One year ago yesterday, we officially became farmhouse-owners and began a new adventure together. What a year it’s been! Looking back on the past year, we have two totally opposite reactions, summed up as follows:
Bea: Living in the middle of nowhere is even better than I ever dreamed it would be!
Chris: I have so much constant stress and anxiety, all the time forever!
(To be fair, Chris had the same reaction to life in the big city. And the suburbs. He’s kind of an anxious person, sensitive to stress.)
Here’s a typical day as narrated by Chris:
- Are our pipes going to freeze again tonight?
- Will our vegetables die?
- How can we beat back the Japanese beetles & squash bugs?
- Is our well water poisoning us slowly?
- What if our septic system clogs up?
- What kind of chainsaw should we buy?
- Will I ever get any sleep again or will we forever be pickling vegetables?
- Why are these pears so weird?
- What’s up with our internet – today?
Bea’s typical day (also narrated by Chris) goes more like this:
- YES! Another day where everything rocks!
- Today I will do so many projects all at the same time, and never go to bed!
- How about digging while I boil the water, coring pears while I process the pickles, chopping onions while the pears simmer, and planting our fall garden while the sauce reduces? Maybe after Chris gets home from work we can build a fence before dark, eat a quick dinner, and then rearrange our furniture, and sort through two rooms worth of unpacked boxes! Maybe that sounds like too slow of a day…maybe I’ll have time to do some laundry too!
(SIDE NOTE: It NEVER all gets done!!!)
So, after a year, Chris has also come to appreciate some of the finer points of living in the country. In the past year, we have made some fairly significant strides at establishing ourselves in our new home.
- We moved all our stuff in 3 (yes unfortunately THREE) moving trucks, have basically unpacked & decorated our new house, and generally settled in.
- We bought – drove to Denver – drove back – and sold – a used cargo van, our faithful AdVANture Van.
- Chris found a job, twice! Bea had her “last day” at her old job, thrice!
- We won the National Reuse Contest by accident and ended up with a huge gift certificate for secondhand building materials, which we had to drive back to DC several times to spend up.
- The aforementioned gift certificate helped us buy supplies to rebuild our 50’x20’ hoophouse, and complete it with gutters and a 500-gallon rain-barrel collection system (soon to be 1,000 gallons).
- We installed a 45’x50’ garden surrounded by deer fencing, and grew over 700 pounds of food from it (and the hoophouse)!
- We battled a plethora of insect and mammalian enemies and learned to identify several types of bug poo. We also trapped (and released) a baby groundhog.
- Bea joined the Central Virginia Master Gardeners and organized some gardening workshops, then volunteered weekly at the local food bank to help with their vegetable teaching garden.
- We found a wonderful church that we both like and have gotten pretty close to becoming members.
- Bea took some classes, read a lot of library books, and developed new hobbies exploring the wonders of things you can do with plants besides eat them (like natural dyeing, herbal medicine, flower pressing).
- We digitized (60) 8mm silent films Bea's grandpa recorded of his kids (Bea's dad & uncle) between 1948 - 1969, and then scanned in slightly over (10,000) 35mm slides from his enormous collection. We're about 2/3 done with digitizing the Trickett archive, before moving along to the Maxwell digitization project!
- We canned over 200 jars of veggies and fruit, a sum total of over 19 gallons of food! Also Bea filled our freezers. Two freezers that is. Bring it, apocalypse zombies!
Overall, both of us agree this new place suits us pretty darn well, and we're looking forward to seeing what the next year brings!
