I have been in a depressive state since we decided to give upon Market Gardening and focus on things which present a better outcome financially. It took me a while to see what was happening, but there has never been a time when I was not ambitious. No matter what I have always been optimistic and scheming for a better future. It is worth exploring what happened so that we can move on and move forward from where we are. FIrst up: Counting Our Blessings.
We made big plans in 2013, the bulk of which are written in the early pages of this BLOG. The actual start to all of this happened in 2010 when we decided on a try for law school. I was in my third year of undergraduate studies when we decided to add a farm to our plans. We had bought our first home in 2005 and started breeding Bassets soon after, so things were going very well as the path was extended into farm country. Like everything else we do the path too many unexpected turns.
Cancer took my voice in 2014 (literally) and the law school dream evaporated soon after. But rather than lament the loss we pressed onward into the Farm aspect of our extended plans and, as graduation came nearer, we found Creekside Farm. (A trash strewn wreck of a plot of land with many issues.) The past ten years have had ups and downs.
We got through my having been damaged by a treefall. Surgery never stopped the plans, even for a minute. I recovered quickly and began building our home a few months after the tree nearly killed me. It took five years to accomplish a two year goal, but we got there. This was almost three years ago when we moved into the new house and two years since putting in the last nail. Then it was on to farming for effect.
The farming thing started in 2013 when we planted our first food and bought our first chickens. We were still living in town so the effort was small, but the stuff we got out of it was wonderful. After much sacrifice, in 2016, once we moved to the Farm and into our tiny home. I built a greenhouse and began the practice of gardening with the goal of growing food for profit. The early success did not scale up as the garden plots became larger. The soil on the Farm had serious issues and it took a lot of trail and error to find a way to make the ground fertile. But eventually we did get good growth and great produce. But it was never a commercial success.
Our crops were large enough, but not quite large enough for marketing. Our crops came in at odd intervals too. So we had a ton of tomatoes on week, corn the next, others coming as the would but none of it at the same time. We built a produce stand but the cash coming in was a trickle and we tried many different ways to sell what we grew. All along the way we continued to build our knowledge base and formulate new alternate plans and contingencies. Eventually we aged to the point that keeping up on the work, without any success in profitable enterprise, no longer made sense. So we decided to put our energies into things that made money. The bigger project must move forward by removing some of the drag on our plans. This brings us to this year, but we accomplished so much.
The Farm exists, where it did not at the beginning. The House exists where it was a dream before. We are healthy, despite all of the hurdles. All along we learned to garden in a big way,learned to build a house, and loved each other more and more. Our lives here are very good. Our business is good and we are self sustaining financially. As for blessing to count, there are so many. But it remains that I am in a depression because the grand plans,the end results we made, have largely failed.
We planned for failure when we planned the Farm. We decided to build a farm as part of a bigger plan. Law school was part of the bigger dream. In truth, everything we have done here was only a stepping stone on the path toward the bigger goal of creating a wedding venue farm. But the bigger dream was always a bit unreasonably grandiose. That we haven't achieved it, and perhaps never will, doesn't lessen what we have accomplished. But our Plan always took the possibility of failur einto account and the failure points were:
- Acquisition of the land. If we only got this far then we were ahead of the game.
- Building a house on the land would mean we were ahead.
- Creating a Farm meant we had become self sufficient in many respects.
Failure to progress past any of these points would mean failing at a higher level and not going backward. We progressed past these points, with some provisions still needing worked out, and so when we decided farming wasn't a winner, we failed at a very high level and with many possible paths into future success. But it is likely tooo late to build the large wedding venue ideas. So here we are trying to find our next step. Hence my depression. The question now it: what next?
I know that this lack of direction won't continue. I will rise from the ashes of this broken dream. What is needed is a big dream to replace the broken one.
Update: on October 27th my depression broke and I returned to the land of the living. I felt like going to work again and my creative juices are once more flowing as they always had. To wit; . . If American English were more true to it's Germanic roots we might speak differently than is done today. I wrote this sentence in an unrelated post this morning: "But we are certain she is integrating into her group very well." So if the German influence were strong we might break this into two clauses: We are certain she is, and, integrating into he group very well. This might be spoken as two words with an indicator, rather than a toolbox of smaller statements pushed together to form meaning. "Pixie weseeincluding wellinthegroup". Not all of my ideas are good ones, but I have a lot of them and am glad to have them back in my head.