Jackie Ritz

I am so excited that Erin from Blue Yurt Farms is sharing a piece of her life with all of us. Her story is so similar to mine (which I still need to share someday). The lure of homesteading calls even the most “corporate” of us all. I believe it’s because that is what we are designed to do. I hope you enjoy what she writes and I, truly, hope it encourages you to start thinking about what you can do to take a step towards raising your own food and enjoying the beautiful world around us. 

As I sit here in my big blue yurt, with a happy dog curled in a bright sun spot and chickens clucking outside…I think back to five years ago and how impossible this would all sound. Back then, my husband, Mike, and I were working intense corporate jobs in NYC and living a polluted, processed, stress filled life. 

We knew that we wanted to do something different with our lives, but we weren’t sure what exactly that meant or how to get there. A health scare around that time motivated us to change our eating habits to pastured only meat, and unprocessed, whole foods. That was definitely the step that got us moving toward our current homestead life.

The next step was finding a home based income stream to decrease our stress levels. As web designers by trade, it wasn’t a far jump to start our own business doing the same, but BOY was it stressful. Following your dreams is way, way more difficult than living with the status quo. But the rewards are also much higher, I can promise you that.

After the first two years of building up our business in the city, we were able to relocate to a semi-rural area in NJ. We still had constant traffic noise outside our windows, but at least we were living in an old farmhouse! Around that time we started visiting local farms and dreaming of a future with chickens of our own.

Our friends laughed at us for making kombucha, butter and our own hamburger buns, but we loved any little taste of homestead. We even convinced our neighbors to collaborate on a garden space.

Imagine six mid-20 adults laughing and giggling through Home Depot with grow lights and seed starters…and you might come to the same conclusion as the employees did. “Suuuure you’re growing vegetables, sure you are,” they said.

But we truly were that excited about the prospect of growing our own food, as were our friends. The garden that year was a bit of a flop, from a growing standpoint since we were all such beginners, but we were bitten by the homestead bug and hard. That first home grown sugar snap pea was the best we’d ever had (it was probably the most expensive sugar snap too!).

Thanks to the hard work starting our own business years before, we were able to look nationwide for our perfect homestead spot. The only criteria for work was that we had high speed internet! Initially we were drawn toward Oregon, for the amazing food culture and hipster vibe. We even had a flight booked to visit the entire west coast, starting in San Francisco and driving up to Seattle.

Then I picked up a copy of Mother Earth News, and read their annual “Great Places You’ve Maybe Never Heard Of” and one in particular, Floyd, VA, cried out to me. After re-reading the one page description a few times, I walked over to Mike and said, “this is where we’re moving.”

We scheduled a quick weekend trip down the following month, and loved it just as much as we thought we would. Three months later we hauled all of our belongings from NJ to the mountains of VA and a year after that, we moved into our yurt on 22 acres.

It has been a roller coaster ride, and our dream is still evolving, but I’m so glad we took those first steps back when we did. If we hadn’t, I wouldn’t be sharing fresh eggs from our free range chickens with friends, enjoying a meal made from meat we raised on our farm and enjoying clear, unpolluted night skies.

One step can make all the difference, even if it feels like a teeny tiny step to you right now. Who knows where YOU’LL be in five years. Perhaps a yurt in the mountains of VA, or feeding your friends and neighbors out of a backyard garden, or managing an urban farm on a city rooftop.

The sky is the limit, what’s your dream? What step will you make today?

Erin and her husband, Mike, left their stressful urban lives two years ago to live in a big blue yurt on 22 rolling acres in rural Southwest Virginia. A rag tag mix of farm animals keeps them company, from oinking pigs to honking geese. They’re slowly using sustainable methods and animal power to rehabilitate their land…one acre at a time. Follow their adventures on the Blue Yurt Farms blog or Facebook page.

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