Everytime I look around The Ridge it’s hard for me to believe that we’ve only been living here for three and a half years. Because it feels like we have been here forever and at the same time it feels like we just moved in yesterday.
In three years, we have done so much on The Ridge to build the micro farm of our dreams–building gardens, planting fruit trees, putting in fencing, building animal housing. The projects never seem to end (and probably never will at this point if we’re being honest with ourselves).
It was about this time last year that we were starting to realize that our goals were quickly outgrowing our space on The Ridge.
Having ventured into fiber animals, we needed more room for grazing and infrastructure to support housing these larger livestock. If we were to continue raising poultry for production, we needed more space for hatching and rearing–outside of just my small office space in our home. If we wanted to grow enough produce to sell, we needed to majorly scale up our gardens–reducing the space we had to graze animals.
All of these realizations made us come to the ultimate realization that we were heading down a path that would take us away from our primary goal we set when starting our homesteading journey–self sufficiency.
We found we were raising animals, growing food and making goods for others and not ourselves. We went from wanting to be able to give back to our community, to wanting to turn a profit to justify the work we were doing here.
And all at the same time we were on course for major burnout. The Ridge became a full time job on top of our already full time and demanding careers.
I am one of those people that has to see things through but one thing I had to remind myself is that dreams and goals can change. They evolve with us. Putting a goal to the side, doesn’t mean you can’t come back to it.
So we decided–this year let’s focus on what makes us happy, what makes the most sense for our property, and will get us closer to our goal of self sufficiency.
This is a big reason why we decided not to raise poultry this year or to sell our goods at markets and directly to our loyal customers. Instead we decided to pursue other farming dreams–like fiber milling and arts, gardening, and beekeeping. Homesteading things that truly made us happy and got us closer to our longer term goal.
But, in order to really pursue these dreams the next course of action was to either a) move to a larger farm or b) expand and develop our current property.
If you’ve been to The Ridge lately–you know it looks drastically different than it did last year. Clearly we chose option b! This spring we have cleared and fenced over an acre of new pasture, we added a hoop house, more garden beds and we are moving my “childhood” barn from my parent’s homestead in Haymarket to ours here in Stanardsville.
By shifting our focus here on the farm, it opened up more time and energy for us to focus on our social life, travel and our own personal goals outside of homesteading that we had been putting to the side.
For me, that meant pursuing my Yoga Teacher certification and getting in the saddle more. For Josh, that meant returning to the gym and weightlifting. We were able to make time to travel, visit friends and family, and go to social events that we hadn’t had time to do the past few years since starting this journey.
While our goals may have changed, our love for farming and our original intentions for The Ridge remain the same.
We have some even bigger projects planned for the rest of the year; like expanding our orchard, developing walking trails through our dedicated Wildlife area, and adding my family’s Airstream to our infrastructure to start building a guest suite and studio.
I hope you all will stick around and continue to follow our journey here on The Ridge–even if we are no longer hatching cute chicks, or selling at farmers markets. And thank you for your support over the past few years.
The best is yet to come!
Ravens Ridge Micro Farm 