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 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 farm stay with us, you’ll not only have the chance to learn about growing and producing and preserving all 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 off 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 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, 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 have lots more building and other woodworking-type projects that we'd like to prioritize in the next few years.
WHY WE HOST VISITORS, LEARNING OPPORTUNITES
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 (and also because of pandemic complications), but we have a partially completed primitive log cabin that's now far enough along to put a bed in it and host 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, fence work, 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, 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 we have sometimes made exceptions for shorter visits.
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. Eric speaks rusty German, otherwise we can pretty much only speak English. 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. Feel free to contact us for any other reason.
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