About me

My name is Erin. I am the daughter of parents who each grew up in rural communities on farms before marrying and creating their own homestead on what was my maternal grandparents'--and before that, my maternal great-grandparents'--homestead.  As a middle and high schooler, I begrudgingly tended to chickens, ducks, pigs, goats, sheep, and cows.  I helped my parents sow seeds on Good Friday each year but grumbled the entire time, insisting I would never garden when I was an adult.

Two decades later, my husband and I bought our first home, an 8,000 square feet piece of property a mile or two from a large navy base.  We quickly transformed that piece of property into a small urban homestead.  There, we grew tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and herbs in eight raised garden beds and grew eight dwarf fruit trees. But nearly four years ago, my husband was offered a job in one of the biggest cities in the U.S., and he urged me to move for the betterment of our family.  I dreaded moving to a big city! Fortunately, his income nearly doubled with the job change, and we were able to buy several acres of property in a rural area just over an hour from his work about four months after he started his new job.  

We didn't do anything agricultural with the property for the first two years we lived here. The first year, we moved in too late in the year, and the second year I was pregnant. The third year was the year the pandemic came to the U.S. Like many people seeing empty shelves at the grocery store, we panicked. We bought tomato starts and new seeds for vegetables and set to work doing what we could. We pickled cucumbers, canned tomato sauce, and dried and crushed herbs, but we learned quickly that our "soil" was hard-packed clay and flooded easily. Worse, because our backyard is a huge hill with a drain field and woods, we opted to garden in the front yard, which gets full sun--incredibly hot sun--for 12+ hours a day in the summer and drowns in afternoon pop-up storms. Before long, our yard was a mess and visible to anyone who passed by!  

Undeterred, we spent the winter researching and planning and then spent the spring working. We decided to embrace our front yard homestead, using fallen logs from our woods to line and raise garden beds and even planting a postage stamp orchard in the front yard with inexpensive trees from Arbor Day. We created additional compost bins and piles and then planted pollinator beds and seeded the beginnings of a clover lawn. In the process, we fell more in love with not only our little homestead but also with our beloved earth, all while providing increasing amounts of healthy food for our little family. Ours is not what others would call a true homestead at this point, but we are heading in that direction one step at a time.