Bob and I are proud to announce the birth of our baby podcast, The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow! It was born on Feb 14 at 7 am, weighing 22.5 megabytes! Welcome to the world, little soundbyte!!!

It feels weird pronouncing this episode 00, or the starting point. I’ve been writing down stories about my family and farming, community and business for 20 years. That was when I left academia with all this theoretical knowledge about rural communities, ecology, business and sustainable farming. I left because, no matter how many classes I took, no matter how many books I read, or conferences I attended, the theories of small business, civic welfare, regenerative agriculture and economics all rang hollow for me without family and neighbors, without time to amble beneath a tree canopy in a summer rain, or to push aside work and break out the sleds on a glorious winter morning, or without tucking into a delicious meal rife with laughter and stories of the day, or turning off the phone for an afternoon nap.

Somewhere in the American struggle to guarantee farming and small business survival, our obsessions about balance sheets, setting prices, developing value-added products, negotiating farmers market politics, and labor laws, food safety laws and tax laws led us to forget about the single greatest reason to sustain rural communities and focus on regenerative agriculture:

The life is delicious. It’s rich with eccentric personalities, deep connections, amazing food, caring families, and miles and miles of beauty: forests, pastures, stone walls, streams, mountains, gardens. And when we recognize its richness and our wealth as stewards, we care for it. And when we care for it, it’s bounty extends far beyond the town lines, increasing quality of life for all.

You can’t examine a balance sheet without taking these things into the balance.

And yet most of us do.

All my life, the written word has been my channel to talk to a higher power and delve deep into my own untapped wisdom. And when my husband Bob and I made the decision to forego a conventional career in favor of coming home to my family’s farm, the written word came with me. It is my way of making sense of this life, of finding the lessons and the riches that it offers, and of reaching back out to the world and teaching every chance I get, all the elements that we must include on the balance sheet when we’re evaluating our lives.

So for twenty years, I’ve been writing essays about this journey. For almost as long, I’ve been posting them on my blog. And for twenty years, Bob has rarely read it. Instead, he gets up in the morning after I’ve written, sits quietly beside my desk and stares off, waiting for me to read to him. He wants to hear the words on these pages from my own lips.

Along this journey, our children, Saoirse and Ula, came into the picture. They, too, repeatedly asked me to read my work out loud.

And for the last four years, Ula has campaigned for me to move my blog to a podcast. She wants to be able to keep the stories on her ipad, to listen to my voice reading them aloud to her over and over as she grows up, as she does with all her favorite audiobooks and podcasts.

So this isn’t really episode 00. It’s probably closer to episode 420, with some new technology thrown in for a twist, and our children’s digital media advisement. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re actually joining us in the middle. But I don’t think it really matters. Pick up with where you are and join us as we move forward, just as any new neighbors might. If you still prefer to read, the essays will continue to appear each week on my blog. But if you’d rather download and listen, welcome to the next phase of our adventures together. Thanks for tuning in.