Exciting times; when your dream starts becoming a reality
Ever since we lived in Maryland, in that small military house, with the small yard, that started out as a smelly, gooey mess we knew we wanted something. Something. But we just couldn’t quite figure out just what that SOMETHING was. We knew when we were getting closer because things just seemed to, amazingly, always work out. Always when we moved towards certain ideas and feelings. We knew we had a dream, but what was that dream? And if we didn’t know what the dream was, how then could we make it our reality?
When we bought our home in North Pole Alaska, it seemed like a huge stretch. After all, we still owned a townhome in Fairbanks and now we would be required to rent it each month. Still, we managed to find a way to make it work. Then we’ve slowly but surely added more and more to our property here in North Pole. We’re nowhere yet to where we want to be but every day we get closer.
While searching for your dream, be open to new ideas
My last several months as a Life Balance Coach at Empower Life Works, along with just life experience have taught me that one must always practice patience when moving forward. The picture you imagine in the beginning is never how it looks later on. This is simply because you change as a person over time. What was once important to you before, later isn’t. Your ideas shift, change, morph into something new. Yet, all these years we were certain we wanted to do something. We knew that had to do with our property here in North Pole. Something that had to do with growing a garden. Something that had to do with beekeeping. Something that had to do with raising animals respectfully, and something to do with community. Our dream was becoming clearer however can we make this potential dream a reality?
Uh, oh. We’ve got a problem
This past year taught us that we were able to raise larger amounts of animals. We were able to increase production yet again in the raised beds, and we are constantly adding more fruit trees, and this summer we did our best to just allow some of them to drop their fruit to seed the earth with hopefully even more fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. By summer end we increased so much so that we realized we had a totally different issue that we’ve never experienced before. We grew too much for ourselves.
CSA? Can we make this dream a reality?
Now we did give some away, but still, towards the end of the season, we were stuck. We had no freezer space left. The thought suddenly occurred to us. Why not start our own CSA? Could we do it? Could we potentially start a well-rounded CSA that didn’t just produce veggies or fruit? But instead, produce a bit of everything?
Lo and behold, after a bit of research, it’s looking highly probable. So, just as the world is dealing with potential food shortages we will be able to contribute in our own way to help look after our neighbors, friends, and coworkers. We will be growing and raising vegetables, chickens, turkeys, ducks, soaps, homemade jellies, and jams, honey, and home-baked goods. Could we make this dream a reality?
Summers over, winter creeps in
I hope within the next couple of months I will be able to announce it officially. As of today, our family is almost done with the typically “farmstead” chores. Animals are more or less taken care of, harvested. Vegetables are almost completely out of the garden. We have a huge bed of collard greens that we continue to eat from each week. I think, in about two weeks we won’t want to see another collard green again. The bees are gone. This year, since we purchased Italian bees, we knew the chance of overwintering them and them surviving was probably about 5% so unfortunately, we culled them instead. The ladies of Hive 2 were rock stars by the way. The number of workers was amazing in that hive.
So, now we enter our long winter and I hope to start putting out much more content, both video and the blog here. If you’ve never seen my youtube channel, here’s the link. Hope to see you around!
