When we moved here, I don’t think we had any idea just how special this place was. We knew for sure that God was bringing us here but Sedalia is so small, you could almost miss it if you blink while driving through. Driving through the valley on your way here, you’ll see farm after farm. But this little corner of Virginia where we put our roots down, there are 3 farms that are really doing it right. Everything they do is to heal the land and animals they steward and in turn, produce food that heals us. Two of those 3 even share fences with us so to say we are blessed to have neighbors like this is an understatement.
In conventional terms, these 3 farms are well, completely un-conventional. All animals are raised in pasture to forage and graze without all the modern farming amenities you’d imagine would be on a commercial farm. Nature has an amazing way of providing everything the animals and plants need to be as healthy and vibrant as they were created to be and these farmers are trying to keep it all as close to “natural” as possible. It’s closer to Eden than anywhere else I’ve ever experienced.
We had always talked and dreamed about growing our own food and that was one of the dreams we had when moving here. We never had plans to be farmers (still don’t, really) but this lifestyle is so inspiring that the more you’re around it, it’s hard not to want to follow in their steps of our farmer friends and neighbors when you see how they’re doing it.
Last week we spent about half a day with our friend Mark Angellini getting overwhelmed (in a good way) with ideas and advice on how to best use our land to grow food and medicine for our family. He helped us pick out the best locations for our gardens and gave us so many good ideas about which plants would thrive here. I wish I had taken some photos when he got the drone out to get some aerial shots of our property. I’ll add those in a later post when we get the plans back from Mark (Landscape design is one of his many skills)
There were two big bare patches of dirt the grading had left around our house that are perfect for gardens. We measured out how many beds we wanted, put a few stakes in the ground to mark the corners and began digging. This is going to be a LOT of work for us. This is outside my comfort zone for sure but not in a scary or intimidating way. It is exciting to dream something up like this and see it come to life. We spent the weekend putting down seed and straw with the kids and dreaming up all the foods they wanted to plant. It felt so good to spend the day outdoors after such a long and hard winter. We really don’t have anything to show for it yet but it feels like we’ve come so far from the dirt pile that was here last summer.
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Workin in the dirt -
Do your thang, Mama! 🍑 -
1 done, 9 more to go.
Mark let us borrow his broadfork to break up the compacted dirt. This thing really does the job but man, it put me to work in the process. Steph makes everything look good when she does it but I promise it’s harder than it looks from these pictures. I do think throwing my weight back and forth on it really helped to correct some shoulder and back pain I’ve been having due to my bad working posture. Almost like an unintended chiropractic adjustment. As crazy as that sounds, I think gardening is already improving my health and we haven’t even started growing anything yet!
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