Big Way Farm

Big Way Farm As "Big Way Farm", we produced and sold beef for a few years.

Then prices went crazy and we sold the farm, which did nothing to my love of reading and writing stories except downsize the piece of land I get to live on for a while.

I cannot wait to see if this bucket garden works.We had to buy some 2x4’s and the PVC pipe, but the buckets were free. Y...
06/05/2026

I cannot wait to see if this bucket garden works.

We had to buy some 2x4’s and the PVC pipe, but the buckets were free.

You can see if you zoom in that each bucket it actually a double bucket. We looked online at a few different ideas before settling on this method. There are strategically placed holes in the bottom and on the sides. The PVC pipe goes down to the outside bucket, where a reservoir of water can sit for the roots to find.
The double buckets also insulate from the direct afternoon sun they get. We don’t want those roots to cook!

We got the free buckets from three Chick-Fil-A restaurants. I called over a period of maybe two or three weeks to see if they were throwing away any buckets. They ship the pickles in these- and throw them out when they’re empty so, it’s a win-win to pick them up! They are at least $5 each to buy at the hardware store. That could have been $120 in buckets! Thank you, Chick-Fil-A!

I had to get bush cukes- a first for me. And determinate tomatoes. I did sneak in one indeterminate, on the corner. I have to have a German Johnson, at least one.

Maybe we will do a proper, in ground garden next year but, if this works, maybe we have found our new favorite thing!

For my mom’s seventy-somethingeth birthday, we parked the camper at my sister’s farmhouse in Ohio, and met her at her fa...
06/03/2026

For my mom’s seventy-somethingeth birthday, we parked the camper at my sister’s farmhouse in Ohio, and met her at her favorite Amish produce auction in Indiana🍅.

We stood together in the happy mayhem, the breeze through that open building brushing my skirt around my ankles. Mom made conversation with strangers, like she does, walking through the maze of flat white boxes full of neatly placed tomatoes and quarts of strawberries, racks and pallets of flowers of all kinds and colors. There were horses tied and stamping in a shelter nearby to two rows of black buggies, flatbed carts rolling through the graveled parking lot, and clumps of bidders loosely moved between the two Amish auctioneers (who were going at the same time!), flashing their bid numbers, making eye contact and nodding and whooping over the sound of the speakers and the voices calling numbers in mash of sound.

Mom said she takes it all when the auctioneer asks how many of the lot she wants. She loves a deal and she loves to win. She will spend hours and days working on those boxes of jewel colored produce to add to her beautiful stash of home canned food, lined up in rows on big plastic shelves in a back bedroom.

She’s only been canning for a few years and when she got the hang of it, she went all in.
If you grew up so hungry you’d sneak a can of green beans from the house for dinner to split with your siblings- and potentially get beat if you got caught- then can you imagine the joy of putting a years’ worth of food on the shelf, whenever you feel like it?

And to be a happy, healthy, seventy something years old, a military veteran, mom of four and grandma to a lot more than that- she could write the kind of book that would be worth reading. But instead she’s buying tomatoes and she’s happy as a clam about it.

Happy seventy somethingeth birthday to my mom. Thanks for making it through everything, and thanks for all the tomatoes 🍅

05/27/2026

The A/C unit at the new house looks as old as I feel anymore.

I got two quotes to replace it. The first was outrageous. The second quote was a little better but still I thought, I will go old school and sleep with the windows open and a box fan before pay that much money for a mere A/C unit. I heroically told the family that if it goes out this summer and things get really bad, we will buy a window unit. We will acclimate to the summer nights. We will be closer to nature! The way God intended for our bodies to live.

Well, it got really hot for a spell until these rain clouds moved in like they did the last few days. But the nights at least were cool. The box fans brought us down to 68 inside.

But now it’s warming up and it’s just muggy. We all woke up sticky and grumpy a few mornings in a row- the box fans don’t do a thing for the humidity- and in the middle of the night, I really questioned deep inside, just how close to nature man was ever intended to be. I didn’t tell the kids, but I turned the A/C on last night.

Well I didn’t need to tell them. That old units rusty fan will deafen you if you open the window right above it. You have to shout to have a conversation on the back porch and it’s still hard to hear.

But I slept so hard last night I even pulled up a blanket. And we all woke up a little bit brighter. Maybe the old gal has one more summer in her?

