Fertilizer Fieldtrip

"All the manure you can fit in the bed of your truck for 20 bucks," I hear an old farmer say.  Hey that's music to my ears!  I don't have a truck, so I call my friend Lisa and say, "Do you think your husband would let us take his truck today and fill it with poop?" Of course he says yes.  He's a farmer. 

I can hardly contain my excitement as I wait for Lisa to come and get me. We are going to fertilize the organic way. Considering the price of a bag of fertilizer, this is cheap AND good.  I dress in old clothes. But I really don't have a clue what's ahead of me. We jump in the truck and drive to the chicken farm.

When I arrive, I discover that this old farmer is younger than I am.  I tell him why we've come and he takes us to this huge mountain of manure. He says, "OK. If you really want it, I can scoop it into the back of your truck."  He climbs up on his tractor and we are standing there ready to watch when he says, "You might want to get back in your truck and roll up the windows."  Before we can heed this sage wisdom, we are covered in poopy dust. I mean head to toe! Up our noses, between our fingers - it's the nastiest smell I've ever encountered. It's all over us!  We make a mad dash for the cab, rolling up the windows as fast as our fingers will move. We can feel the back of truck sink lower with each scoop.

As we drive away with our treasure, we feel like REAL women. I mean really! Who does this? We stop by the corner gas station for a Coke and a bag of peanuts. We've worked up quite an appetite. But we consider that our hands aren't clean enough to eat with. Should we wait til we get home to wash our hands? Nah...

The moral of this story...Everything washes off. I'd say we cleaned up pretty well.

Simply Family

Our first night in this farmhouse was spent with 6 of us trying to pile onto one air mattress.  We tried to make the most of what we had until the next day when the furniture arrived. Jett woke up crying for Georgia, which made me cry. We didn't have anything to drink and there weren't enough blankets.  But the next morning as the sun rose on our little farm, snow flakes fell like soft reminders that our time with one another is a gift. This was a dream! Unfortunately, there was no outerwear in our dream. 
 

So out I went to buy boots and bread, mittens and milk, and of course the one ugly Christmas tree that's your only option when you're right up against the 25th.   It wasn't until after the snow melted and we had to start scrubbing the toilets that we realized this wasn't a cabin vacation. 

 

Life got simple fast. There's no where to shop around here unless you are looking for fresh eggs or local honey.  And if you want to get out of the house, you go play in the woods, or shovel manure in the barn. Fast food means a lunch the kids can fix for themselves. And date night might mean packing a basket and driving the golf cart over to a neighboring farm. 

My point is that we are home. Alot. We are together. Alot. And the result is we love each other more and more every day. My kids are best friends and they depend on each other.  I think this is normal. They can't wait to finish their school work and build a fort or ride bikes or shoot arrows...with each other!  I don't run to this lesson and that meeting, doing things I used to think I had to do. We don't even take many field trips. We are living the field trip!

My idea of simplifying is saying no to things that swallow up my time so I can fill those precious moments with learning and growing and loving the people around me. I just can't allow the urgent to crowd out the important.  I'm making it my life mission to spend my time with my family first. Time is so limited. I want to treat it like the treasure that it is.

So what do we do all day? I'll tell you that in my next post.

First You Have to Dream

Three years ago, our family of 8 gave up our busy lifestyle in the Atlanta suburbs to farm a little piece of land in North Carolina. People often ask how they can make this work in real life. How do you cut the cord and live simply? 

First you have to dream. I remember telling my husband, "I'm going to drink out of a Mason jar every day until we live on a farm." But I had to find a Mason jar! Today I have jars stacked in all my cabinets, under my bed and on top of the lovely fridge we keep on the side porch. Oh yeah, that is not a joke!

Who cares if people think your dreams are crazy? Which leads me to my second point....You can't care what people think. You aren't living for them. So decide just how simply you want to start and go for it. You can simplify anywhere. Eat less. Use less. Go out less. Sign up for less. Say yes less.

You have to say no to a lot of good things if you want to have time to say yes to a few great things. Let simplicity rewrite your list of priorities. In the words of Andy Stanley, "Your time is limited. So limit how you will spend your time."

This a small start. But I believe simplifying your life starts with a pencil in your hand and a dream in your heart. So get in a quiet place and make a list. What do you want to prioritize? Tomorrow I will talk about family. That's who will really benefit when you start to simplify. You will find that you have more time for them. And they will love you for it!

Milking Day

"It's a gift. Either you got it or you don't." Mr. Lankford was talking about homesteading. I could feel my throat tighten up. "What if I don't have it?" my mind was asking itself. I was there to milk a cow for the first time and I was really nervous that I couldn't do it. Mr. Lankford didn't know I was apprehensive about the cow recognizing me as an imposter and kicking me off the stool.

