Looking back...

My final night of work @ The Sherwood was last Saturday so I've had a bit more free time to tie up loose ends around the house this week. A few days ago I was storing away our cold frames for the season, and it got me thinking about how far we've come in nearly two years.  These simple, plywood boxes were our first project here in Upstate NY--completed on Labor Day weekend 2009, just before I left for the last Giving Chase tour.

Building cold frames

When we decided to stay here permanently I'm not sure we really knew what we were doing.  But a plan developed fairly quickly, and new projects popped up almost weekly. We built our own sawdust toilet.  We grew more of our own food than I ever could have imagined.  We built our own top-bar beehive. We designed and built a raised bed hoop house, helping us to grow hot peppers more successfully in our climate.  We learned about blanching, freezing and canning to preserve our harvest.

Our top-bar hive...soon, with bees!

Maple-sugaring, cooking, baking, kombucha, cheese making, kim-chi...Ok, enough of the bragging list. We failed a whole hell of a lot too, and we probably learned even more from that. For one, don't use drop-cloth plastic from Lowes for a hoop house.  It will deteriorate and rip to shreds by the end of the season.  Don't leave your kombucha mother sitting in the back of the fridge for a year--she will die.  And over-cooking your maple syrup after 15+ hours outside cooking it down over an open flame is particularly disheartening.     

The garden in full swing last summer

But I've also learned how much you really appreciate the value of things when they don't come easy. That lettuce that you've grown, battling the slugs and the deer and the groundhogs all season.  The salsa that you've canned from tomatillos that you grew from a plant that you snapped in half while transplanting and almost killed. Yes, I did that. Well, they all taste that much better. The crops or projects that fail make the ones that succeed that much more valuable. And what's more, they somehow make me feel more whole, more grounded.



So we're taking another big step, moving to a new place where we hardly know a soul, going forward without a safety net or a fall-back plan.  It feels...necessary. Much like coming here to experiment with all our ideas did two years ago.  Some days it seems so much easier to play it safe, follow dollars or convention and just fall in line with other people's expectations.  But there's so much more we want to do, and we continue to do our best to follow our hearts.