More of the One Acre Farm

My name is Jim, and I am battling stage 4 lung cancer. I am 69 years old and recently married. I live in an older home that needs a lot of work, yet my main goal is to get things in a place that will allow my one acre here to become a self-sustaining endeavor. It may create an income, but more importantly, it will allow those that do not have access to a garden plot to be able to come and grow healthy food, and even some flowers for their own personal use.

This means so much to me, since I have been actively involved in “getting back to the basics,” in living a simpler — as well as a more self-sustaining — lifestyle. I have the land to make this happen; I just don’t have the health or the strength to make my dream a reality. Consider an acre of land fully cultivated, fruit trees, berry bushes, year-round gardening endeavors, happy hens running around in the sunshine and laying healthy eggs. Top bar bee hives scattered about, a grape arbor or two. Consider families with children learning to garden and becoming just slightly self-sufficient. Not off the grid, just the ability to have some small amount of control over what fresh, healthy produce gets on their table at home.

I have had to surrender my own flock of hens due to health restrictions, and was fortunate enough to find a volunteer from the Cancer Center with a little over 35 acres who was able to take them all and divide them with her neighbor. She has let me know that the neighbor’s kids have already made some of them pets, and they pick them up and carry them around.

As for being thankful, if I can leave this for others to carry on with, it would mean the world to me. I have very little else to leave as my legacy on this earth other than my desire to help others as best I can. This would be an ongoing concept to help others for a very long time to come.

Anyone thinking about this — I have found here in North Carolina there is a “Community Garden” person with the County Extension office. There are seed banks and equipment resources through the United Way (who knew?), and the one that is really exciting to me is a program called WOOF (Workers on Organic Farms). Thank you, Jennifer! I have contacted them, yet still have to actually talk to someone. They do the match-people-to-dirt thing I have gone on about in the past.