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Have you ever had what appears to be the worst day of your life but guides you in a direction so different from where you were and amazingly exactly where you want and need to be? 

This is how our story begins...

One morning Roland woke up and went to work, minutes after getting on site he began feeling very ill and came home. I was working nights at the time so I was there when he got back.  He rapidly went from feeling ill to having vertigo and loosing vision in one eye. After many doctor visits mostly eye specialist he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis!!!

This lead us to what do we do now...

We immediately started researching, what we found was that medication was not likely to help in any way.

So what now...

All the information we found lead us to believe that vitamin D and diet were our best options.  As a child Roland had a lot of allergies including gluten and dairy add that to the fact that sugar is incredible bad for everyone and you have our new diet!!

The next decision we made was that pesticides and antibiotics probably weren’t food additives we really needed if we were going to get healthy. So with this in mind we took the next huge step in our life.

We bought the farm...

This was a big step for Roland who has always been a city boy, but he jumped in with both feet ready for the next adventure.  Initially Roland thought we were just going to live in the country, he soon figured out though that the plan was to grow and raise our own food.  The first step however was to reroof the barn, we took a week off work rented a zoom boom and after 7 15hour days it was done. There is some truth to the saying “ what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger “ . While he barely lived through roofing it he is very proud of his accomplishment and so am I. An interesting point here is that while we were doing the roof a part on our 40 year old John deer mower broke and being that we were so busy we asked Roland’s dad if he would pick up the part. He returned saying it was $150 and that was too expensive so he then bought us a $40,000 massy Ferguson tractor instead? Not really sure how that math works but it was an amazing gift to receive. Side note here we did go buy the part for the John deer as well. So no real savings lol.

Step 2 bring on the animals...

After talking to people at work Roland figured out there was money in raising goats, so he bought James and Jake. Two very friendly billy goats that always want to be on the wrong side of the fence. Shortly after this purchase Roland figured out that he doesn’t like goats lol they are very loud and whiny.  Next we bought a dozen little chicks , being that we have a dog and my son Nicholas that lives with us also has a dog, we were very careful to make sure they were safe and the dogs couldn’t get near them. We did however forget there was feral cat in the barn, so day two we built a secure box pen for our 4 chicks . Lesson learned!!
The next addition to our farm was a herd of Blackbelly and kathadin sheep 10 in all including 2 little rams that were born that spring.
With buying the farm in April and having to spend a lot of time fixing and cleaning up our first garden didn’t get put in till July. We turned an old corral into a garden to keep animals out And we still had a good season and got about 400 lbs of potatoes to take us through the winter.