We took the

Long Way Home
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We believe in taking the winding road. That’s how we found each other. That’s what led us to our little piece of land in Catoosa County, Georgia. And that’s how we became farmers. We took the long way home, the road less traveled, the scenic route. And now that we’re here, we want to do the most that we can with the good luck we’ve found.

We’re both musicians by trade and for life. We both teach college music and perform frequently around the region. Neither of us set out to be a farmer. We’ve been gardening for years, growing food for ourselves, and about a decade ago we got very interested in the local food movement and the logic behind it. We started focusing on supporting our local farmers and our local businesses, aiming to do our part to support our friends and neighbors and the community economy.  We got to know the people we were buying food from, talking with them at farmers’ markets and sometimes going directly to their farms. Some of them became friends – a couple of them even helped replace the alternator in our old truck when it died at an inopportune place and time! We saw the value in what they were doing as well as our part in it. But we still didn’t think we’d ever grow food for anyone but ourselves. We were busy, and they were doing a fine job. 

Then we decided that subdivision life wasn’t for us. We wanted some space to breathe and some room to enjoy walking with our dogs and each other. We wanted to grow lots of different plants and be free of “supervising” neighbors. We thought 3-5 acres would be manageable for us, even with our frequently busy schedules. The only problem? We couldn’t find 3-5 acres with a decent house on it that we could afford. So we waited, and we kept looking. Then one morning, after a couple of weeks of neighborly aggravation, Eric handed me his phone showing a real estate listing. I started scanning through pictures, looking for the other shoe, and not seeing it. I said, “What’s wrong with this?” The short answer was, nothing, really, except that it was nearly ten acres. [The long answer is what you might expect from a neglected, foreclosed house, but that’s a story for another day.] To make this long story short, we hustled ourselves out of the house to take a preliminary look at the place before I had to be at rehearsal, and we made an offer a few days later.