For anyone who doesn't know what I have been up to over the last few months, (or may not have gotten the Christmas newsletter... oh, yes, there was a newsletter), I'll give the "short" overview.
Kelly and I moved to Erie, Colorado the summer of 2009. Erie was close enough to Boulder to be able to work there but not have to pay the price to live in Boulder. While living there, we got a better taste of what fresh, local, organic food is like. We also started eating healthy, and drinking a lot of juice. I mean fresh juice. (Fresh juice gets in your blood stream as fast as alcohol!) With just changing our diets, drinking juice, and cutting out crappy, processed food, we both noticed a difference in how we felt. For the first time, people would tell me I was healthy, and I'd take it as a true compliment.
In the Summer of 2010, we started our first garden.
(Daisy helps too)
It was small, but just what we needed to get started. From that little garden, we learned a lot. Among other things, I learned that zucchini is not a container plant (neither are cukes). If you plant garlic and onion bulbs too late, they are basically just preserved underground. I learned that grasshoppers like to bask in the sun on a good tomato, and I also learned that wasp stings hurt.
By the time our garden was in full swing, we knew we wanted to garden on a larger scale -- full time, and indefinitely. Like a real farm. With a lot of searching, and even more positive thinking, we happened to find what we now call our home.
We found 5 acres in Penrose, Colorado. We have been here for about 4, almost 5 months, although it feels like that has gone by fast. Our house was a foreclosure, and we are still working on the inside. We were lucky it was in pretty good shape -- nothing a little paint can't fix. Our 5 acres has the potential to do anything we want it to.
We plan on having chickens first (fingers crossed we are ready to order chicks in 1 month). In the future, we will have goats. Some of the other possibilities we like are llamas, pigs, and maybe even a mini dairy cow.
And the big reason we are here in the first place, we will have a very large organic garden. Being in the sun and working in the dirt is like the best kind of therapy. I can't wait to get started.
So that is how we ended up here in Penrose. It is a little strange to, at 27, be living in a house that I have no intentions of moving out of, but it is also pretty exciting. I don't know what we have in store for us, but I have a vision of us in 20 years, sitting outside, relaxing on the porch, and looking out at everything we have done with our little slice of earth, and feeling very accomplished, and very happy with what we have done :)
