Good-Bye or See You Later, The Journey Begins

Good-bye or see you later?

It has been a busy week for us. We've traveled from Northern California, through Oregon and back "home" to Washington in time to put together a celebration party for our oldest, who graduated high school this weekend. Congrats Miss Chelsea!!

And then it happened. I finally got sick. Saturday, the day of the graduation walk and her party, I got a stomach bug. And a headache. Oh my. Not that I never get sick, but it's not a common occurrence. I was able to make it to graduation, and part of her party, but even that ended up being too much and Father's Day, Farmer Scott was on his own with the boys. Luckily it passed relatively quickly and we got on the road Monday, a little late, but still kept on moving.

Leaving though is bittersweet. We have big dreams and a plan, but it involves leaving not only our beloved farm, animals and business, but our family and friends as well. But today, we say not good-bye, but just see you later. We look forward to finding the right location that will fulfill not only our dreams, but will allow for family and friends to come and stay for a while. For others to come and learn. A journey for all, to be sure.

The Journey Begins

Leaving the Seattle area a little late due to illness, our original plan was to hit Boise by evening. Duh. What were we thinking? Yeah, that might be OK if we were two of us, traveling in a car, driving the speed limit. But we're not. We've got 2 young-ish boys that are full of energy oozing out of every seam. We've got a big truck. And a bigger trailer. As I said in my previous post, we're not quite going the speed limit. It actually more likely that we're doing just shy of 60 on the freeway to have any sort of reasonable gas mileage.  So in actuality, we ended up just over the border in Fruitland, Idaho at a rest area because we were too exhausted to try and find any other place to park for a few hours of sleep. OK, this was a first for us. No, you don't really get sleep at a rest area, just rest. Note to self: off freeway parking when you are used to sleeping in the country is a good thing.

The most amazing thing happened a little earlier that night though. We saw stars. Not just the big dipper and his friends, but seriously, the sky was littered with stars. The entire Milk Way galazy.  Being out in the middle of basically nowhere, and not having the city light polution, you can see things. OK, maybe not the deer on the side of the road that I'm sure where there, but the most amazing creation ever made. OK, second most, or third, but you get my point. This wasn't what you see in the glossy photos of National Geographics. Or even in the wonderful planetariums. The only way to describe it would be, if you had a very large black piece of paper, placed rocks to form the known constellations on it and then threw sand up in the air over the paper and let it fall. That would be pretty close to how covered the sky was with stars.

So even though we were tired, we were star struck in the best way possible.  Now, onto Utah...see you later!

Closing the Farm

Well, we're almost there ... the farm is closing up by mid April. Desmond went to live on a great farm in Fall City, WA. Mina and Neesa are heading down to Oregon, Elsie Rose will be heading over to continue work as a therapy horse and Ole ... well, we're not quite sure where Ole will end up yet. We're still trying to finalize his plans.

We're getting ready for the next adventure in our lives...for the family and for our farm. We welcome you to join with us for the next part of the journey as we travel across America, learning about our rich history with our boys (I have to say, this will probably be our biggest home school project ever) and blogging about our adventures. We plan to stop at many farms along the way - we, along with most farm owners - enjoying finding out what makes things "click" in different areas. How they "do" farming can be completely different than how we "do" farming. Finding the perfect place to re-establish Willows Edge Farm is on our list of travel projects.

We will continue to post where we are in each stage of the way and have another post coming in the next few days as to our short term plans. You WON'T want to miss that one!

The Vision - The past and present...this is a long one

We have had such a great few years sharing our farm, we thought we would share our process in how this all came to be. So far.
2007 ... our first Norwegian Fjord horses arrived in February! Brrr!! But they were everything I had dreamed of - and MORE. Tina and Elsie both arrived in foal and within a few months our numbers grew from zero, to 2 to 4. But wait. They were so amazing, how could we not have more of them? Along came the opportunity to buy our stallion Fair Acres Ole from Patti Jo Walter in Wisconsin. No waiting to purchase, but we had to wait for him to finish breeding all those mares back there before we could bring him home.
We had a few girls come out and learn a little about the Norwegian Fjord horses over the summer and that was the beginning of what would become our Summer Intern Program.
2008 ... our first breeding season with Ole, but no babies! HA!! I could not go a year without a foal. We bought 3 mares and one was in foal. Off the truck rolled Mina, Greta & Lena - along with Lena's newborn foal. We also offered our first ever farm life camp. It started out as a donation to our kids' school auction - why not offer to let one of the kids come spend the day "out on the farm". I still have that little flyer I made up for the auction. How fun! Word spread and spread quickly. I was being asked over and over if this was something we would do for others. But our first summer's Farm Life Camp was wildly popular and we began planning soon for the next summer. I also started offering riding lessons that summer and found out I had ways to pay for my little farm besides the sale of foals and breedings. We also bred our first mares to Ole. The excitement was almost unbearable...a whole year to wait!
2009 ... We grew our little farm into a full time business this year. Farm Camp dates were added and enlarged. We added extra positions to our intern program as well as created a few "Junior" internships. Starting early spring we had more and more phone calls from groups wanting to know if they could come and tour the farm. Really? Sure, we love to share what we have and teach people about caring for the animals as well as our land. Early summer came all the phone calls about birthday parties and about the third time I said "no, sorry we don't offer that", I realized we were missing a very important way to share our farm, horses and provide additional income to our ever growing farm enterprise. We started parties in mid September and again, another successful venture added.
2009 also brought us a little closer to our larger vision of the "large farm" with spectacular field trips for myself & Scott to go see the world famous Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms in Virginia. What an inspiration to our dreams! With his un-technical strategies, farming - the natural way - has been gaining in popularity. Both by farmers/producers as well as consumers, farmer's markets, high end restaurants and even animal rights groups. It seems the only people who don't like him are the chemical companies, large --ahem--farms and some government agencies who don't seem to understand this desire to get back to natural movement. Anyway, getting to visit with and learn more about permaculture from him and the other farmers attending was adding fuel to our fire. We came home with more ideas, a larger vision and a burning desire to keep moving.
One other field trip we made was was to Nate Lewis & Melissa Barker's Homegrown Pastures in Olympia where we got to learn again - from the pro's - about processing pasture raised poultry. Something we plan on adding to our farm in 2010. We also got to meet with some other helpful people who really are just amazing to talk with and learn from including Colleen Donovan from Heifer International and Fred Berman from Washington State Dept. of Agriculture as well as other farmers interested in pursuing - or growing - their own pastured poultry farms.
We have been encouraged, motivated and forward in our plans for 2010 and beyond.

The "future" part of The Vision, will be coming soon.
Hope you all had a great Christmas & got to hug someone you love!