are you sitting down?

This blog has been the outlet for so many emotions. It has been the place I've come to when feeling overwhelmed, scared, frustrated, sad, happy or when I just wanted to share something. I've talked about things I knew would not be popular among most, like killing animals I loved and cared for to make food for others to feed their families. I've written about how, for the first time in my entire life, I had found my calling and then I wrote about the sadness and anger I felt when it seemed we'd lost it all.
This past year though, well, there's been just so much. So much more has been felt than you've read here, because sometimes it hurt way too much just to write the words. In many ways this has been the worst, most intense year of our lives. It almost broke us and the stress of it even threatened to break our friendship and our marriage. But you know, I am proud of it all, the ups and the downs. Because it's just so. . . real.
It is because of all this that I've learned - sometimes things do happen for a reason and sometimes things do have to completely fall apart so that the pieces can be put back together the right way. (Thank you, Danifred.) And. . .well, we're putting things back together because right now, at this very moment, WE ARE MOVING TO A NEW FARM.
Let me go back a bit. We have some amazing friends at Blackberry Meadows Farm whom we love ever so much. To be honest, and I'm not even sure they know this, they are partly responsible for us taking the leap to become farmers. When Nate and I were living in England and just starting to think about farming, my mother sent us an article. The article was about a group of 4 young people who bought an organic vegetable farm/business near Pittsburgh from an older couple who were ready to retire. Their story was so incredibly inspiring for us. We thought that if these young people could do it, so could we.
We've helped out on each other's farms over the past few years and have become closer and closer as friends. They have been understanding and supportive through all we've been through, always offering positive feedback and advice. Besides the fun we have together, we have all known that each of us has many talents that would combine well and we've all spent these years trying to work out a way for Nate and I to move there and for us all to work together. Things have only recently come together and we're making it happen.
Nate and I are in the process of moving all of our farm equipment which is still at the old farm. Once we get it all moved, we'll work on getting ourselves moved there too. We will be setting up our operation at Blackberry Meadows and will continue to operate as Wolf Lake. There are lots of exciting plans in the works but for now, we have much to do to get set up because we have 100 fuzzy baby turkeys arriving on August 2nd - and that's 2 weeks away!
Onward.