Very Important…it’s been so long since I’ve updated, I’m starting from ground zero. If you’d like to receive blog updates, please sign up again. This is a re-do with many exciting posts with useful information to come.

This is a partial list of available funding and grants in Virginia as well as throughout the USA. If you don’t live in VA, you could look for similar organizations in your own state. The first listing contains many links for various types of agriculture producers; some link producers with consumers doubling the impact.

The VA Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, or VDACS, offers reimbursable grants. Your state Department of Agriculture probably does as well. 

The American Farmland Trust is throughout the USA and offers varied projects and initiatives for funding.

SARE, or Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education is for the southern USA, primarily the southeast. 

As I find various organizations that offer funding via grants or initiatives, I’ll post them. Unfortunately, some of the specific organizations deadlines have passed but peruse the information and consider what you could apply for in 2025.

List of Ag Funding in VA has perhaps a dozen, or more, various programs for grants and initiative funding, here.

1. Personal Catch-up
2. Name Your Homestead
3. What Comes Next

1. If you’ve read the previous post, written earlier this year in January, you know 2023 started with great difficulty and challenges which only increased as the year moved on. The last day of March Mom died and was buried close to my birthday; ironic, because her Mother was buried on my birthday a few years ago. Without laboring the points the family dynamic shifted enormously both priot to Mom’s death and after. If your family struggles emotionally you should know two things: a truly dysfunctional family keeps secrets and doesn’t talk about the elephant in the room. The elephant could be, in the case of Joyce Meyers, a father who sexually abused her and a mother wholooked the other way or, in the case of another friend whose parent was a closet alcoholic or ____…fill in the blank. Not all families suffer and not all families suffer in the same ways but I do know this when I chose to drag my elephant into the light and shine spotlights on it, my life changed. My elephant wasn’t as dramatic as the aforementioned examples but, nonetheless, for decades keeping silent meant decades of emotional hardship.

Is it just me or did anyone else blink, sneeze and January was finished? I feel like I haven’t had a chance to get used to a New Year and the first month is done and dusted. I’m still thinking about sitting down and making goals and plans while God is saying, “Better get your skates on and catch up!”

Last year ended on a sour note with me being admitted to hospital with a heart attack. You may recall Mom was/is in hospice and now doing amazingly well and I was staying nights. It’s only thirty miles between us but, if I’m driving the speed limit, it takes almost an hour due to narrow, unmarked country roads. I was away from my home a minimum of fourteen hours, coming home to dog messes and who could blame them? That’s entirely too long to ask. Anyway, without going into more details, there was a dust up with my family and I found me on my sofa with an Inky Cat on my chest and not feeling even fifty percent. As I said on FB, “If I’d had the strength, I would go to the emergency room”.

Do you think Joseph and Mary had their entire lives planned? Do you think they talked about their wedding day, where they would live, how many children they would have, what they would name them?

Then God showed up and everything changed.

Do you think Mary wanted to be Mary?

During the New Testament time Nazareth was a small, rather insignificant village and, most likely a village of blue collar workers…farmers, shepherds, laborers both skilled and unskilled and others who worked with their hands and probably poor. All four Gospels record the question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Still, in my mind, I think of it as filled with good, solid, hard working people whose focus was living their faith, raising their children in synagogue, finding and making good matches for them and, in due time, enjoying old age and grandchildren.

Long before the time a female reached the age to bear children, her parents would have deliberated on an appropriate husband. With the average life expectancy around 35 years, it made sense for a girl to marry once she had her first cycle and proven to be physically ready for pregnancy.

My family is in the last season of Mom’s life. She’s slipping away, day by day, sometimes minute by minute. Memories are confused with the present and it can be a struggle to keep up, to be in her present, at times, years past.

It can be a frantic dance, between then and now, a hasty search in my memory to place my thoughts with hers in an attempt to meet her so she’s not suddenly and unexpectedly jostled into the present, leaving her embarrassed and off kilter. Family conversations swirl around her and sometimes the fog will clear and she struggles to comment, slurred words discordant, making sense in her mind while we catch one or three words and begin the guessing game of “Mom, do you mean …?” Depending on her level of strength or perseverance or will, she might help us understand but, more often than not, she’ll (impatiently) shrug and reply, “Oh, never mind.” Soft words of endearment or even a quick laugh and, “You’re okay, Mom. Don’t worry” will settle her for a while.

Her body seems to be in a race with her mind or is it the other way round?

