Waiting for nature to take its course . . .

We started looking at properties just to get a feel for the market and see what was out there. All we could do was wait. Cancer came and went, my Son came into my handyman business full time and began rebuilding what I had let go fallow while at school, and our dogs grew up.

Our plans got a lot bigger though. The idea was to build first a farm on the proceeds from breeding Bassets. We needed land, but the idea morphed into building a uPick strawberry farm based on a barrel idea I found and modified. I won't bore you with the details here, but the idea is pretty cool. My plan here is to eventually put these up on risers so that they can be picked from the standing position. In my view this would be a first for a uPick farm. But only time will tell if this works the way I have envisioned.

Each barrel contains 108 strawberry plants. Ann picked the first plants and I built the first barrels to test the concept. We have learned much since then, mostly that the idea is sound and the yields should rise.

In my zeal for the idea I formulated a plan to sell all the produce and decided that one hundred- fifty barrels ought to produce enough fruit to keep us all busy while we bred our dogs and built the rest of the hundreds of ideas under discussion.