We've Moved!...And, we're not done.

Short update this week, as I have forgotten how much I hate moving!

We have officially moved into this farmhouse with available organic farmland in Wisconsin.  Specifically, we are in Dodgeville, west of Madison, at a co-operative called Rock Ridge Community, in the Driftless region of the state.  After doing two loads in our box truck, we have realized that we apparently have a lot of farm things, and not a lot of furniture.  We are swimming in boxes and harvest crates full of tools, books, clothes, and equipment scraps.  So, everything looks like a mess, but the boys are excited to have a real space that is not 250 square feet, and I cooked a meal in an actual kitchen while listening to NPR, and Alex and I started potting up some seedlings, so I am feeling ok about things right now!

On this journey to find a home, I really wanted to make sure we had a safe house to live in.  The house at Casey Farm was hardly updated at all when we moved in, and, years into living in it, we realized how many problems it actually had; besides having things like chunks of ceiling falling to the floor occasionally,  we lived with mold, chipping lead paint, and asbestos (discovered four years into us living there, when I asked for a test to be done) leaking into our house’s air quality. 

After we had been living in the house for six months, our four-month-old son tested positive for elevated lead levels in his blood.  They finally agreed to paint most of the chipping lead paint after I left a hysterical voicemail, but it was never completely done, and this definitely was the pattern for the rest of our time there: me feeling scared, and people doing nothing except asking us to pay more money for things, extra money we just didn’t have as farmers.   I was always afraid of our house there, which we were paying very high rent for, and always worried it was doing us harm.  Alex had his childhood asthma flare up repeatedly for the first time in that house, and Huck was in and out of hospitals with his preemie lung condition (also known as bronchopulmonary dysplasia, or chronic lung disease) for every year we were there (though the house didn’t cause his lung condition, I certainly felt it probably didn’t help it).  Everyday I worried about breathing this house’s air, and everyday I was frustrated at the lack of empathy from our landlords about doing anything about it. 

That said, this house we just moved into is also very old.  It is owned by the community here, who we are renting from, but, unlike our last situation, they have made sure to keep it much more updated (though I am sure we will continue to run into those old-house problems, as evidenced yesterday, when Huck tried to close a door last night and it just broke off.  It’s ok, Alex fixed it!). 

So, among our box chaos and lack of furniture, which will all sort itself out soon, we are also steadily planning out the growing.  Alex is working off the farm right now at his job at Meadowlark Organics, right next to us here, and I am working on seeding starts.  We have a lot of projects in the works, and I am also sending out freelance writing work, something I really have not done in years.  And just like we did at Casey Farm, I am looking into the landscape here and trying to figure out how to do something positive, no matter how small. That urge, that itch, to feed people, to help people be healthier and not at the expense of using up the world, has germinated again this spring, like a buried seed that needed to be scarified and frozen a few times.  This community, one that started in the seventies by hippie Quaker back-to-landers, is almost 200 aces of woods, pasture, CRP land and farm fields.  The fields were farmed decades ago, but not since, so there is potential for something to happen.  Feeding people and taking care of a little piece of the earth always feels like something small and positive I can do, and right now, we are just trying to figure out what the best way is to do that.    

We are here, renting, for at least a year, until we can figure out if we want to continue here or if we want to move on to another place.  Either way, the community here is kind and we feel safe here, unlike our last situation at Casey Farm, and I don’t feel my stomach twisting with worry here. Cooking, as it usually does, always helps, and even though we were so tired last night from gathering things from our friends’ farms and unloading it here (thank you Mike and Claire and Rob and Christina and Kevin and Michele for letting us store things at your places for over two years—sorry it is not completely gone yet!!), I knew getting take-out from lord-knows-where would make me feel even worse. It is always worth it to cook, even if it is the easiest, dumbest meal I can think of to throw together.

Our closest grocery store here is the Piggly-Wiggly, which, honestly, I can write a whole other newsletter about, and not a very flattering one, but luckily, our friend Marisa sent us a surprise welcome package full of some frozen, pasture-raised meat from her farm. We met Marisa back when we worked at as farm interns in Wisconsin, years and years ago, and now she is doing amazing things at her own farm here is Wisconsin. You should order from her, as she is wonderful. (Thank you Marisa!).

From the Farm Kitchen:

I will be doing actual cooking and kitchen things soon, but, like I said, we are still in that weird transition time and I guess it will take a while. This meal pictured is just vegetables that I had stopped to get a few of at the Willy Street Co-op on the way here, plus some wild asparagus and wild onions that I found outside growing near the woods, and some venison sausage someone gave us from deer that was hunted on this land. I had a can of pinto beans, and a can of garbanzo beans, and added those to make sure it fed everyone, and added some curry spices. It was all cooked in butter and was very slapped together, but it worked.

On the Farm:

Not on the road! At least, not for a while, although we are excited about exploring this region eventually. Right now, we are still settling in, so there is not much to report, unless you want a riveting tale about how I found an old glass-blown bowl our friend made and gave to us years ago that I thought I had lost, and it was just buried in box. I’m sure I will have much more interesting things to say in the weeks to come about farming and growing and things, but right now, we are just digging ourselves out!