Why We Started Growing All Our Own Food

For as long as I can remember, I always loved going to both of my grandfather's houses because that meant seeing cows, getting to eat Papa’s fresh tomatoes and Grandpa Don's green beans. I grew up with farmers on all sides, and like most folks in Kentucky, where my entire kin hails from, everyone’s parents and grandparents before them also had farms. They had to grow their own food to eat, and feed their handfuls of children. This was a human norm until recently, but neuroscience research indicates that learning and memory create lasting changes in the brain by altering gene expression through epigenetic and DNA-related mechanisms. These studies challenge the traditional view that memories are stored solely in neural connections by revealing that the physical and chemical state of DNA itself is dynamically involved in memory formation. All that to say, farming was and has always been in my genes, even if it skipped a generation or two along the way, due to grocery store convenience or just plain “never wanting to weed another garden again, because grandfather made us weed every spring and summer growing up”.

It was only natural when moving to a 70 acre homestead in rural Pennsylvania, that my curiosity for farming began. We live at least 30 minutes from the nearest grocery store, and forty five minutes from the nearest Walmart. We live in what you could call a destination town for New Yorkers and their second homes, next to a lake in the mountains, therefore prices aren’t cheap for food here. On top of all these factors, the difficulty of knowing and trusting where our food comes from when we buy from the supermarket had us considering farming as soon as possible.

The first summer here, we bought from the local farmer’s market and thought, ‘how hard can this be?’ Boy, were we in for a treat! Not only was farming hard, but quite possibly one of the most difficult yet most rewarding things I have ever done in my life. With that being said, our property didn’t become a farm overnight. That first year we started small, with a humble flower bed for the pollinators outside the front porch. We found old pallets from a dumpster and began building raised garden beds with two trellises. Eric wanted to make sure I wouldn't experience back pain during planting and harvest, so we designed them in a way that it would be level to my hips, as opposed to bending frequently during the growing season. We filled these empty rectangles with stone from the abundance of the land from old rock walls and formations from God knows how long ago, as well as dead and decayed tree branches and logs. This was to make sure there was sufficient drainage for water, and ample food for our worm friends that would make our soil rich and healthy. Afterwards we spent quite a while filling the beds with equal parts mushroom dirt (very nitrogen rich) and composting soil. This is where the real journey began, that fall we planted GARLIC!

Garlic is one of the easiest foods to grow, but it takes the longest. We planted in the fall after our first summer here, covered them with pine needles, dead leaves and mulch to insulate over the winter to avoid ruining our crop with moisture or mold, and we uncovered the beds after the last frost of the winter the following year. Our first buds didn’t begin popping up until the spring that next year. That spring we planted dozens of seeds, which filled all four raised beds almost instantly. We quickly began to expand our garden and used the remainder of our pallets and reclaimed wood from Eric’s jobs to make long trellis arched raised beds. The groundhog found our watermelon growing, decimated our entire crop, and those trellises transformed into a greenhouse quicker than a match on dry straw. We couldn’t cover those beds fast enough!

With a fancy, brand new to me greenhouse for the first time, I made my first farming faux pas, growing squash inside a greenhouse. That thing became a jungle and by the end of that growing season, I couldn’t even walk inside the greenhouse without using a machete to get through it. That year, we grew and harvested a bounty of food! We grew pumpkins (for my mom), butternut squash, spaghetti squash, summer squash, garlic, tomatoes, cantaloupe, carrots, beets, okra, dinosaur kale, butter lettuce, sugar snap peas, varieties of hot peppers, potatoes, kohlrabi, and just about every medicinal herb and flower you can possibly imagine. There were some definite learning curves along the way, and without TVs, WiFi, or cellphone service, we were winging it, relying on old fashion books, and elders in the community to learn from for the most part. We enjoyed our abundance of food well into the next summer when it was time to plant again.  We improved where we fell short the first time, and expanded our garden into what now feels like a farm. 

I went away to help my mother through shoulder surgery and upon my return, Eric had built me a 40’ by 50’ fenced in ground garden bed! A proper place to grow my squash, pumpkins and berries! We started cultivating even more obscure medicinal herbs after visiting the Amish and Mennonites in Lancaster, PA. This got my mind moving in a new direction, thinking how am I going to preserve all off these amazing plants! I remembered we had harvested some wild mullein from our backyard the year prior, and made it into a tincture. Eric was struggling with allergies while working in the garden, and suddenly we remembered we had made a solution for that! We finally put the tinctures we made from the previous year, hoping we made them properly, to good use! And to our amazement, the tincture worked! Eric had been urging me to bottle some of the other homemade remedies I was making before, and I was being stubborn. I was feeling unsure if what I was making for my sensitivities would even be something others would want to receive or enjoy. But, Jesus was continuing to move mountains in my heart, I gave my life to Him, and Sacred Rose Organics was born!

We haven’t looked back since and I absolutely LOVE growing my own food, I feel better, I eat healthier, and I know where my food comes from…my backyard. I lost thirty pounds and counting, from eating what we grow, fasting accompanied with prayer, and outdoor chores and farm work as exercise. I am fulfilled, satisfied, and gratified seeing the seeds we plant become meals we can enjoy and medicine we can share. If you have the opportunity, the space and the time, grow some food! Even if isn’t a whole year’s worth of food, or acres of farmland; a little bit of dirt, some heirloom seeds, and a whole lot of love can create something money can’t buy. It might even change your life for the better in the process!