This Memorial day weekend is especially memorable for us. It has been a little over four years since we began working toward a few of our early goals. Four years back I was building the frame of our first tiny home out in the driveway of our house and we had cleared enough area on the Farm to put the thing. We had not broken ground for anything like planting and it would be some more months before we moved the tiny home cabin out the Creekside Farm. Needless to say it, but I will anyway, the whole project was still very much an uncertainty. That was Memorial Day 2017.
We started the project in April of 2015, but didn't start this journal BLOG until October of 2015. On Memorial Day of 2016 we were still learning to build a fire out of scrub trees and had just begun getting electricity to the pole that had so recently been buried under thirty feet of Blackberry brambles. We had started renting tractors and brush cutters, when there was money, to clear the land. Trash was everywhere and it was dangerous to walk the land because of all the broken glass, scrap metal, uneven Terrain, and Blackberry bits. This place wasn't a Farm at all. The Farm didn't even have any name at all until December of 2018. At Christmas of 2018, once we had a cabin on it, we called this place Camp Creekside. We came out on weekends to clear and clean, earning from many sources, none of the cash came from here. We couldn't call the place a Farm until we began harvesting food in late July of 2018. There were many goals and milestone reached for this light supper of lettuce, cucumber, and strawberries, eaten at the table of our cabin in 2018. At this point, the Farm was mostly still a gamble. We were putting all of our time and treasure into a place that seemed to fight our every step.
Our first Farm food was grown here less than three years ago. But we were living on the Farm full time then, and eating from it (if only just a little bit). We had taken the leap of faith. Rolled the dice. Gambled everything on the idea that we could live here and make our living here.
This Memorial Day weekend we crossed another major milestone on our way to making this place work. We finished the business of selling a litter of puppies which were born here, of dogs which have know little else but the Farm. And our Farm, as much as it is, is cleared, planted, and growing in a way that looks to recoup much of our longer termed investments of time, labor, and cash. There is a good cash crop out in our fields today. In past years the tax forms have claimed that we hade made enough money in the past few years to call this place profitable, but the little we got never paid any bills or bought anything significant. This first Farm litter gives us four months to come up with some more cash and pays for quite a bit of building and farming supplies as well.
It is not that big of a thing to earn the money we did this month, using the money we earned and spent over the past five or six years. But it does seem that this new income was very significant in a self-sufficiency sort of way. Being able to live on what we can produce means we might just be able to build the big dreams we outlined earlier in the history of this place. (All of which are buried in the archive of this BLOG.) To us this is major. That's memorable.
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