Where Are We Heading?
What a change a year can bring. This past year we’ve seen more movement in our lives than in the previous ten altogether. Not just with all the Covid stuff, although that has admittedly been a big catalyst. But our family is now moving in a completely different trajectory than we ever expected or even dreamed.
I think beekeeping started it, which if you know me personally is no surprise. I literally just woke up one day and decided I wanted to try bees, and God love my poor husband because he let me get them. He is such a good man.
Over time those bees turned into a small business. Granted, it’s a very small business, but something about the entrepreneurial spirit took hold in our family as we started thinking about things that we have a passion for and actually pursuing them. And thanks to covid, we had plenty of time on our hands.
For my husband, this manifested in an interest in plants and gardening. He began with propagating plants and trees that are good forage for my bees. Then he took an interest in old roses and wanted to propagate some own root roses. After that of course he had to see what else he could propagate, so he tried almost everything on our farm until he ran completely out of room in our flowerbeds and in what used to be my little greenhouse. He called it an experiment.
Fast forward to this past spring, and after building his own larger greenhouse, he decided to get his nursery and grower’s license so that he can grow and sell plants. I guess the experiment was successful. Somewhere along the way, our plans began to come together. I’ve always liked gardening, but he sucked me in when he started showing me Piet Oudolf gardens, full of plants I’d never seen or heard of before. So here we are. Just this past week, we put in our first wholesale order as an official nursery. We feel very grown up.
Now we’re looking at what else the future holds, and as we started to think about where we want to end up, we began to realize that we own a beautiful piece of land, and we want people to enjoy it. We found a delightful plant farm not too far away called Mary’s Plant Farm, which has unfortunately closed with the passing of Mary, but it was so much like what we envision for our farm. (Actually it was better than what we can probably accomplish right now, but we’ll keep trying until we get where we want to be.)
What we want is for people to come enjoy our property and our gardens and our ponds. We want people to walk around or sit and relax and gather with friends or literally just stop and smell the roses. We want people who love to garden to come and talk about gardening. And one thing that stuck out as we discussed it is that we want it to be a place people can bring their kids, and we don’t want it to be boring for kids either. So our vision is to incorporate the landscape and future flowerbeds with playgrounds, jungle gyms, and playsets and maybe even open up the ponds to fishing. Nothing that would detract from the natural beauty, but something to make it family centric.
And maybe, possibly, there would one day be a carousel. With a little cob cottage in the woods and a covered bridge over the creek in the back. I can’t help myself. I think I like a little bit of whimsy. Let’s build some gardens and make it weird.
Truth be told, we have no idea where God is going to take this. This is just a little nursery and apiary that gets very infrequent customers at this point in time. But we have a vision.
Maybe we’ll never even get there. Maybe we’ll just sell a few plants and some honey here and there. Or maybe He’ll make it even better than we could have planned. We don’t know. It’s all in His hands. But for now, this is where we’re heading until God gives us a new direction.
We’ll keep beekeeping, we’ll keep planting, and we’ll keep following His plan for our lives. So the farm may not look like much right now, our plant availability might be small, and our honey comes in small batches, but we have a dream and we’re going to keep working until we accomplish whatever we’re supposed to do.
“Whatever you are, be a good one.” ~Unknown