But I got very sidetracked telling about our A/C unit that roars- I came on here to show you my Tractor Supply find: baby turkeys! To grow out for Thanksgiving. They will call in every turkey in town if I open the windows- they must cheep fifteen times louder than any chick I’ve raised ever has. (I think they are fifteen times as cute, too).

They’re in the carport-turned-sunroom. It doesn’t have HVAC, so that greenhouse effect makes it a great temp for the babies. Just warm enough to sleep all the day. I steal the heat lamp from the tortoise at night (Fred- that’s another story) and keep it on the turkeys. They think night is day, it’s as bright as the beach!

So they cheep all night long and it echoes throughout the house- but I can’t hear them because I’ve got the A/C on.

I dropped one kiddo off to ride up to Charlottesville with his NJROTC group. They did color guard for a nationally telev...
05/26/2026

I dropped one kiddo off to ride up to Charlottesville with his NJROTC group. They did color guard for a nationally televised lacrosse game held at UVA. It was sprinkling rain, we drove under heavy skies.

Then I crossed town to drop the other kiddo off near the airport to ride down to the Veteran’s cemetery with Civil Air Patrol, where he would participate in the wreath laying ceremony. He walked up to the group with his chin high, gray-green cap on right and pants tucked into his shiny black boots.

Then I headed back home to our little road up the side of a mountain, underneath clouds so low and gray it was like they wanted to see just how close they could get to the treetops without actually touching them. I sat up by the front window with my oldest and watched the rain and we scrolled our phones for a quiet few minutes. My dad's cousin posted a photo honoring their uncle who was KIA in the Philippines, two months before WW2 ended. I asked her if I could share it.

I told my oldest- I just realized that he fought in the same country, at the same time, as my grandfather. Two young men, distantly related, sons of same Russian-German prairie town, engaged in hand to hand combat on a mountainous jungle island on the other side of the world, as American soldiers.

How it must have rocked that tightly knit community when one of theirs didn’t come home. That group of immigrant families who just fifty years before had staunchly dug themselves in as American landowners- the language barrier, tornadoes and blizzards and dust storms and even the Great Depression could not drive them out- so that their kids could live in the land of the free.

Say what you want about America, there are a lot of people like my ancestors who decide that even an empty corner of South Dakota is better than what they left. Not one of them went back to Russia. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to come here.

I am back at home with everything I love, and thinking of the fallen young sons and daughters from all over this great country today. The families who watched them leave and serve, the communities that were never quite the same.

And it seems fitting today that we remembered, and it rained.

“Carpe Diem” was everywhere at the dawn of my young adulthood. I heard it in at least three graduation speeches in a row...
05/23/2026

“Carpe Diem” was everywhere at the dawn of my young adulthood. I heard it in at least three graduation speeches in a row. It was tattooed on the forearm of one friend, on the back of another.

I heard it to mean- seize the day, in the manner of a race where you didn’t have much time so you yank some piece of fruit off of a vine and squeezed it with all one’s strength into a jar, because it might be gone tomorrow. Throw it back, and don’t miss a drop. If you aren’t half manic all the time, you aren’t Carpe Diem-ing hard enough.
(the origins of FOMO, anyone?)

So it turns out, that an ordinary life watching myself, my husband, my kids (and newly minted adult kids, plus the people they drag into all of this), is kind of hard to beat many days and none of us are rushing and grasping and seizing and squeezing much at all. Life is still good. Even when there are hard things! But gosh it’s especially good when I’m not clutching at everything or going “full send” every single time.

Turns out; a new board game, a spontaneous hunt for blooming mountain laurel on a day off, my favorite people in the world all in town and in the front yard, my boys finding (shock!) common ground and even (gasp and shock!) sending me a selfie of it!- is a wonderful way to spend a moment, and I didn’t have to rush in and hold onto any of it for dear life. Like the beginning of a schoolyard dodgeball game.

Oh I’m sure there’s a better interpretation of Carpe Diem out there, just like there are billions of people who are closer to God and are able to help more people and invent bigger things than I am.

I have seen enough sorrow to know that anything could happen to permanently change my life, at the drop of a hat.

But if I got to speak to someone graduating this summer, or embarking on a new adventure in their young life- I think I would ask them to approach the trajectory of their life in a manner more akin to planting things than seizing them. I would say something like:

Plant flowers out front.
If you move, plant some more.
Don’t give up on God.
Start a family.
Seek wisdom from God, and know that he loves you.
It won’t be perfect, but gosh you will have some wonderful days.

