In June 2006, Avrum and Kristen took their whole family – three kids, three dogs, three cats, 15 goats, 20-odd rabbits,  several dozen chickens and some doomed geese – and moved to a 100-year-old house with no running water on a 32-acre farm in the mountains of Northern New Mexico.

No indoor plumbing. The foundation is built of river rock and the wiring is 40 years old. We’ve  built a composting outhouse for the short-term, and we're mostly living in an old converted boxcar from the Santa Fe Railroad until the house is habitable.

Which brings an obvious question: Why?
 
Because the land here was perfect for our goal: To find a way to make a living growing and producing food.

This site will provide information and humor about country life and our somewhat unusual lifestyle.  Kristen (not-so-religiously) keeps a blog of our farm activities, ranging from encounters with rattlesnakes to tales of the skunk living under our bedroom floor.

We also want to provide a bit of information on the increasing control of our food supply by gargantuan corporations who are gobbling up all the farmland and hybridizing the heck out of our vegetables. We say: Let the bees do it, and the wind.

We are members of a new breed: First-generation family farmers. We grow -- or try to grow -- gourmet garlic, strawberries, asparagus, cut flowers, high-altitude vegetables, medicinal herbs, and lots of weeds (primarily wild prickly lettuce and some kind of runaway buckwheat, as of July 2008, to be updated seasonally). We also raise milk goats, chickens, and the occasional goose that survives the coyotes. We also added several beehives in 2007 and this year hope to expand to 20 hives. The bees feed of the sweet clover and alfalfa in our neighbors' pastures--  and they pollinate our pumpkins!

We've also added 2 donkeys to our farm; we plan to use them to schlep gear up into the high country in the summers -- the Pecos Wilderness is our backyard. And, in spring 2009, we've also added two Cotswold ewes, due to give birth this March.

Yes, it's a zoo. As Kristen's mother says, "I think I let you watch too much Little House on the Prairie when you were a girl. I should have let you watch Charlie's Angels."

No kidding.