FARM LIKE YOU'RE MOVING.
My back ached as I threw the last trash bag into the truck to take to the dump. Not the last trash bag of the move, the last bag that could fit the first load.Hannah was joining me the next day but I was already exhausted, yet nowhere near done.As I stomped around the property in Bugtussle, doing the last round of cleanup before we officially left this week, I was completely floored by how much junk we owned—how much stuff had just collected, dotting the property like little flags of half-finished projects.There were endless piles of lumber scraps, broken five gallon buckets to the heavens, glass, plastic, bags, barrels, books. (I don't know why books, but several soggy books outside). I couldn't help but wonder, "What would this place have looked like in another four years?"I vowed (to my aching body, mostly) never to let this happen again. And not because I think we will ever move any time soon, hopefully ever, but because that's exactly what we said when we returned to Bugtussle. You never know where life is gonna take you, and you should never assume it won't move you.Plus, when you treat a place too permanently, you can easily weigh it down. But when you treat it as mobile, you keep it light and airy, flexible, agile even. Whether you're moving or not, that's the farm you want.I wrote a story recently about a farmer named Ben Hartman and lean manufacturing in agriculture. I won't get too much into it here, as I got way into it over at Civil Eats, but one of the things Ben did to lean up his farm was to just take stuff to the dump. Loads and loads of tools and junk he wasn't using got hauled off or sold because, as he wrote in his book, even if excess stuff doesn't have a literal cost, it has a psychological one.And as I walked around our old property this week I felt that cost. I realized how burdened our farm was with our tinkering, with indecision, with general stuff, and how much that in turn burdened us.So as we look towards the new farm, I'm going to remember this ache, this pain, and keep in mind that the farm feels it, too. If I can barely move after taking four loads to the dump, you can only imagine how the farm felt lugging all that for four years. Not good. Not healthy. Not agile, that's for sure. Now, I hope, it feels as alive as we always wanted it to feel, and I hope we can maintain always remember to keep our operation lean. Not just for ourselves, but for that land as well.- Jesse.
BACK AND FORTH.
We have been living in a very strange in-between time lately, one of my least favorite places to be. I find it so difficult to stay “present” when I know what is just around the corner. And so now, as the fall season is upon us and the garden is bursting with greens and cauliflower and carrots and is basically just hanging out, ready to be harvested, Jesse and I spend a lot of our time pacing around not knowing what to do. There is no weeding to be done, not much cultivating, harvest is short and sweet. We suddenly have a lot more free time, and SO many projects we want to be working on at the new farm, and yet we are still grounded HERE. And so we have been going back and forth as we are able to, getting the garlic patch ready, slowly moving things with each trip back in hopes of avoiding a giant move all at the end, taking soil tests and meeting with the FSA office about grants - all the while trying not to rush forward too fast and to enjoy our time here while we still have it.
These photos are from the new place, when Jesse mowed the garlic patch and then covered it with large, black plastic tarps to kill the grass and encourage microbial life.How do you guys stay present during the in-between times?
- Hannah.
THE NEXT DRAFT.
