by Janelle Brown
I was away from home all last week on business, and halfway through a meeting on Wednesday, I got a text from the contractor helping us with the land prep on the farm.
He had just finished the second round of mulching.
Now, a little backstory…
Here in southeastern North Carolina, most raw land is covered in trees. If you can’t harvest them for lumber, you have to find another way to clear them. Ours were too small to be worth harvesting, so we chose to have them mulched, a process we talked about in an earlier blog.
After that first round sits for a bit, you can bring in another machine to break it down even further. It gets surprisingly close to topsoil, and all that organic material stays right where it belongs, feeding the land instead of being hauled off.
That mattered to us.
It just felt like the better way to do it.
So back to Wednesday…
After the text and a follow-up call walking through everything, I found myself sitting in that meeting thinking, I really just want to be home right now, walking the land.
He sent a couple of pictures, and I’m not even kidding—you would have thought I was showing off a brand-new grandbaby. I was passing my phone around to anyone who showed even the slightest bit of interest.
And yes… more than half the time their eyes glazed over while I explained all the things.
But I kept going anyway.
Because something has shifted for me.
Even though I couldn’t get home for another four or five days, all I could think about was getting my hands in that dirt.
This farm is a passion project in the truest sense. A lifelong dream, slowly taking shape. And if I’m being honest, the process has felt frustratingly slow. Many times like we were taking one step forward, two steps back.
But every now and then, there are these moments.
Little glimmers where you can finally see it coming together.
Where the future feels real instead of far away.
And this was one of those moments.
So if you need me… I’ll be outside, working in the dirt.
I’ll come in at sundown.
