It’s been a busy couple of weeks and as the garden continues to grow, we’ve actually got our own big change in the works. A week ago, we had our offer accepted on a property outside of Shepherdstown, West Virginia where we plan to relocate our family and start our farm! Staying true to my love of small scale, we’ve been targeting properties with about 2- 2.5 open acres, with the goal of having an acre and a half in production. While we love Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, our research showed us that the D.C. metro area offers much more in the way of market outlets for local produce. That, added to the fact that being only a little over an hour from D.C. puts us much closer to family and friends, led us to focus our search on Frederick and Washington Counties in Maryland and, finally, Jefferson County in West Virginia.
Buying a property to farm is a whole different ballgame than just buying a home. Rather than looking for the right house, we are really looking for the right land. Each time a property comes on the market that fits our overall criteria, we have to use the NRCS web soil survey website to make sure the soil is deep enough, not too rocky, not too wet, and many other criteria that make or break a healthy farm. Once we had our offer accepted, it wasn’t just a matter of having a home inspection. Instead, we spent a couple of hours on the property last week checking for invasive weeds and taking samples of the soil that we then sent to a lab to have tested for nutrients and to check that there are no dangerous heavy metals like lead or arsenic in the soil. Next, we need to have the well checked to make sure there is enough water to irrigate the crops and that there are no dangerous toxins present in the water supply. We’re just keeping our fingers crossed that everything comes out clean or else it’s back to the tedious search process.
So what’s the longterm plan? If all the testing works out, we plan to move mid-summer and start the work of turning the 2.9 acres into a small-scale, organic farm in time for the 2018 growing season. We plan to do a few farmers markets as well as a small CSA in the D.C. metro area. This has been my dream for years and it’s both amazing and terrifying to finally see it getting close to reality, so hold your breaths with us…
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