Hello world!

After years of dreaming, my husband Alex and I have finally purchased our 9+ acre Homestead in the gorgeous Finger Lake Region of Upstate, NY! I am so excited to share our journey with everyone who (like me), finds inspiration and a sense of comfort in content that reflects similar goals and values. For me, this includes slowing down and live more mindfully, changing how we interact with our food systems, and creating abundance and beauty through gardening, home-cooked and preserved food, and giving space for creativity to shine. Oh, and leaving room for lots of laughter along the way!

I know I would not be where I am at now if I hadn’t found the amazing online community of Gardeners, Homesteaders and Homemakers who showed me I wasn’t crazy to crave a different kind of lifestyle and home. I hope that I can help inspire others as well, and connect with more people (like you!), who may be on similar journeys.

Here’s what you can expect from this blog:

• Updates, experiments, lessons-learned, tours, and photos as we build our zone 5b, 9+ Acre Homestead in upstate NY. This will include an annual Mandala Garden, a dwarf fruit tree orchard, food forests, cut flower gardens, perennial gardens, keeping chickens and ducks, and so much more.
• Recipes using high quality home-grown and conventional ingredients, focusing on from-scratch, health-aware cooking. I am a FOODIE, first and foremost, and you can rest assured that there will not be any boring food here.
• Sharing our experiences and experiments with more value-conscious living. This includes how we’re utilizing Permaculture and regenerative agriculture principles into our farm and lifestyle, and what we’re doing to heal (and mitigate damage to) ourselves, our communities, and our planet.
• Our progress as we remodel our fixer-upper home– from before-and-after reveal tours to step-by-step walk-throughs of how we’ve completed certain projects to create the Farmhouse of our dreams in a sustainable, budget-friendly way.
• Everything else that pops up in our crazy, unpredictable lives! From personal updates, DITL vlogs, contests, craft projects, Holiday prep, you name it!

More than anything, I am striving to be authentic and share our real experiences living this lifestyle. Even when the dream comes true- it’s still not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s important to know that you’re not alone, and failing at something doesn’t mean you’re a failure. I’ll always be upfront on what isn’t going well, as well as celebrating when things are. You need some bitterness to make you appreciate the sweet times, after all!

I hope we will get to know one another better in the coming years, and learn from each other along the way. Please reach out via my contact page if you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback; I would genuinely love to hear from you! My goal is to post to this blog at least weekly, so I encourage you to subscribe to get email updates so you can see them whenever you’re posted. I will also be launching a Youtube channel very, very shortly, and I look forward to seeing you there as well.

Until then, I hope you and yours are safe, healthy, and happy. Many blessings!