OPEN TO HOSTING FARMSTAY VISITORS

This post is for anyone interested in coming to our farm for a farmstay, to live with us for a little while, share meals with us, and help with whatever farm or homestead tasks and projects we have to do.  

ABOUT OUR HOMESTEAD AND FARM

We make our dollar living farming, mainly selling vegetables but also a little beef, some orchard fruits and nuts, mushrooms, and other farm products... almost entirely direct-market (farmers market, CSA...), but we're at least as focused on the self-sufficient part of our living. We're extremely (by modern American standards) self-sufficient in food. Over the last few years we've averaged under $500/year on purchased food for our whole family of 8. We grow/forage all of the vegetables we eat, all our fruits, all of our nuts, wild and cultivated mushrooms, all of our dry beans/peas, the heirloom corn we use for all of our tortillas and hominy and cornbread, all of our wheat, all of our honey; we raise goats and cattle for all of our dairy (milk, soft and hard/aged cheeses, yogurt, ice cream…) as well as for meat; we raise various poultry and occasional hogs; we process our own rennet, salt cure our own pork; our butter and animal fats provide all our cooking fats. If you come for a farmstay with us, you’ll not only have the chance to be involved in growing and producing and preserving these different things, but we also share all our meals together with our visitors, so you'll get to eat exceptionally homegrown-organic meals every day, too.

To the extent that we're able we're very willing to trade profit (which isn't great with small farms to start with) for the sake of things like being able to eat our own food (as opposed to just growing the most profitable things and buying the rest of our diet from mass-market sources), avoiding disposable plastics, not outsourcing things to conventional farms (even if they're allowed under the USDA organic rules, like buying poultry from conventional hatcheries) that we can do in more responsible ways, etc.  So, for example, we do things like picking up lots of acorns (mainly by hand) to feed pigs through the months when there aren't acorns on the ground and to be able to raise hogs without any purchased feed. We save a majority of the garden seeds we plant, well over 100 different open-pollinated/heirloom varieties, and propagate almost all of the fruit trees and other perennials we grow. We grow a couple hundred different varieties of several dozen different species of fruit and nut trees (and bushes and vines...)  We grow bamboo for stakes and trellises and countless other uses. We harvest grass seed for our own use. We manage our forest areas for lumber, posts, and some random uses like hickory bark for chair bottoms, oak splints for homemade baskets, wood for carving spoons, making our own axe handles... We render fats to make our own bath and laundry soap.  We've built a small roundwood log cabin with trees from our own land with wood joinery (saddle notches for the walls, pegged lap joints for the rafters, etc.) done with hand tools, but still need to make windows and a door... chink between the logs... We've since bought a small bandsaw mill and have lots more building and other woodworking-type projects that we'd like to prioritize in the next few years.

WHAT WE HAVE TO OFFER AND WHY WE HOST VISITORS

We're not offering any kind of employment or pay, and we're not asking for any money from our visitors either.  We don't have any employees, and we don't depend on guests to do any of the things we do.  What we have to offer is very different from any kind of employment on the one hand and also very different from a bed and breakfast on the other hand.  What we mainly have to offer is an opportunity to try out and experience our way of farming and making a living and the food and the work that goes along with it.  And alongside that as much as time allows we're happy to show and teach people how to do things we're doing that our visitors are interested in learning about.  We enjoy hosting visitors mainly for the opportunities to interact, make friends, share the food and farm things we’re passionate about, to inspire an appreciation in visitors for homegrown food and low-tech organic ways of farming, and to teach and mentor and also learn from people interested in doing the same kind of things we’re doing.  We love to discuss visitors’ how-to, why-not, what-if… questions. Besides mealtimes, we spend a lot of the average work day working together with visitors, too, so there’s lots of time to discuss farming things and answer questions.  We enjoy hosting visitors from all over, but we’ve particularly enjoyed the two extremes of international visitors and visitors from close enough that we've been able continue to connect and share in common interests afterwards.  

PREVIOUS HOSTING HISTORY

  We're not currently signed up with wwoof or any other organizations, but from about 2010 until 2019 we hosted almost 50 visitors (mostly through wwoof) with lots of great experiences.  We quit hosting visitors largely because of limited space issues after our sixth child was born, but we have a partially completed primitive log cabin that's now far enough along to put a bed in it, so we're open to hosting visitors again.

THE KINDS OF THINGS VISITORS HELP WITH

Types of work we can frequently use help with from visitors include milking, setting out transplants, weeding, hoeing, harvesting, packing up for the farmers’ market, rotating/watering animals, setting up and taking down temporary fences, food preservation, and lots of other random farm and self-sufficiency projects.

HOUSING

  For the months when it's reliably warm enough (roughly mid April or early May through late September or mid October) we have a partially completed primitive log cabin where visitors can stay.  At this stage the cabin is basically open air, but there's a regular (twin) bed and mosquito net (although mosquitos generally aren't especially bad on our farm), and we'll have curtains for the windows for a little privacy.

  Visitors come to our house for meals and to use the bathroom.  Internet is available in a separate outbuilding.

  Our options for housing visitors in the colder months are extremely limited, so at this point we're pretty much limited to hosting visitors in the warmer months.

 

FOOD

Visitors (except for day visitors) need to be able and willing to eat wheat, corn, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy.  We share all our meals with visitors, and we aren't set up to have visitors cook for themselves, so visitors mostly need to be happy to eat pretty much the same food we eat.

