Hey blog readers. It’s been a minute. As I’ve transitioned to writing an almost monthly newsletter since April of 2021, I’ve mostly stopped writing “update” style blog posts here (though fear not, I DO have a list of long form topics I still plan to cover here in the next year). I still regularly refer readers to this blog all the time (especially that DIY Homesteading tab at the top), and you can rest assured, this blog site is not going away. But changes are afoot.

My life, like most, has been a series of right turns. Heading off to college. Moving from California to Colorado in my mid 20’s. Traveling in Mexico for 9 months on a very tiny budget, on a bike! Returning to college for a second degree (and then changing schools/locations twice before finishing up in Missoula Montana). Getting married. Moving to Arizona for a job. Moving BACK to Colorado (SW corner vs front range this time) for another job and because we most definitely did not want to stay in Arizona). Taking a job as an environmental educator for a non-profit. Taking a job working for the state fish and game office. Moving to north Spokane Washington. Starting a farm business. Moving to Walla Walla Washington and growing as a farm business.

I had lived in nine different houses/apartments (and 6 different states) before I graduated high school. Parents – what can I tell you. You aren’t always born into stability. This taught me, for better or worse, to be pretty flexible in the face of change. I oscillate between boredom if things are too routine, and gut churning stress when things are too up in the air. But I will take the stress over the boredom most any time. And so, the pattern in my life is to shake things up on a fairly regular basis. To stretch and learn and challenge myself. You never feel more alive then when you are taking a risk and trying something new for the first time!

As I entered my mid 50’s, I knew that things were feeling too settled, too routine. And that my husband and I wanted to do more traveling before we became too old and infirm to be able to have big adventures. So I’ve known changes were coming for quite a few years. But this time, instead of ripping off the band-aid, we have been slowly transitioning to new ways of being, sometimes on purpose, sometimes despite ourselves.

First came COVID-19 lock downs, and the inability to sell my value added products at a farmers market (sales of which relied heavily on people being able to pick up and smell my soaps or taste test my jams – both of which were verboten in 2020). Though I had planned on stopping farmers markets in 2021, after 10 years, COVID forced this transition a year early. I made the pivot to increasing sales through my own online store and the Walla Walla Food Hub (the invention of which was also a COVID pivot by Hayshaker Farm). 2021 was my biggest year since starting my farm business in 2011, and to be honest, it almost killed me, despite having not one but two interns. Imagine you have homework every single night. FOREVER. That’s a bit like what it’s like to run your own business. The possibility of adding employees was limited for a variety of reasons (restrictions on my commercial kitchen license – the huge added time and $ suck of employee paperwork/reporting, not being QUITE big enough to warrant the added expense). I knew I needed to make some changes, and we were blessed to have the financial flexibility to do so.

I made the decision to stop making jam in 2023. After 9 years, I had come to realize that 1) it just didn’t pencil out economically at the scale I was working 2) I was unwilling, at my current age, to invest in the infrastructure to be able to expand into a commercial building with new equipment, larger batch sizes and employees, which would have easily been a $500,000 investment 3) the committee work I had been a part of since 2013, working towards a local shared use kitchen that would have allowed this expansion at a smaller financial outlay, just wasn’t going to happen before I wanted to retire. Plus, on a simple “listen to your gut” level, I was sitting on my back porch pitting cherries in June 2023 (a fairly thankless task, even with a good piece of equipment) and suddenly realized like a thunder clap, “I am SOOOOO over this.” It was most definitely NOT sparking joy, lol.

So I decided to keep making jam (from previously frozen local fruit – which I’ve done since the beginning) until I either ran out of fruit or out of my latest shipment of jars. The jars ran out in the spring of 2024.

The jars. Don’t get me started on the jars. I needed 8 oz STRAIGHT sided jars in order for my labels to wrap around the jar and lay flat – so standard Ball style mason jars, which are tapered – were out. During COVID-19, the jars I had been using for years (made by Arkansas Glass – hooray for domestic manufacturing) were unavailable from any distributor for over a year, and I had to switch to 9 oz jars (multiple different 9 oz jars due to supply line issues – necessitating different labels, different batch sizes, new pricing, new marketing photographs…). But ALL 9 oz jars available use a different style lid, one that isn’t designed for water bath canning. So I had to switch to a “hot fill and hold” method, as recommended by the Washington State University processing authority. While this method is standard for large commercial operations, it doesn’t translate well to small batches where the jam for the last few jars filled has cooled significantly, and I kept having either seal failures or mold forming in some of my products.

I’ve got to tell you, it’s not a great day when a customer contacts you to say they opened a jar of your beautiful expensive jam, only to find it had mold on it! (Jam mold, while gross, is unlikely to make anyone seriously ill because of the inherent pH of the product, and I refunded/replaced all failed jams with profuse apologies). Meanwhile, the price, with shipping, I was paying per jar, which was always over $1 each, just kept going up and up and up. Shipping of glass is very expensive because it’s very heavy. The freight fee on the jars was routinely higher than the actual cost of the jars. And there was nowhere within a 5 hour driving distance where I could go pick them up instead. WILDLY frustrating.

So, an end to jam making. (I still maintain my jam license so I can do the occasional one-off batch). Meanwhile, the price of sugar has also doubled. Sigh.

