About Us
Welcome! We invite you along our exciting (and usually chaotic!) journey… to inspire and be inspired, to learn and to teach, to share challenges and victories, and to escape into a happy homesteading / self-sufficient bubble of thoughts during these crazy times.
I’m Emily, my husband is Troy, and we have 3 children~ Tristin (14), Ryan (8), and Abigail (3). As we prepare our land to homestead in Vermont, we are also building our skills and experience down here in Connecticut, which we will be sharing with you all along the way. Livestock, Gardening, Preserving Food, Frugal Cooking, Building Structures, Homeschooling and more!
So how did we get here and what are we doing?
A few years ago, Troy and I searched for a little getaway for our growing family. Instead of going on vacations, we wanted to have a place of our own to retreat to that would be away from all the hustle and bustle of modern life. ORIGINALLY we wanted a piece of land to camp on, and someday build a “little shack” to sleep in instead of a tent. HA! I have to laugh at the evolution of that initial thought!
We live in CT but looked for land in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Having, at the time, 2 small children, we quickly ruled out Maine as it was a bit too far of a drive for just a 2 or 3 day weekend escape and narrowed our search to NH and VT.
We looked at plots of land in New Hampshire with no luck then went to look at one in Vermont. We quickly ruled it out as we drove up to meet the seller. There was something about it that we just weren’t “feeling” right off the bat. As we were leaving, obviously not interested, the seller mentioned that he had another plot up behind this one but that it’s “pretty rough”. Immediately our ears perked up and we were intrigued.
As we bushwhacked our way throughout the 44 acres of brush and dense woods for 3 hours, we instantly fell in love with every piece of the land as we saw it. It may have been the crisp Fall Vermont air, the breathtaking colors of the changing leaves, the rolling streams that we couldn’t wait for our kids to play in, or my obsessive desire to see a Moose in the wild and trying to follow the tracks, but I think it was more Troy’s vision with every step. I don’t have the gift of being able to picture things that aren’t yet in existence and right in front of my face, however throughout the years I have learned to trust his vision, creativity, hard work, and his incredible talents, that THIS time I could see it too!
That Christmas was totally Vermont themed gifts as our excitement was bubbling over and in early January the land was officially ours. We couldn’t wait until the snow would melt and for it to warm up to be able to camp on it for the first time as a family. Finally Memorial Day weekend arrived! After a 3ish hour drive, we excitedly got our kids unbuckled and all stepped out onto our RAW new land. We breathed the untouched air, OUR air, and all smiled, looked down ……….
…..and saw at LEAST a dozen (perhaps even two dozen!) ticks on each of our legs!…as in a dozen (or two dozen!) on EACH leg of EACH person!! It was HORRIFYING! Literally what nightmares for the next year were made out of! After quickly flicking them off of our children and ourselves we immediately got right back into the truck without unpacking a single item.
What now?!
We drove to the nearest truck stop/gas station/only tourist attraction in town, freaking out while driving as ticks were on our child’s seatbelt, trying to get to a “safe place” to think straight. We went into the diner area and were seated. As I pointed to the menu, in front of the waitress a ticked crawled out of my sleeve onto my finger then table. It was MORTIFYING! We were so embarrassed, disgusted, flustered, and trying to stay brave for our kids’ sake, however we just basically bought 44 acres of Intravenous Lyme Disease for our children! I went to the restroom shaking (probably twitching too!), completely frazzled, stripped off all of my clothes in the stall, like a crazy woman, and picked a tick off my ass. That’s it! I was ready to get rid of it and sell immediately!
Fast Forward a Bit…..
I’m happy to say that we didn’t sell, we didn’t give up, and the ticks have been so under control that most of the trips up there we don’t see a single one. (HOW we got that to happen I’m sure we’ll discuss in a future post)
Over the next few years our family grew as Abigail joined us and completed our tribe. Our vision for the land has also grown, from roughing it in a tent to having a bit more comfort and shelter in a Carry-On trailer (future post about that set up too!), plans to build a “little shack” to now blueprints for a full cabin/home and foundation complete. While our land in Vermont, started out as an occasional escape, when we are up there we never want to leave. With young kids and living states away, it’s a slow progress but we are getting there.
Enter Covid-19, Politics, Civil Unrest, Toilet Paper, and the Crazy Year 2020…
I’m done….I’m over it all…. I’m ready to escape into the woods with my family and shelter them in a bubble. Like many others, our desire to full on homestead and be GREATLY self-sufficient has never been stronger. So, we are currently trying our best to fast-forward the process. Troy is an incredibly hard worker, and whenever he has an available weekend he tries to go up and pick away at the To-Do list to make our dream & vision happen. There are a lot of logistics to think about and plan when starting with such raw land. Which came first the chicken or the egg? For us it was an outhouse then shed, wood shed then pavilion. I’ll be sharing our process (the hows and whys) thus far and update you as we go on the building and homestead setup.
While that aspect is Troy’s main focus, I am learning and putting into practice as much as I can about maximizing garden harvests, several different methods of preserving food, as well as frugal cooking and living in a more self-sufficient way (we’ll be sharing all of this with you as we go). We have raised chickens for almost 10 years so we already have that under our belts, but I continue to explore other livestock as we know we definitely will have pigs, Troy wants a cow, and I want goats. We may even get rabbits this Spring! This has been quite a journey from the start and is about to get a lot more adventurous for sure! We are Halfway to Homesteading and loving it!
Ok so that it us and where we are at and headed…..how about YOU? Where are YOU at on your own journey? We would love to hear!