He's been teaching me everything from how to make butter to how to stop a dog from sucking eggs. Now I am ready to go to the source for my butter making. Two years on the farm and I feel the time has come to consider owning our own cow.

As he calls Rosie in and sits down to get started, I'm thinking, "Oh good. He's doing to do it." But has luck would have it he gets up and says, "You try." He didn't say a word as I pulled and tugged and nothing came out. Finally! I hear the milk hit the pail and I almost cried! "You're doing good," he says and I finally relax. I could feel my back aching because I had not set my stool close enough to the cow. But as I got more comfortable, so did Rosie. I didn't get a glassful that first day. But I got something: the gumption to go back day after day and keep trying. So I'm milking, the kids are milking and Mr. Lankford and Rosie remain very patient.

Meet the Milkman

I really like him. He's got the greatest smile. I get a little nervous when I am around him. I can tell I'm nervous because I talk too much. I should be listening. He has so much to tell. I have to listen intently because his voice gruff and small. But his knowledge isn't. And I can just bet if I'd stop peppering him with questions, I'd hear more than just the answers I seek.

Mr. Lankford will be 80 this year. He's my favorite person in Cherryville. Thanks to him we drink fresh, raw milk. Thanks to him we make our own butter. Thanks to him our chickens are eating organically and laying through the coldest months. I never tire of driving across town when we need milk because I know I'm going to learn something from his words. On the drive back, I try not to forget what he says about okra and soil and timing. I have a journal back home where I record his admonishments on gardening and animal husbandry.
As soon as the sky stops dumping snow on us and the sun warms the ground, he's going to teach me to milk a cow. Living simply has brought many blessings.

Epiphany

We celebrate our first year as farmers.


My oldest says it's been the best year of his life. And I would have to agree.


We are on the road to simplicity.

I am learning simplicity through the eyes of a chicken.


My parents finally moved to the country with us.

Thanks to God's grace and this great guy in the yellow shirt. I am living out a life long dream.
Happy Epiphany and Happy 2011!

Fight for Your Right to Simplify

I am stretched so thin that I can feel my skin splitting. OK, that's just gross. Let me start with this. When I was a kid, my little brother had a toy called Stretch Armstrong. You could pull him, stomp him, bend him into unnatural shapes and he was pretty tough. But after too much abuse, the goo would start to leak out of him. That is how I feel. I am loosing goo. I guess that is gross too. But there is no pretty color to paint exhaustion.
This farm has moved me to a place of simplicity I had longed for but thought unrealistic. Now I know it can be done and I am not going to give up so easily. I was living my life at a slower pace, cooking from scratch, gardening, meandering through chicken coop, picking fresh blueberries for crying out loud! Then I got what I asked for: our house in Atlanta sold in two weeks! But we weren't finished building onto this house. Rush set in as I had to finish painting 1,700 sq. ft. here and help my parents move from there. Suddenly the kids were fixing their own breakfasts and lunches as I "went to work." I sanded, painted, packed, garage saled. For two weeks we had 8 people and all their stuff crammed into a tiny house with two bedrooms and a loft.

We doubled the size of the house and only added two people. You would think we'd have plenty of space to organize. But instead it looks like a bomb went off in here. Everywhere I turn there is stuff, stuff, stuff. It's pouring off tables and benches! People are asking me where stuff is and where stuff goes. I want to escape. But I have to finish what I started. My simplicity is under here somewhere!

I felt immobile last week. So this week my goal is to whip it all into shape so I can get back to being a farmgirl. It's time to start the homeschool year, replant the garden for a fall crop and eliminate whatever is eating my chickens! Doesn't that sound more fun than being stressed and overworked?

I Can't Do It All

I never thought physical labor would be so appealing. I like to read and sew and eat. But this summer I have learned something...Farms don't look good all by themselves. And the more I sweat, the better I feel. This week after working outside a full 7 hours through heat, rain, storms and more heat, I stopped to ponder the sheer joy I feel to be living in this place. There they hung, like ribbons dangling down to touch my face and draw my attention to the One who gave me this gift. How powerful an image when you know the original intent of that first rainbow.

So today I will go out there again and try to undo the mess my inattentiveness to my garden has created. But I am not lazy. I swear! My attentions have been turned elsewhere, equally as important. Yet somehow while I am working so hard on one area, another one spreads out of control. The perfectionist in me tries to beat up the naturalist who wants to sit back and take in every sunset. I will not be bullied. I am learning as I go. Today I will battle beetles and weeds and tonight I will rest knowing I have done all I can do.

