Lots of good things around here, not the least of which is some excellent bicycle riding!
I Got A Bike: Bicycling around NovaBicycle crossingLocal farmers selling produce twice a week at a public auction.Most of the food at auction comes from nearby Amish farmsA ride around the neighborhood, Fall 2014
We were really in a rush to get the garden put in, as we didn’t take possession of the house until May. It turned out to be the best garden we ever planted, bar none!
Putting in the new garden
The new garden tilled.
We had to buy a tractor to mow all that grass, which we then use as compost and fertilizer. Who knew that grass could be so useful? Alexis taking Uncle Guy for a ride.
The garden doing well about halfway through the season.
Eventually, we had to buy a tiller, as the garden kept expanding. This bad-boy is a Troy-Bilt from the early 80s (craigslist). Came with a plow, hiller and tire chains. Gonna make life a LOT easier!
Carol and Guy with a bit of the bounty
Bounty canned!
Our first potato crop ever! 110lbs!
Garden, late summer. We built the shed from scratch, intended as a chicken coop. We decided it’s too nice for chickens and will build them something else in the spring.
We looked at a LOT of places! Some were very interesting. We usually knew within ten minutes if it had possibilities or not. Following are some pictures of our searches.
The first house we looked at in Mt. Sterling. Big house on 1 acre with two large barns, surrounded by corn fields. We really liked this place a lot and still talk about it today.
This was a really nice place that butted up to Pymatuning State Park. We never went inside.
We finally moved to the country. We now live in the little town of Nova Ohio with a population of about 500. There were more people living on our STREET in Cleveland. The house is a 125 year old farmhouse on just about an acre of land. Plenty of room to grow our own food! Check out the pictures and the captions to get the full story.
Here’s the back-story: We always wanted to live in the country. We did the best we could in the city; our entire back yard was dedicated to our vegetable gardens, but it still wasn’t enough. Add to that all the noise and crime and… daydreaming became talking out loud which in turn became a search.
The hunt officially started on the way back from Carol’s mom’s house in Cincinnati for Thanksgiving 2013. I found a house on an acre in Mt. Sterling Ohio, south of Columbus. We loved it immediately, but thought, “we can’t take the first place we look at!” Turns out, there would be another 75 to see before we found “home.” Nothing was off the table; we looked at trailers in Darke county and shacks in Ashtabula, houses along the Ohio river in Brown county and just empty land in any other county in-between. We thought about trailers and manufactured homes and even converting a shipping container. We searched the entire winter, with a goal of moving by the spring. As our neighborhood in Cleveland continued to erode, our search became ever more desperate. We put over eight thousand miles on our car, searching, searching, searching…
An aerial view of Nova on the left and our Cleveland house on the right- roughly to scale!
