DocAndersen
Pictures are from my parent’s farm. I should point out that it wasn’t a farm. Dad, decided when I was a junior in High School, that he was going to build a self-sustaining life. He started out buying 5 acres in a small Indiana town known as Kirksville. Kirksville is a dot on the map, a small little town with a long-closed Elementary School, a grocery store and a volunteer Fire Department. When I was a school teacher in Bloomington, one of my co-teachers had been the very last principle of Kirksville Elementary School. But that is a story for another day. Today it is my father’s beloved gardens. One of the reasons, I suspect that he wanted to move to the farm, was to have more room for gardens.
Once dad moved to the farm, he started planting a lot more things then he had in the city. The first two big gardening projects were the planting of grapes and the Apple Orchard. Dad planted non-wine grapes along the back part of the original farmstead. (the first 5 acres he would eventually buy ten more acres). The first 5 acres ended up being where the apple orchard, gardens, and grapes were planted. There were also two ponds, one dry one with water. The one that had water when my parents owned the farm was often called “Kirksville Lake” by the people that had lived there for many years. There were fish in the pond that had been added by folks over the years.
From the pond with water you went downhill to the empty pond. About 300 yards past the now dry pond there was a cave entrance, but it was not large enough for a human to go through it. You could feel the cool air in the summer near the sinkhole where the cave roof had collapsed. The collapsed cave entrance was on the last 5 acres that dad bought. We added fencing around that wooded area one summer. I learned a lot about the barbed wire that summer. The most important lesson is, I stay away from it now. I had cuts all over my hands, arms, and legs from pulling barbed wire through the woods. , Dad bought the second five acres as pasture for the cows, and later for my little sister’s horse Woodstock.
I didn’t know that. Self sustaining. Boy he was ahead of that movement.
By 30 years he was ahead. He never got there but he tried.
Smart man your father was, I keep saying that with each story.
he was always looking for a way to do things better!
Lovely colours by the woods I often have dreamed of a self sufficient lifestyle
Dad did try for nearly 15 years.