2021 dreams and goals
What’s in store for J&J Acres in 2021?
In 2021 I’m taking our homesteading to the next level. I’ve spent the last month looking back at the work we’ve done, and spent the last couple weeks taking stock of where we are now. In this blog post I’ll be sharing a few of my biggest dreams for the near future.
Right now we’ve got five major dreams that we’re actively making a reality:
Growing our family
Keeping our day jobs
Growing our brand from a hobby to a business
Renovating our home
Setting up our home to be multi-generational
Some major steps towards these dreams include juggling life as a first-time mom with my day-job and my passions. There are a lot of things I’ll be trying for the first time this year. Letting go of the expectation of success is already a struggle, and it’s only January.
I’ve sewed hundreds of seeds in the greenhouse, and they’er all going to need potting up.
We have more eggs than we know what to do with, and feed costs keep rolling in.
I’ve got 1800 square feet of winter rye growing happily in the back yard that will need to be harvested sometime before July.
And I’m almost 8 months pregnant, tired, and as of last week constantly nauseous.
So how are we going to do it all?
Spoiler alert - we’re not.
But here’s what we are going to do: we’re going to plant a lot of the seeds that have survived in our hearts through all the neglect and denial we’ve rained down on them while we got ourselves in position to take off. The ideas that nag at us as we try and fall asleep, and make us order catalogs for things we can’t afford and drive really slow past certain parking lots or stores to look at our dreams in real life.
To provide us with the means to chase these crazy wild scary dreams we’re committed to keeping our jobs through this global pandemic and beyond. Yea, it may sound a bit obvious, but it’s time to get a little real here. We have been extraordinarily lucky to have two relatively covid-safe jobs that have not only paid the bills, but let us purchase a small investment property to help us achieve our long-term financial goals. And it’s even harder to get up in the morning and actually keep doing it while the world is a raging dumpster fire.
We like our schedules, we even like our jobs. Making them a priority and solidifying in our hearts that they support our dreams is high up on the list for us. Burnout is real, we’ve been through it before and are making it a priority to make the room for recovery.
We’re saving up for a tractor - even though we’re in debt. We spent months in the past couple years working bloody blisters into our palms and inside our shoes moving literal tons of earth, sand, manure, gravel, and wood around our property, and soon we’ll have little ones underfoot - we won’t easily be able to take a long weekend and install a new chicken coop, harvest grains by hand, or double the size of our garden. When we have to re-gravel the driveway or upgrade the septic we’ll either have to find a way to do it ourselves or pay out the nose for someone to do it for us. And if we do it ourselves, we’ll need to find a way to do it quickly.
It seems utterly impossible - we’ve already had to pull from our modest funds we set aside for it to purchase flooring for the master bedroom. We know we’ll have to pull from it again if we run into any unexpected bumps in the road next year, and Jess - the main wage earner in our household - will be the one taking family leave, along with a significant decrease in income while he’s home learning to be an amazing father. Combined with the complications of covid, we know our families are behind us every step of the way but anticipate challenges to make sure everyone is provided for safely.
Despite all these fears, we still dream of having a little tractor with a bucket on one end and a scoop on the other. A little tractor that we can use to maximize our connection to these 1.8 acres, and to build the homesteading lifestyle and community we’ve been dreaming about since before we knew what it even looked like. So it’s on our list.
I’m building a second chicken coop and run from materials we already have laying around. Every time I see a picture of colorful eggs in a basket, I think “that could be me”. Every time I see a post on social media advertising rare-breed chicks for sale in the spring, raised on organic grains and green grass, I think “ that could be me”. Every time I run across someone in town who has a basket of rainbow eggs casually sitting on their counter ready to be turned into a delicious meal for their family and friends, I think “that could be me”. And yet I’ve never once considered buying the right chicks or getting the right permits to sell eggs.
So this year I’ll be figuring out and building an imperfect coop specifically for chickens who lay rainbow-colored eggs. I’ll be placing it by the garden, close to green grass and the compost pile, and I’ll be tackling the process of getting permits to sell eggs in a more professional setting.
Oh, and speaking of that more professional setting, I’ll be joining my local farmers market. I don’t know anyone who runs it, or who sells their wares there, or even if they’ll let me in since my farm is still in the beginning stages. All I know is that I have more eggs and vegetables and starts than I know what to do with every summer, and every time I pass a farmers market I still get the thought “that could be me”, and a deep indescribable sadness that it isn’t.
I may absolutely hate it, I might fail completely and not make a single sale, I might end up closing up shop and dedicating my time to postpartum recovery and learning to “mom” for the first time, but I’m signing the papers and giving myself the chance to to fail instead of no chances at all.
And throughout all these projects and all this planning and scheming and move-making the hubby and I will be taking messy steps towards finishing our home remodel, and setting the ground work to age in place. This includes planning out a vertical expansion to our home to allow for inter-generational living once our kids are grown, or if we ever want to provide a safe living quarters to our parents and bring them closer to their grandkids while they enjoy the final years of their lives. For all we know, we might be the ones who end up connecting with their grandchildren in our final years while allowing our children to save enough money to make their own dreams reality.
We would never have been able to build our dreams the way we have without our families. The idea that children are born, grow up, then separate completely at age 18 and are seldom seen or heard from again (the lifestyle that was all around us growing up) never resonated with us the way we thought it should. In the last couple years we’ve begun to full on question the notion that children are meant to fly the nest and instantly live independent lives, the way we are sometimes taught they should. We also realized that if we wanted our children to know their grandparents as more than just the people that gave them birthday money (or worse yet, become those figureheads in our own grandchildren’s lives) we would have to take real steps towards making age-appropriate spaces in our home, and soon.
Finally, we’ve decided to start taking more pictures. Write down our thoughts more. Put all the work we’ve done so far into a format that we can easily see, so we don’t forget to celebrate the fruits of our labors. Use our dusty business license to build a platform where we can share what we build, because over the last year I can’t deny any more that people actually want to see us build our dream. Like, are willing to click several buttons to see more of our projects, watch us take more on and even to be there for us when we inevitably have monstrous failures.
Which reminds me, stay tuned for a greenhouse update * cries internally *
I contracted an SEO and branding professional to help me build foot traffic to my website with the ultimate goal of earning actual real in-my-bank-account money from blogging and selling helpful tools and experience. This idea absolutely horrifies me to my very core. I cannot stress enough how absolutely bone shakingly terrified I am of this dream. The idea that I can write about the aspects of my life that feed my soul, and that indirectly money can come from that, and actually pay my bills? It’s made me cry more nights than I’m going to admit here. I don’t know why things that make us happy scare us more than anything else in the world but if my level of fear is any indicator, I really really want this. So, I’m going to build and monetize J&J Acres as a family business.
Even though sharing all this publicly gives me cold terror sweats as I imagine myself in January 2022 laughing at my naive 2021 dreams, it’s an important step to recognizing the real worth in dreaming. Dreaming lights a fire under my ass like goal-setting and planning and gym memberships motivates some of my friends. It’s part of the process of making space for the kind of person I am, not necessarily the person I want to be or think I should be, but the person who is here now doing all the work.
That person deserves to have their dreams recognized and respected, and to have the opportunity to love all over the dreams of their friends and community members.