I  can’t breath.

It’s HOT and the humdidity is wet. All my family is in WV and I’m sitting on the farm in the air conditioning, waiting for Autumn  I mean December. Early in the morning, I’m in the barn, feeding horses and cats and that’s after feeding dogs and the porch cats, then dragging myself to the house to think about turning the thermostat down to frost. The dogs and I took a nap then we thought about taking another nap and all around I hear snores. All the cats are outside, sprawled with limbs pointing north, south, east and west and they seem to be enjoying this weather.

I do not understand. Not at all.

I’ve been reading or I should say re-reading because every so often my favorites are pulled from the shelves and enjoyed all over again.

Jeanine MacMullen is the author I’m currently finishing again. Born in Australia, she made her way to the UK, had a variety of jobs and ended at a BBC broadcaster where her “A Small Country Living” was hugely popular. Unfortunately it’s no longer available on the BBC website.

~ back porch sitting with homemade strawberry lemonade ~

“To begin, begin.” Peter Nivio Zarlenga

“Your time is limited  

so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Steve Jobs

“Information is pretty thin stuff, unless mixed with experience.”        Clarence Day

“The total history of almost anyone, would shock almost everyone.” Mignon McLaughlin

“We stand on the backs of others or on the shoulders of giants.” SKB

“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” Mario Andretti

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Winston Churchill

“It’s a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”         Robert G. Ingersoll

~ Snowman, my beautiful Percheron ~

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”            Albert Einstein

“Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.” G. K. Chesterton

“How small a part of the boundless and unfathmable time is assigned to evey man?

Celebrating my birthday today by doing the usual…tending to animals, perhaps going to town to post packages, relishing in the beauty God has urrounded me with and pondering the many, many blessings He has given me.

I’ve learned a bit and am still working on a few but the most important are these:

*God forgives sin. There is no sin so grievous, God will not forgive. Take Jesus into your heart and claim Heaven for eternity. (It really is that easy.)

*The hardest words I’ve ever uttered, time and again, “God gives and He takes back. Blessed be His name.”

*Forgiveness can takes years but is so worth it!.

*Never, Never, NEVER stop praying for others and yourself.

*Don’t chase people whom God has removed from your life.

*Everyday read God’s love letter. Five chapters of Psalms and one chapter of Proverbs takes you through the month. Then, start over.

*Live forward.

*You’re either a care taker or steward. Choose wisely.

*God can handle the questions. Can you accept His answers?

*Jesus loves us, this I know for the Bible tells me so.

Recently, I read where 40% of city folk surveyed were interested in moving to the country. I can’t blame them; I moved from Richmond more than 25 years ago and have never regretted it. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t new at the country lifestyle as I come from generations of homesteaders and spent every possible moment on the farms of my kith and kin. On Mater’s side there were sheep farmers who, probably, raised cows or cattle as well but all I remember are the sheep. On Pater’s side it was more of hardscrabble farms kept going by sheer determination, physical strength and prayer largely because those farmers were in the Appy Mountains of West By God Wild and Wonderful Virginia.

While I had an idea of what moving from a city to a valley tucked between the Appy Mountains of southwest VA would be like, Dave, poor lamb, hadn’t a single clue. He told me, “I’m moving for the view and you can do anything you want to on the farm except ask me to help. I’ll do anything but work with whatever animals you want to get.” Wow! I was all in and never regretted him farming from the warm side of the window while I was out daily no matter the weather.

Long time readers know this blog was started in May 2005 but before then Thistle Cove Farm was being used as an AgriTourism venue. There are two types of tourism: capture and destination. Capture is when there are other tourism activities in the area and you tag along with them. Destination is something like Dollywood, Kings Dominion, etc. I branded Thistle Cove Farm as a destination and brought thousands of people to the farm and area to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Jammy, aka Sudhakar R. Jamkhandi, a professor at Bluefield State College heard about the farm and contacted me to ask if his college visitors could visit. Jammy brought visitors from Russia, Armenia, the “Stan” countries and many other countries to see how I used AgriTourism. Those visitors would take some of those events, suggestions, etc. to utilize in their countries. In 2003, Jammy asked if I would be interested in going to Russia to teach what I knew. I couldn’t say YES fast enough!

Jammy also suggested to Concord University, Athens, WV, I would be a good candidate to teach AgriTourism. So I developed a syllabus and taught evening classes for several semesters.