Hey everyone! If you are new here, welcome. Thanks for joining us, a lot has happened since I have written on the blog. Our daughter is turning two soon and I just can't believe how quickly time seems to fly by.
We have sold our home to a wonderful, God given couple and we had the amazing opportunity of purchasing part of Mike's childhood farm. We will be moving here in the next few months and though bittersweet to leave our home we have put so much into - we are quite excited to start from a blank slate. There is a home and a shop/barn there already so that is exciting. However there are no garden spaces established other than 2 raised beds, which gives me the unique challenge and opportunity of building from scratch and learning how to use the land in the best way possible.
I have also started a YouTube channel - The Yoder Homestead. If you are already a part of the community - thank you for your support! If you haven't yet go on and check it out. I share lots of gardening ventures and all I learn along the way. I have a lot of new things that I would like to try this year and I will be sharing along the way.
Mike and I will be celebrating our 10 year anniversary this year and as time has gone on we are realizing how important it is to simplify our way of life and get 'Back to our Roots' if you will. We have had the amazing opportunity to travel and spend our lives enjoying so much together and we are thankful for all the places we have gone and the things we have done. We are also thankful for our heritage and how we were both raised and how much our parents have taught us - it made us realize how far we actually had been slipping away from the simplicity in our food especially compared to our childhood lives. We had fallen into the ease of just relying on the grocery store for everything and then 2020 hit and we experienced shortages in our lives in ways we had never experienced before. Before 2020 came I was pregnant in 2019 and realized how much I missed going out into the garden like I did as a child and eating fresh sun ripened food, that I told myself I will create that for our children and that drove my love for growing things even more.
I always loved planting flowers and decorating pots with beautiful flowers from the greenhouses in our local area, but I never dove into food gardening and now sitting here in the early part of 2022 I have 2 years under my belt and have learned so much that I just cannot wait to grow ALL the things yet again. Each year is filled with trial and error and some you win and some you lose and that is the beauty of the garden. Growing food and brining it into our home has filled my heart in so many ways and then seeing our sweet little girl snack in the garden freely makes me realize that this is exactly what I wanted her to have and to experience. Watching her enjoy fresh food and flowers made me feel like a child again walking into my mom's garden and enjoying all the beautiful, delicious food and flowers she had grown.
I have many dreams for our new property and I am so excited to try new methods and grow food and flowers that I never grew before - I know it will be a journey and one can't do everything right away and I'll learn more and more as I go but man am I excited!
We are coming to the end of our family vacation time here in Florida and I am so excited to get home and start my seeds and watch them grow as I nourish the soil and plants. Then we also have the opportunity to create completely new garden spaces! There are so many great things coming for this year and I cannot wait to share them all with you.
Also I'll be doing a blog post pretty regular - where I'll be adding links to specific things and answering questions and sharing more details about specific projects and/or topics as the year goes along so make sure to check back in and subscribe to the newsletter here on my website for notifications.
Thank you for joining and thank you for your support! Cheers to 2022 and another opportunity to grow beautiful things in our garden.
-Karen
