backbone of our society for well, in our case anyway, forever. But as time marches on I do believe it is our responsibility to bring farming into a new age. An age where we can manage our farms, feed our community and live off our hard work in a way that is better for our planet. Traditional farming uses the most water out of any other industry by a land slide our system recirculates water. We fill our tank once a week or so and that’s it. That water waters our plants and provides a simple method of providing nutrients to all of our crops evenily, there is no competition for water or light. Our yields have very little waste and we trim from the same plants for many months at a time when we make our salad blends. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Something we have been taught since we were little, its within this same concept that we want to do everything for Leafy. Our land has blessed us with everything from a spring fed pond to building materials to the immense amount of “stuff we keep finding, literally everywhere.
We are using anything and everything that we can that we find. I’ve used metal and wood to make tables and storage for us, we have sheet metal in stacks that we will take to be reclaimed. There is wood everywhere, old fencing we can reuse, downed trees that we can have milled. Anything that doesn’t have to be wasted wont be. Anything that we can sell or give away we will. Right now we’re just working on getting as much of it out of our wooded area as we can. It’s like a massive treasure hunt. Everyday there is something new to discover, and we haven’t even started digging yet. We were told that one of the previous owners used to like to bury things on our property so I’m sure that will create some kind of challenge down the road, but if I have learned anything since we started on this journey its that there isn’t much that Nick and I can’t figure out or solve as long as we’re doing It together.
Take a peak inside the first building we found on our property below!
I was so excited to get in here and start exploring when we officially owned the property. I can’t even tell you the amount of stuff that’s we have dragged out of here and if I’m being honest, you can hardly tell we even made a dent. At this point we are just working to get as much out as we can until the entire building caves in. I’m not even sure how it’s still standing. I can’t imagine it will be after this winter. The old barn is beautiful and if there was any way we could have saved it it would have been a priority but the wood is all rotten and even in the short time we’ve owned it, the walls and roof are already starting to cave in.
I’m hoping that one day we will be able to build a new barn in its place. Once we have some of the old trees taken out and the good trees have a little more breathing room, I can picture this part of our property being something really special. But that, like many of our plans are still a ways away sitting on pages of paper and growing in our minds by the minute. What started as one little indoor hydroponic farm is becoming so much more and one day, hopefully soon we will be able to truly share what we are doing in the background. We are gaining new clients weekly and have quietly been working on a subscription service to delivery our greens to the community on a weekly basis, it has a couple months still before its launched but we are working towards it every day along with finding other ways to help out our community. We have learned so much over the last year, it is our hope to share all of this knowledge with anyone and everyone who wants to hear it so please stay tuned! We have done so much, but we have SO much more to share with you.
Today we sit and somewhat impatiently wait for water and electric to be installed so we can bring home our farm and finish turning our little shed into our little cottage. It’s small, but it feels like it will be very cozy when we’re finished. It may not be for everyone, and I’m certain there are at least a few people out there that think we’ve absolutely gone off the deep end but in this big old goofy world all any of us can do is dream big and chase those dreams to the stars.
Thank you to everyone following along and rooting for us near and far. We love you all and we truly wouldn’t have the courage to do this without you and each other.
Until next time friends,
Peace Love and Leafy Dreams from us to you.
Stay Leafy,
Amy