Jesse and I have always tried to focus on the long-term goals we have for the future – our holistic goals. These are the goals that we have set not just for our farm, but also for our future finances, for the future quality of our land and for the future quality of our life. Determining holistic goals is a process that considers the financial, social, and environmental impacts of a decision before you implement it.This is something we learned from our mentors, Eric and Cher, while we were Bugtussle Farm interns. It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work, the projects that begin to stack up and the never ending cycle that is life, but it is important to stop often and revisit your holistic goals. Ideally, you would revisit them before every decision you make, to make sure that what you are doing now is moving you towards where you want to be later. You may find that you have veered off course, or that you are wasting energy on work that doesn’t align with your values, or perhaps even that your goals themselves have changed. This kind of periodic checking-in at home base, re-centering and making sure everybody is on the same page, has been immensely helpful to our business, our marriage, and our sanity!Last December, Jesse and I found ourselves on a date for the first time since Further had been born – our first time alone in one year! Sitting in a hotel bar while my parents blessedly watched the baby upstairs, we used that time to revisit our holistic goals. And we discovered some surprising things. We were both feeling like our current distribution model was unsustainable – the hour long drive to market twice a week was starting to take a toll. Not just hard in terms of gas mileage, but hard to be off the farm two ENTIRE days a week. We want to be a part of the community we are feeding, to be involved in a way that isn’t just driving in and dropping off our food. But we don’t have extra time to go back into town for activities, socializing, volunteering, local politics and social justice – we don’t have another full day to give. So, we end up feeling disconnected.Also, it turns out that the cliché is incredibly true: having a baby changes everything. We want so many things for Further – we want him to have that same sense of community connection that we are craving. We want him to have the option of school or sports or lessons or even simply playing with friends on a regular basis. Most of all perhaps, we want Further to be closer to his grandparents – to see them regularly, not occasionally. We selfishly want and need his grandparents’ help to allow us to work more on the farm, or perhaps even have another child some day.As we talked about all these things last December, we allowed ourselves to say something out loud for the first time: Maybe we can’t have all of these things here. Maybe Bugtussle isn’t our forever home.It was a difficult thing to say – a difficult idea to even entertain. We had finally gotten our farm to a really great place: The cabin we had worked so hard to build, the home where Further was born. The land Jesse had been slowly carving out by hand, clearing and tilling and mulching and nurturing. The neighbors we love and had worked alongside, their children we were watching grow up. Our little homestead was a paradise. But we had come to see that our paradise was just too isolated from the other parts of life we wanted for ourselves – we conceded that our holistic goals could not be fully achieved here. Bugtussle was maybe just not in the right place for our new family.Honestly, I could go on and on about all of our reasons, about how many times we went back and forth about what we should do, about all the thinking and rethinking and praying and agonizing that went into this, but we ultimately knew it was what we had to do. And so we began to talk with our families and to start looking.Well, to go ahead and jump right to the end of it, we found it. We found our new farm. It happened very quickly and unexpectedly. It is in Anderson County, still beautiful and surrounded by woods and creeks. Still very isolated while also being close to many major cities as well as our families. We are incredibly excited and terribly devastated at the same time. Bittersweet. Leaving is hard. Change is hard. We will miss our market – our Bowling Green family and friends that have been our support system and our customers for four years now. We will miss our Bugtussle family, the Smiths who are actual family to us, and our wonderful neighbors who are the definition of generous and kind.And so, this Rough Draft of ours continues to be just that. Right now, we are still trying to focus on the growing season. We won’t be transitioning to the new farm until the winter, until after our fall share ends. We are anxious to share more with you about the new place, but our energy is still entirely here right now. On saving the blighted tomatoes, on weeding the late sweet corn and keeping the deer out of the sweet potatoes. We just keep farming, keep moving forward and taking the changes as they come at us. Keep trying our hardest to do what is best for the garden, for the land, for our family.-Hannah. 
GOODBYE FOR NOW.
We are in a chaotic state of packing today, running last minute errands and trying to plan for the next few weeks. We are so ready to be back on the farm - but in many ways, we are also COMPLETELY unprepared. The cabin is not finished - it is mostly insulated but without drywall, there is no water, no stove - and yet tomorrow we are moving in. It is just too difficult for us to try to finish the cabin from 2 hours away, and staying in the city is simply too expensive. So, we're just gonna go. We are expecting there to be a strange settling-in period, the days before we have the stove to cook on, or a reliable source of water. But it is time. Although we have lots of love for Nashville and our amazing friends here, we don't do well living in the city. We aren't good at being apart from each other while Jesse is at work, being inside and away from the garden and the animals, spending all the money we make on food that we would normally be growing for ourselves. And although we aren't sure what the upcoming days will bring, we are excited for it. We have lived in a barn before, and we can surely (and happily) do it again. "Roughing it" is sort of how we roll.All that to say...we are officially heading to Bugtussle. That means off-the grid. No cell phones, no internet, no electricity. Although the plan is to drive to town at least once a week, that might not happen. We will definitely be slow to respond to emails and messages, so apologies in advance. Like I said, we will be transitioning, figuring it out as we go, and we hope you can put up with the messiness that will most likely result. See you on the other side!- Hannah.