Where did you learn how to do this stuff?

Whenever people visit our farm, whether it is to pick up a goat we've sold them or to just visit as a friend, we always seem to get asked the same question: "Where did you learn how to do this stuff?"

I grew up on my grandparent's farm about forty minutes from the one I now call home, Persimmon Farm. My grandfather grew up in the Cumberland Mountains during a time when having double-digit siblings was not uncommon and quitting school after 8th grade wasn't either. He left home to make his own way shortly after his mother died when he was thirteen, and was a sharecropper until he and my grandmother moved to Nashville when my mom was a baby. He finished school by taking classes at night after working 2 jobs during the day, became a welder and was an integral part in the construction of many of the hydroelectric dams in the Southeast,and still maintained a garden and small livestock in the places he lived. About ten years after moving to Nashville, he and my grandmother, along with my mom and aunt, moved to the ten-acre farm in Joelton, Tennessee, where all of the grandkids and several great-grandkids rode their first horse before taking their first steps.

A few years before I was born, Grandaddy suffered a serious injury that forced him to retire from the Army Corp of Engineers. Faced with retirement in his late forties, my grandfather returned full-time to doing what he knew and loved best: farming. When I came along, he and my grandmother poured their hearts into me, and I learned all of the ins and outs of homesteading from the smartest, most patient and loving people on the earth. After my mom returned to work when I was two, I spent my days at my grandparent's farm learning how to can, cook, garden, milk cows, build barns (my mom didn't learn of my grandfather's teaching me, at the age of three, how to roof a barn until just a few years ago after his death - the look on her face was priceless!), and plow a field with a mule among many other skills. I soaked up everything like a sponge. Cattle auctions, "harvesting" roosters, and the art of negotiating were part of our every day curriculum.

I took for granted that every kid grew up knowing how to tell the difference between a red oak and a white oak, or how to can green beans 100 quarts at a time using a metal drum, or how to make butter from the milk you got that morning from your cow, or any of the hundreds of other skills I learned from my grandparents. To me those things were normal, even though I should have realized that what was part of everyday life for a child in the early twentieth century was not the case for kids in the late twentieth century who grew up in suburbs.

Enter my husband: a kid who grew up in the suburbs and had zero experience on a farm. What he lacked in knowledge, though, he made up for in dedication and enthusiasm. From the first time he came to visit and ate some of my Grandaddy's fried pies and saw the goats playing king of the mountain on a pile of logs, he was hooked. Like me, he loved to spent time at the farm with my grandparents, learning everything he could, and my grandfather was thrilled to find in him a grandson in whom he could invest. When our son was born, he, too, rode his first horse before he could walk. We spent as much time as we could at this precious place until my grandfather died of cancer in 2009.

We had always dreamed of taking over his farm one day, but that didn't work out, so shortly after his passing, we realized we needed land (how we got our land will be the subject of another post) so that we could raise our son on a farm and pass on to him the values that had been given to us through my grandparents. In 2011, our dream was realized and Persimmon Farm was born. I feel confident in saying that if we hadn't been blessed by the influence of my grandparents, we wouldn't be where we are today. They are the ones who started us on the journey, and where we learned how to do most, if not all, of "this stuff." The lessons we learned on their farm gave us the confidence to go out on our own. The kind of knowledge you need to be run a small family farm just isn't readily available like it was when my grandparent's were growing up and we are very grateful they took the time to pour themselves into us.

I think my grandparents would be proud to see how far we've come. We are still learning to this day. We have a "no fear" policy at our farm when it comes to doing things ourselves. If something needs to be done, we try it,and more times than not, we've been successful. The times we've made mistakes or things didn't go the way we'd wished, they've been valuable lessons that we've built upon. We've had advice from the internet and from fellow farmers, but experience really is the best teacher. To see my husband in action now, you'd never know he is a former "city boy." The first year, we began our farm with a garden, 6 chickens and 2 goats. We now have 65 chickens ( I know, I have a problem), 2 pigs, 30 goats and a huge garden on just under 28 acres, and we've helped mentor several families as they've started their own farming adventure.

We'd love to hear from those of you who have farms - where did you learn "all this stuff?" We'd also love to hear from those of you who want to have a farm some day - what's holding you back?