LENGTH OF STAY

We recommend 3-5 week visits for first time visitors, but especially if you're taking time off from a full-time job or from a farm of your own we're open to much shorter visits.  (Besides farmstay visitors we're also very open to day visitors.)

TRANSPORTATION

Our farm is in a very rural setting, but we’re only about 35 miles west of Winston-Salem and about 60 miles north of Charlotte. We could pick up and drop off visitors from a nearby bus station, etc., but a car would be pretty essential for doing anything independently away from the farm during your stay, because bicycle and public transportation options are extremely limiting. 

MISCELLANEOUS

  We're a Christian family with traditional Christian religious beliefs, but we're happy to host Christian and non-Christian visitors.  We're a family of 8 minus possibly one or two of our adult children that may or may not be living on our homestead at any given time.  No drugs.  No pets.

CONTACT US!

If you're interested in coming for a visit, we'll send you an application with more detailed information.  Reviews and references from past visitors available.  Feel free to contact us for any other reason.

Winter Wreaths

 Nora has been making wreaths the last couple years and these are the first ones of the season. 

Black walnuts

  About ten year ago we grafted over about a half dozen wild black walnut tree saplings to named varieties of black walnuts selected mainly for superior nut cracking traits. 

  Black walnuts have much thicker shells than English walnuts and pecans, etc. and black walnuts take a lot of time to crack out, but the black walnuts we have to offer are relatively a lot easier to crack out for two reasons.  One, they're substantially larger than most wild black walnuts.  And, two, perhaps even more significant, the shape of the nuts we have to offer is smoother with fewer lobes and indentations, so the pieces don't get caught as many different ways in the shell and it's easier to get the pieces out.  We'll often get pieces of nut meat to come out in whole quarters on the first crack. 

  We did a comparison test several years ago cracking nuts from the best wild tree on our property and the nuts from these grafted trees, and we were able to crack out 3-4 times as many ounces of nuts in the same amount of time from the grafted trees as with the wild trees.  That's still slow compared to a pecan, for example, but it's a major improvement over typical wild black walnuts.
  Black walnuts have a strong flavor, so it doesn't take a lot of nuts to add flavor to muffins or cakes or ice cream or to any of the other things to which you might want to add black walnut flavor and some crunch.
  Black walnuts can be cracked with a hammer, but we like to use an extra heavy duty nut cracker made especially for black walnuts.  

Photo tour of the farm

  Most of these photos are old photos already on our blog, but they're all here together for a broader look at our farm.

Corn made into hominy, ground, pressed, and cooked on the griddle into tortillas.

Cracking black walnuts

Our favorite summer pea variety.  Our original seed source was Eric's great uncle in Harnett County.

A sampling of different summer pea varieties we grow.

In the background are our first attempt at storing hay in old-fashioned haystacks and our little corn crib.

Moveable shade for the goats made out of bamboo.

 

 

One of our (Nora's) first aged goats milk cheeses.  We were very happy with it.

Leaf mold to be used for potting mix once finished

One of our farm visitors helping us hang up onions to dry.

Our now 16 and 18 year olds milking the cow.

One of our farm visitors milking the cow.

Skimming milk to make butter.

Butter

Cheese press

A quick hive inspection on a warm winter day.

Making candles with our beeswax.

Pawpaws

Hardy kiwis (smaller, smooth skinned/not fuzzy, delicious)

Kaki X American persimmon tree

Kaki persimmon

Threshing black beans

Winnowing black beans

A photo from soon after we planted our first apple trees, well over 10 years ago.

Jersey steaks

Making hardwood charcoal in our outdoor water stove

Just some of the seeds we saved one year.

Onion seed

Onion seed after threshing

Nursery bed prepared for planting onion seed in the late fall.  We set onion plants out in the garden the following spring.

Mama hen

The first litter of piglets born on our farm

A neighbor friend helping us scald and butcher a hog

Cold frame

Young goat roasted with spring onions, butter and garlic, asparagus, fried grit cakes and lettuce salad.

 

The seed cleaner we use mostly for cleaning (sifting, scalping, and winnowing the remaining chaff and weed seeds out of) our wheat.

Our favorite salad - dried figs, goat cheese,  and lightly toasted pecans.

Fresh wild-harvested winter oyster mushrooms

A weekly CSA share

Cultivated shitake mushrooms

Frying sweet potato chips

Persimmons from a wild tree on our farm

Persimmon pulp

Canned and dried food

Digging a trench to lay a drain tile through the middle of the garden beside our house.

Saving seeds from the tomato variety we grow more of than any other, an extra meaty variety.

Tortillas with a mix of different varieties of dried peas (similar to black-eyed peas), with canned pork, goat cheese, with fresh cilantro and onions, roasted red peppers from the freezer, fresh Swiss chard on the side, cow's milk to drink...

 

Bamboo shoots

Getting ready to install the water stove and making an extra large split bamboo basket for storing acorns.

Bedding the different varieties of sweet potatoes we grow

Harvesting potatoes

Sampling sweet potatoes.  Sweet potatoes are one of our favorite crops to grow and to eat.

With some protection on the coldest winter nights we're able to grow outstanding quality citrus with hardly any other trouble.

The inside of our pea sheller, which we use for dry peas and beans

Fermenting peppers for hot sauce

Reunion with former WWOOF farm stay visitors

Harvesting peanuts

Splitting basket splints from white oak

Harvesting tulip-poplar bark for siding