This blog entry was submitted to Gene Logsdon’s blog for a series they were doing called “Why I want to farm.”  The original is here: http://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/why-i-want-to-farm-chris-geddings/

This is somewhat edited in an attempt to fix awkward grammar and misspellings.

When I was in my teens, my paternal grandfather, Grandad, announced to me that tomatoes no longer had any flavor. He remembered tomatoes from when he was young. What you could buy or grow in your garden today simply did not compare.

My maternal grandparents had a place in the North Carolina mountains. In my teens, their income was a mix of a civil service pension and periodic tax work. They also did some subsisting off of their 40 acres, where they had a few fields and some pastured livestock.

I grew up around chickens, rabbits and gardens. At my Dad’s we always had fresh eggs, though never quite got the rabbits going well. At my Mom’s we had eggs and ate her chickens from time to time. The gardening was never very extensive, but it put some interesting things on the table on occassion.

My goal in life up until college was getting into college, and once I got there, I had some rather profound “what now” moments. School was shaky, but I never had a problem working. From before my first taxable employment working in the tobacco fields, I could always go out and get things done. I did get through college, somewhat by the skin of my teeth. Then I got a decent job, but I was always a bit unsettled. Unsettled and not really able to tell you why. Could have been just because I was in my 20′s, I suppose, but I like to think I was looking for something I am now finding.

A few years ago, I met a girl, a rather fantastic girl, who told me at some point “I want a cow.” I thought that was a fantastic idea. I had been gardening for several years, and was getting better and better at keeping plants alive. The more the girl and I talked, the more we wanted to unhook a bit both from the conventional job market and modern life. We both are hard workers, but not so sold on the notion of trading so much of our time for things. Neither are we sure the selling of our time is ending up in what we’d consider a fair and equitable exchange for those things we’ve obtained.

So, we started making soap. We are still making soap, and now trying to figure out how to turn that into a revenue stream. We are expanding the garden dramatically, experimenting with making more things grow. We are looking for land — trying to figure out how to put down as much as we can and pay it off the rest as quickly as we can. We are keeping bees, and reading as much as we can about livestock and pasture management. We started volunteering at a bunch of different farms, and have found one whose general model we want to follow, though we’d like to stay smaller. We’ve got a plan, the first life plan I’ve had since I was a teenager, and are taking serious steps to make it happen.

In this, we’ve found a better way to eat. We’ve found work that makes us feel better about the lives we are living, even if the day to day of it has a lot of blood, tears, sweat and snot. With every step we make, the idea of unhooking a bit from “jobs”, finding a way to make our home work for us, and give us more time to spend with each other strengthens our purpose and makes us more confident in the next step. And, now, with a baby on the way, we want this path even more strongly. It just feels right.

What we do now may be gardening, and what is next is may be homesteading, or maybe farming, but most definitely we are building a life together based on the value of what we can do with our hands (or with a little help from critters.)

Recently, my wife and I went to a local event called “Tomatopalooza.” It was an odd series of events, but the short of it was I had stumbled across this affable fellow who grows tomato plants near by… and to understate, he *loves* tomatoes. He gave me a bunch of plants which I got in the ground late in the season, and told me about this event. As I was wandering around, tasting 166 different varieties of *tasty* tomatoes, I was struck by how different my life is these days, how different tomorrow will be, and how I wish my Grandad could taste some of the tomatoes I now grow.