Rusty First of all welcome to our site.. I plan to post anything cool I find about homesteading here on this blog along with happenings on our little farm.
When I met my husband we lived in the city and our backyard was about maybe 400 sq. feet. The neighborhood was nice. We had a chicken in tiny coop that got no sun so the sad thing hardly laid any eggs.
The last line of a poem I heard in a yoga class just wouldn't seem to leave my mind.. actually it serves a constant reminder to me to live this life! This line was, "..what will you do with this one precious life". One life. Here in this consciousness as the person you are now. What will you do with it?
In one of my semesters in nursing school I was working with an elderly gentlemen one afternoon. We sat and had a nice conversation. He said to me, "don't spend too many hours of your life working to make the dollar.. you don't hear people at my age saying, "I wish I had spent more time at work and less time with my family".. he said the parts of his life that were the most important was the time spent making memories with family.
One day we walked into our nearby gym and on the wall the seniors had done a project.. it was a "tree of wisdom" seniors had written on the leaves words of advise.. one read, "I would have been a farmer".. both my husband and I took pause at that and we both agreed.. we did not want to write that down one day... in honor of ourselves, our children and the stranger who wrote that on the tree of wisdom.. we decided to go for it.. it is what we both dreamed of for our family. So we did it!
It took a year of searching.. we started out with huge dreams of 40 acres...then 10, then at "least" 5..we were in Escrow 3 times each time the sale falling through for one reason or another.. each time it felt like a blow as with each property our hopes grew and we would begin to picture our lives at these places.. Then one day we drove up this quiet country lane and passed a huge bull standing out in a field two or three homes after the bull.. was a white picket fence with a little grey house with a large deck overlooking a pasture overgrown with willow trees and a blackberry hedge. The neighbors ponies galloped to the fence line.. we found our home, our farm. This time we closed escrow... on "at least" 2.9 acres.
So far it has been an amazing adventure: watching the kids run and play and learn about farm life, clearing land, building animal pens, one by one with almost all salvaged wood and materials. Slowly adding animals to the farm and experiencing all that goes with that. Our chickens here get sun and they lay 10 eggs a day! Rusty Hill Farm is named after our horse Rusty, he was the first animal we acquired after buying our homestead, he is an old roping horse with the kindest eyes. He lives on the hill in the horse pasture. We figured long after he is gone we will always remember the sweetest horse that ever lived every time we look up at his hill.
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us" J. R. R. Tolkien
When I met my husband we lived in the city and our backyard was about maybe 400 sq. feet. The neighborhood was nice. We had a chicken in tiny coop that got no sun so the sad thing hardly laid any eggs.
The last line of a poem I heard in a yoga class just wouldn't seem to leave my mind.. actually it serves a constant reminder to me to live this life! This line was, "..what will you do with this one precious life". One life. Here in this consciousness as the person you are now. What will you do with it?
In one of my semesters in nursing school I was working with an elderly gentlemen one afternoon. We sat and had a nice conversation. He said to me, "don't spend too many hours of your life working to make the dollar.. you don't hear people at my age saying, "I wish I had spent more time at work and less time with my family".. he said the parts of his life that were the most important was the time spent making memories with family.
One day we walked into our nearby gym and on the wall the seniors had done a project.. it was a "tree of wisdom" seniors had written on the leaves words of advise.. one read, "I would have been a farmer".. both my husband and I took pause at that and we both agreed.. we did not want to write that down one day... in honor of ourselves, our children and the stranger who wrote that on the tree of wisdom.. we decided to go for it.. it is what we both dreamed of for our family. So we did it!
It took a year of searching.. we started out with huge dreams of 40 acres...then 10, then at "least" 5..we were in Escrow 3 times each time the sale falling through for one reason or another.. each time it felt like a blow as with each property our hopes grew and we would begin to picture our lives at these places.. Then one day we drove up this quiet country lane and passed a huge bull standing out in a field two or three homes after the bull.. was a white picket fence with a little grey house with a large deck overlooking a pasture overgrown with willow trees and a blackberry hedge. The neighbors ponies galloped to the fence line.. we found our home, our farm. This time we closed escrow... on "at least" 2.9 acres.
So far it has been an amazing adventure: watching the kids run and play and learn about farm life, clearing land, building animal pens, one by one with almost all salvaged wood and materials. Slowly adding animals to the farm and experiencing all that goes with that. Our chickens here get sun and they lay 10 eggs a day! Rusty Hill Farm is named after our horse Rusty, he was the first animal we acquired after buying our homestead, he is an old roping horse with the kindest eyes. He lives on the hill in the horse pasture. We figured long after he is gone we will always remember the sweetest horse that ever lived every time we look up at his hill.
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us" J. R. R. Tolkien
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