Our First Six Months on the Farm

Six people can live in a 2 bedroom house. There is a loft, which pretends to be another bedroom. Mostly that's great, but sometimes we cannot be fooled. As you might imagine, we are very close! Being a homeschool family, we were already used to togetherness. But I believe, over these six months, we have become more patient with one another. We have to be. The only place to go if you need to be alone is outside. But as I came to sit outside in the early hours to type this, I was greeted by 3 cats and a dog. So "alone" is taking on a different meaning.

There have been some notable changes. For one, we are eating better. We would be considered isolated by city standards. So I often cook three times a day. Now that my dad has this fabulous garden in full swing and we can visit the farmers market, the quality of our food has improved. As I had hoped, the kids are trying new things because they have a hand in growing them. We are getting 4 fresh eggs each morning. A short drive on any given day will lead me to raw milk, fresh whole hog sausage, fresh berries.

We are working alot harder. And along with that comes a huge sense of satisfaction and usefulness. Chores have gone from unloading the dishwasher to cleaning up a fallen tree.

Education is not garnered only from books. We have to figure out what's eating the corn stalks and how to help a sick chicken. We are making organic butter and assisting the elderly in playing bingo.



We are learning what it means to depend on people in your community when you run into a new challenge. People really do want to help others. This is something I knew only as an ideal. But when the man I buy poultry from stops what he is doing to mix up antibiotics for our chickens, I know he is helping me because he wants to. The knowledge I am gaining every time I go in his store to buy feed is of much greater value than the price I am paying for that sack of chicken scratch. So if the first six months are an indication of our new life, I welcome the years to come.

Mucking Day

I have never smelled anything so vile. I didn't know all this had built up in my lovely barn! It was stall mucking day and I was happily scraping the surface, even smiling. This isn't so hard. But the more I scraped, the deeper the yuk seemed to go. Seeing that my own abilities weren't cutting it, I called for back-up. Danny stepped into the moon boots and got in with me. I told him I just needed a little help. There was just one area in the middle of the stall that was the nastiest.

No, he said as he began to shovel. The junk went alot deeper than I thought. The whole stall needed to be cleaned out and it was going to take more strength than I had. As Danny shoveled, it seemed that each layer had a smell of its own. For the past six months I had been skimming the surface, never going deep enough to really clean the filth out of this stall. It was easier just to take off the top layer and throw in some new shavings. But it never took long for what was underneath to show up again.

Why in the world do I do the same thing in my life? Always after the fast fix, I scrap away that first layer thinking, "Surely my heart is cleaner now." Sometimes we have to call someone else in and allow them to dig deeper, to show us what is really under the surface causing us to stink. As I ponder this farm lesson, I have to sit very still and listen. I can hear God scraping. Will I sit here as another layer of my muck is brought to the surface? And what will I do with it? There are big bags of cover-up within my reach. I can grab a good deed and throw it on top. Or I can sit here and allow my heart to be cleaned. One layer at a time.

Start With An Apron

It all started with an apron. I longed for the simplicity of farm living and for me an apron was a tactile symbol of the life I wanted. My inner city friend was my inspiration. She lived in a crowded neighborhood of downtown Atlanta. Yet she baked, sewed, canned and even had chickens. And...she always wore an apron. Though I felt being as crafty as Amy was not within my reach, I could tie up the apron strings. And so I did. With it came that feeling I guess Flylady gets each morning when she laces up her shoes. I was doing something that took me into the mystique of where I wanted to be. Having no idea farmlife was in my not-so-distant future, I began changing what I could. And though friends thought I was just old-fashioned, I wore an apron everyday.

Now that I am living my dream, my aprons mean even more to me. I don't always know what I'm doing around the farm. And that's okay. Learning as I go makes it fun. Looking back I realize I could have made more small changes that would have incorporated farmlife into suburbia. So I want to ask: What life do you wish you were living? Do yo wish you could stay home with your kids? Homeschool? Change the world? Pick one thing about that lifestyle and start doing it today. Soon you will find that you are making more changes. You will feel more connected to what you are passionate about. What is your apron?

Betsy Ross

Scrambled eggs or pancakes? Well, that all depends on who laid eggs this morning. There is something fun about not knowing what we are going to eat for breakfast til we see how many eggs we collect. Sure we could just buy a dozen at the store. But where is the fun in that? Besides, store bought eggs taste like chemicals to me now after eating fresh eggs.

We feed them. They feed us. Having chickens is by far my favorite part of farm living. Betsy comes running when you call her. She waits at the front door now. I guess she has figured out where the scraps are coming from. They all have different personalities. But Betsy Ross is my favorite.