I also made the decision to downsize away from rabbits in 2022, after 10 years of raising them. The rabbits were really difficult to manage during our increasingly hot summers (we couldn’t breed them in the summer without losing litters to the heat, and keeping them under misters so we didn’t lose the adults became a juggling act of unclogging emitters and managing wet animals and muddy ground). So we weren’t getting a ton of meat from them (plus, butchering bunnies is just, well, hard, emotionally). Plus, while my attempts at a rabbit tractor were somewhat successful, I really dislike keeping animals in cages 24/7. I DO miss the fertilizer!

We also decided to downsize away from sheep in 2022. This was a HARD decision, as we really loved keeping them, and they were relatively easy keepers. But because we weren’t separating the rams from the ewes, and American Blackbelly can breed year round, we were having VERY unpredictable lambing seasons. Over the years, we’ve had lambs born in every month from December to May, in every kind of weather, and then again sometimes in the fall. Because we’re only on 4 acres, some of which is house/outbuildings, keeping the rams separated was difficult and they are VERY destructive to fences and gates when kept away from the ewes. We’ve had them break railroad tie fence posts with their heads and bend metal gates into V shapes! The answer is electrical wire to keep them off of infrastructure. And then that wire inevitably fails, or gets tangled/shorted out on something, or presents an ongoing aggravation as you need to go in and out of electrified areas.

The one time of year that it is easier to travel when you are a farmer is in the winter, when you don’t have plants and baby animals to take care of. But because we didn’t know what lamb was going to be born when, and not wanting to saddle a house sister with an unexpected newborn lamb, we often made the decision to NOT travel during the winter months. This, in the end, wasn’t tenable, and so the sheep had to go. Could we have overcome this issue had we really wanted or needed to? Absolutely. But getting older, and needing to wrangle animals that were NOT happy about being handled, in the end, just wasn’t worth it.

This year, on the continuing slide to scale back, I’ve leased out my front pasture (my primary production growing area) to a fellow young farmer who has worked on numerous farms, both locally and around the country. They want to branch out into their own farm business. In lieu of rent this first year, they are going to production grow products I need for my value added products (mostly peppers and herbs) and provide me with a small farm share of produce. It’s a win-win for both of us. We are actually planning a vacation in July. Unheard of during peak farming years.

Mixed into all of this slow transition was the death of my friend Bryan Lubbers, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor in September 2022 and had passed by February of the following year, just shy of his 60th birthday. From his obituary, “Bryan was an avid skier, cyclist, sailor, reader, traveler, singer, cook, tree-lover, infrastructure nerd, sci-fi enthusiast, community builder, beer and whisky aficionado, trusted friend, beloved colleague, daddy extraordinaire, and loving husband”. Bryan did not wait on life, he lived it to the fullest, which is a significant lesson for the rest of us from a life cut way too short. His wife Becci is the poster child for how to handle loss with grace, acceptance, personal growth and fierce love. And a smack upside the face reminder for me to Do it NOW. Say it NOW. Live the life you want NOW. Do what brings you JOY!

Amongst all of this downsizing, I was looking for a new challenge that would bring me joy. Have you ever heard the saying, “A change is as good as a rest”? The idea is that what your brain needs isn’t to do nothing, but to do something new. This REALLY resonates with me.

So I started a YouTube channel, Cooking the Harvest – What To Do With What You Grow, in May of 2022. Because what has always been at the top of the list of things that bring me joy is teaching. Working hard to not to let perfection get in the way of learning, I resolved to JUST POST IT, and learn as I went. And learn I have (and still am). I have 300 videos and almost 4,000 subscribers as of April 2025. I’m not for everyone. Like this blog, it tends to be more long form and less reel/tiktok style content. It currently provides enough income to buy a nice dinner for two out once a month or so, lol. But I’ve enjoyed learning to film, edit, add music, and document this farm/homestead life and plan to continue for some time. My fermented hot sauce video, the most popular of all of my posts, has over 86,000 views.

My husband (married 27 years this May) is planning to retire from federal service this year (as early as June, as late as December, depending on paperwork and the current shifting political situation). He’s 2 1/2 years younger than I am, so this is a BIG deal, as we figure out how to navigate the “gap” years before I turn 62. But we’ve both been poor college students before. We’re not big on owning all of the “things” and have never measured our success by comparing ourselves to our neighbors. We would much rather have “experiences”. I’ve been going back to my old college days practice of tracking grocery store spending and planning meals around “loss leaders” at the store that week (what we don’t already have growing or on our pantry shelves/in our freezers). We’ll be scaling back on a variety of expenses as we transition (forgotten subscriptions, the luxury of having our house cleaned by someone else every 2 weeks…)

We bought a used Scamp trailer a few years ago, and look forward to spending more time “boondocking” in simple no hook up campgrounds with a shared water source and vault toilets (which, conveniently, are inexpensive and tend to weed out the huge “winnebargoes”, as an old friend used to call them). More fishing, more hiking, more foraging, more reading books, more time together. Through some miracle of luck and good decisions, there is no one, after 27 years, that I would rather spend time with than my husband, especially tromping around in the woods.

So that’s the update, and it’s a big one. Keep watching (subscribe to my YouTube channel!), sign up for my almost monthly newsletter, and keep reading here for the occasional deep dive into things like compost and praise of native dirt, food safety and levels of risk and what makes a jam a jam (according to the federal government. As always, thanks for reading and for hanging out with me the last 15 years this blog has been in existence!

© Miles Away Farm 2025, where we’re Miles Away from being ready to join the leisure class, but are definitely ready to slow down and shift gears!