Dan and I were lucky enough to have yet another opportunity to travel this weekend - my lovely and dear friend, Lauren, got married in a barn in Somerset, Wisconsin, just across the border from Minnesota. It was a beautiful wedding and she a beautiful bride, and the drive through rural Wisconsin was a most welcome reprieve from city life.
What's more, Dan and I have been flushing out a lot of our future plans and aspirations, and one of the things we talk about doing on our future homestead is using the land as an event space: as a place for chef dinners, weddings and charity events. We'd like to have a learning and sharing space that promotes community and connection to farmer and land alike. It was nice and motivational to see this idea in action. I've been reading a lot about flower farming and we've of course been working on our vegetable gardening, and we'd like our homestead to have both of these elements, as well as chickens, ducks, and either goats or a cow or two. I try not to get too ahead of myself, as the most prevalent piece of advice I keep coming across in my reading is to start out small and build a little with each year. I am attempting to curb my tendency to want to do everything all at once and as soon as possible. This is difficult to do. One of my goals for the summer is to visit local farms, and when we returned home from Wisconsin this evening, there happened to be an article in the Chicago Tribune about just that. I'm particularly interested in the Soil Sisters event in late July where "women from a dozen or more small, south-central Wisconsin farms (all 150 miles or less from Chicago) team up to share their stories about career transition, self-sufficiency, good cooking and resourcefulness." How encouraging! Mother Earth News will also be descending upon the Dairy State Aug. 8-9 to teach attendees about "how to age cheese, make butter, can jam, cook eggs and eat organically on a slim budget. Learn the basics about starting a farm, butchering a hog, using herbs for first-aid treatments, raising chickens or alpacas, and building an electric car or motorcycle." I'm excited to check this out too. Lots of planning and plan-formulation are going on at our house these days.
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