( Site Content: Repost)

My dream of establishing a farm and getting back the basics of farming stems from my up bringing. I grew up in Birmingham Alabama and most of our food was either grown in the garden or was given to us from our neighbors. I can’t think of a time when we went to the grocery store to buy fruit. My grandmother had an apple tree, the next door neighbor had a peach tree, the neighbor up the street had a pear tree and right behind my mother’s house was a raspberry patch. Moreover, my paternal grandmother had a pecan tree so basically what you didn’t have someone else did and we just exchanged. I can taste those fresh apple pies as I am writing. At other times we would pay our neighbors that grew hogs and cows for their meat. Those meat purchases typically lasted for a year.

Summertime was like a magical time for me growing up, it was the time when many of our family from the north would come down to pilgrimage to what I call the backcountry to where our family had large farms to gather vegetables for the winter. They would come back and to what seemed like an assembly lines of shelling, and packing vegetables to freeze. I remember seeing so many beans, if you could name it we had it. I recall as a little child saying when “I grow up I’m never going to eat any beans. “