Very Important…it’s been so long since I’ve updated, I’m starting from ground zero. If you’d like to receive blog updates, please sign up again. This is a re-do with many exciting posts with useful information to come. This is a partial list of available funding and grants in Virginia as well as throughout the USA. If you don’t live in…
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Leaning LARGE into LIFE!
Personal Catch-up Name Your Homestead What Comes Next 1. If you’ve read the previous post, written earlier this year in January, you know 2023 started with great difficulty and challenges which only increased as the year moved on. The last day of March Mom died and was buried close to my birthday; ironic, because her Mother was buried on my…
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Hunkering at Home
Is it just me or did anyone else blink, sneeze and January was finished? I feel like I haven’t had a chance to get used to a New Year and the first month is done and dusted. I’m still thinking about sitting down and making goals and plans while God is saying, “Better get your skates on and catch up!”…
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Sabbath Keeping – A Strange Way to Save the World
Do you think Joseph and Mary had their entire lives planned? Do you think they talked about their wedding day, where they would live, how many children they would have, what they would name them? Then God showed up and everything changed. Do you think Mary wanted to be Mary? During the New Testament time Nazareth was a small, rather…
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The Beauty of Kindness
My family is in the last season of Mom’s life. She’s slipping away, day by day, sometimes minute by minute. Memories are confused with the present and it can be a struggle to keep up, to be in her present, at times, years past. It can be a frantic dance, between then and now, a hasty search in my…
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Surviving with Farms on my Bookshelves
I can’t breath. It’s HOT and the humdidity is wet. All my family is in WV and I’m sitting on the farm in the air conditioning, waiting for Autumn I mean December. Early in the morning, I’m in the barn, feeding horses and cats and that’s after feeding dogs and the porch cats, then dragging myself to the house to…
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Need Some Encouragement?
~ back porch sitting with homemade strawberry lemonade ~ “To begin, begin.” Peter Nivio Zarlenga “Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Steve Jobs “Information is pretty thin stuff, unless mixed with experience.” Clarence Day “The total history of almost anyone, would shock almost everyone.” Mignon McLaughlin “We stand on…
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Ten Lessons I’ve Learned
Celebrating my birthday today by doing the usual…tending to animals, perhaps going to town to post packages, relishing in the beauty God has urrounded me with and pondering the many, many blessings He has given me. I’ve learned a bit and am still working on a few but the most important are these: *God forgives sin. There is no sin…
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Goodbye City Life, Hello Country Life!
Recently, I read where 40% of city folk surveyed were interested in moving to the country. I can’t blame them; I moved from Richmond more than 25 years ago and have never regretted it. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t new at the country lifestyle as I come from generations of homesteaders and spent every possible moment on the farms of my…
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AgTourism – Ways to Increase Farm Income
Long time readers know this blog was started in May 2005 but before then Thistle Cove Farm was being used as an AgriTourism venue. There are two types of tourism: capture and destination. Capture is when there are other tourism activities in the area and you tag along with them. Destination is something like Dollywood, Kings Dominion, etc. I branded…
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When Things Go Wrong…
Today was Spring. Not spring like but Spring and at 64 degrees F (18C) with sun shine and a feeling all’s right with the world. Don’t you like the Elvis quote? Just a reminder trials and tests happen and it’s life happens daily. Although, as Daddy told me earlier today, “Sunday is going to be a whopper (and he doesn’t…
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