It begins!

I guess the first thing would be to tell about the who, the what and the how.  I never really got into the whole face book thing where you write about what your doing every second of every day, so this might be a little choppy at first till I get the hang of writing about what I'm doing, O and my spelling sucks so beware.

The who.  My lovely and supportive wife Cheryl and I met at a friend of her's BBQ.  We found out that we attended the same Church and lived in the same town.  We started dating about a month after that meeting and then five month after that we were engaged, then five months after that married.
Next Came our son Nate (3) and then our daughter Hailey (14 months).

The what.  A little over a year ago I felt a draw, a pull to something that had never interested me before.  It started with bio-diesel.  Then it expanded to farming.  We need to remember that this was coming from someone who had never lived on a farm and had always wanted to live in a loft apartment in a city.  This and the events that followed I can only assume is a push from God, not that I am putting words in his mouth, I just have no other way of explaining it. I'll write more on the events that followed later.

The how.  I have always wanted to invest in real estate. Now with the global recession it might sound mad to invest, but actually if you think about it it was the perfect time.  The short of it is, we sold our house privately and then bought three rentals with the equity that was in our house.  This investment is not funding (it actually make no money right now but it is a long term plan) what we are doing it just takes care of retirement if things go to plan.  We didn't have enough left over to buy our house so we borrowed from family and now we have our dream home, it does need a lot of work but by year ten here it should be everything we want.  To summarize. Cheryl will continue to work her job and commute an hour each way.  I will stay home with the children, manage the rentals and build the farm.

That brings you up to speed with what we are doing.  The events leading to this I find interesting and amazing.  I will try to fully explain but I am human and will miss details or events, but hopefully you will be able to get a good idea of the big picture.

It started with a show with this Aussie guy driving across the USA using only alternative fuels (alternative to fossil fuel).  Thats what inspired me to build a bio-diesel lab.  I started to rent documentaries  and google about all the harm we were doing to our plant and thought long about why and how we could do things differently.  THE TURNING POINT: One day after morning service friends of Cheryl's family had approached us and asked if it would be alright to introduce us to their grandson and his wife, seeing that they were new and didn't really know anyone at our church. You will find that over the last year or so I have been turing into a person better suited for living in the middle of no-where.

Sure, and that's how the first big step was taken.  Meeting this couple start a friendship that out of it I got a job that allowed endless google time for research and the grandson was in the same frame of mind move to no-where and start a farm.  Over the next several month I had researched everything down to what breed for every animal I would raise and several techniques on how to do it.

That brings us to almost today.  We now have the land,  the plan and the friends to make it happen.  It is all hard work and blood from here on in.  And trust me there is a lot of work to get done.  I think it will take 10 years before this is up and running to the point that we can feed ourselves from the land.

The Land:  we have 13 Acres that exists as one long strip.  We are becoming more inclined that this shape (a long narrow strip) is better suited more then the square that we first were looking for.  The forest here has been badly managed.  There is a lot of standing dead trees and spots that look like they were clear cut at some point and the trees were never really able to make a come back.  Although I have formal training or certificate.  I did grow up logging my families 62 Acre forest, although I am rusty, I hope to make a thriving sugar bush that will serve our desire for sweets and our need for fire wood (we have a wood burning furnace).
We hope to have a flock of chickens for next year and once I get some fencing up then we will get a goat or two. Plus we will constantly be working on and expanding a garden and orchard.

I just took some pics and video of the current state the property is in and hope to once a year take the video from the same spot to capture the changes/improvements that we are going to make.

That all for now and I hope to add weekly but no-one is reading yet so I am just typing to myself for now.  Plus I need to figure out how to to add pics and video to this site.