The heavy things in life are loud enough- and yet there are baby box turtles 🐢 and a twelve year old with a heart to hel...
05/20/2026

The heavy things in life are loud enough-

and yet there are baby box turtles 🐢 and a twelve year old with a heart to help it over the fence ❤️ , long (for me!) runs 🏃‍♀️ down a country road, a new sunflower 🌻 patch in front of the house, and bread pretty enough for a photo 📸

Maybe some social media posters over-polish things for likes, but, I think most of us are sharing the beautiful however we can 🌅

We won’t be selling beef for a good long while. The logistics are saying no and the math is saying a harder no right now...
05/20/2026

We won’t be selling beef for a good long while. The logistics are saying no and the math is saying a harder no right now!

If we had a bunch of bull calves, maybe. We had a whole little crop of heifers, two calving seasons in a row, and just one bull calf. Heifers are too valuable to turn into freezer beef and steers are too pricey to buy!

The good news is, we dropped our lone two-crops-ago steer off last night at KC Farms Meats to process. They’ve got their operation down so well at this point, them and a few others in the area, that I can say confidently that there is good local beef for those who want it. KC Farms is what I bought when our beef ran out a few months ago because I know how they farm and I know you are getting exactly what you are told you are getting. It’ll be excellent beef. And processed right on site.

I’ve bought from Lazy Acres Angus a while back and I would say the same for them. I’m a huge fan of tripleoaksfarm for pork. I’m sure many others in the area also are wonderful this is just who I’ve scouted out and found they go above and beyond with their animals and processing standards. I will pay a little extra for that peace of mind.

Free to the first taker: Two Austrolorp HensOldMean as a snakeStill layingCome and get em!!!
05/18/2026

Free to the first taker: Two Austrolorp Hens

Old
Mean as a snake
Still laying

Come and get em!!!

It’s my last day to have twins, until next year. And this pic of us might be my favorite! It was the end of Justin’s thi...
05/16/2026

It’s my last day to have twins, until next year. And this pic of us might be my favorite!

It was the end of Justin’s third year of medical school- his third year of having a wife and second year of being a dad- an absolute grinder for someone in their early twenties.

He a month long rotation scheduled at a hospital in Oregon; travel and housing paid for if he took it. He wanted so badly for me to see the west and we had no money to travel on, so, we packed up our station wagon and headed west, with the promise of a gas reimbursement check and a student house to stay in when we got there.

By day we rigged a portable DVD player onto a platform strung between the front seat headrests, and played Elmo into the backseat, right behind our heads, for thousands of miles.

(I can sing several episodes- the same episodes- verbatim- to this day).

At night we erected our tents and waited for some blessed cool air to descend onto our campsite, so that our babies didn’t roast inside those vinyl greenhouses.

In other words, there wasn’t much sleeping between Illinois and Billings.

Maybe it was the cowboy who tipped his hat at me at a gas station somewhere past Sturgis. Maybe it was my first sighting of tumbleweed (I’m that big of a romantic!). Maybe it was Justin’s excitement at seeing the snow capped ridge ahead, way up in the sky in Wyoming- but I remember, vividly, crossing the Missouri River in South Dakota and entering a foreign landscape, and feeling more at home between that point and the Beartooth Pass that bridges the high plains over the Rockies and into Yellowstone country than I ever had, anywhere, up to that point.

I linger on this picture every time it comes up. It is from a precious and exhausted era before social media, digital cameras, smart phones, enough money, and before we had any sense at all. It was not the worst way to be.

And so now that my twins are roughly the age I was in this picture, they are also out adventuring with no money, but with more sense than I ever had and more grace for themselves, as they should. I hope they can look back someday and think, too- it was not the worst way to be, for sure.

My girls are together, my boys are in their rooms for the night- one with his dog probably on the bed and I hear the muf...
05/15/2026

My girls are together, my boys are in their rooms for the night- one with his dog probably on the bed and I hear the muffled sound of an audiobook from the other, Justin is tapping away at the laptop at the kitchen table. He turned off the overhead light and said something I couldn’t fully hear about the sunset and I loved the shade of light from it on the wall behind him.

And I’m in my favorite spot, by the front window, curled up with a book. Like a house cat.

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Hardy, VA

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+15402964864

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