LONG-TERM INVESTING.
It feels a bit silly to be writing about retirement when we just started our farm, but perpetually worrying about a retirement fund is something my father instilled in me at a young age (which I assure you was a rather mind-boggling concept to a fifteen year old). It would be nice now, though, to start setting a little money aside for when we finally do decide to "settle down". But we barely have money to spend at the moment, let alone save. What little extra money we get goes into the house and into the farm (and into a meager vacation fund––see you in November, somewhere really close!). At this point, a retirement fund seems a long way off.The other day, however, Hannah and I went into Lafayette, TN (locally pronounced: Le-FAY-it) to buy a peach tree. While at the nursery, we acquired two more blueberry bushes (totaling eight now) and a bunch of perennial herbs. It was a sixty dollar hit, but it felt like, at a time when we don't have money to stuff into the bank, we were still making an investment in our future.All of those plants have the potential to earn us hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in their lifetimes. And if managed, cultivated and propagated correctly, most perennial plants we invest in now will have the potential to stick around until our retirement and beyond, fathering (or mothering, respectfully) many more trees, plants or bushes. Sure, we'll have to do some maintenance to keep them going even when we retire, but isn't gardening something people do when they retire anyway?Perhaps this has been on my mind lately as we've been hearing on NPR about how inflation is causing savings accounts to shrink––savings accounts once being a place people were led to believe they could safely save his or her money. If we don't have money to save, we decidedly don't have money to lose to inflation. Investing in trees and herbs and plants––more or less immune to inflation––that we ourselves will manage, is a type of savings that obviously fits our lifestyle, but that we have supreme confidence in. If nothing else, nature has proved to be a reliable area for growth, and not a bad place to invest.- Jesse.