What, you mean not everyone upends their life to become Urban Farmers?! Huh.

I guess not everyone does that, but we sure did. Our patio garden was not enough. The pandemic changed everything for us so we pivoted to find our dream. And here she is, Withywindle Urban Homestead.

The first 4 beds are built! The next 16 are next year!?

After selling our apartment with the garden that taught us we loved growing our own food (and that it didn't matter if you were north-east facing in the middle of a forest, so long as you got SOME sun), we moved into the basement of family members and hunted for Withywindle.

The pation garden that started it all! In peak sunlight, in the middle of the forest.

The other half of the patio garden that started it all, during peak sunlight hours!

And lo, we found her. In all her junky, dilapidated glory. The previous owners were enthusiastic gardeners, that's for sure. But maybe a different kind than us. As a result, rather than starting with a bare lawn, we started with thousands of square feet of rotten, rat filled, falling down, ineffective, structures. We're saving what we can but the dump runs, with trailers full of tarpaulins that were used as landscape fabric, feel like they're never ending!

Withywindle, the front garden over grown and covered in nautical netting.

Back garden views of the greenhouse, full of rats.

Both Matt and I (Elise) work other jobs currently, and get to spend our evenings and weekends pouring our heart and souls and buckets of sweat into renovating this house and property into the urban homestead of our dreams. And it is dreamy! ... with some spots more nightmare like. I swear the nautical netting has a spawn point somewhere on this property! We have space for about 2000-3000 sq feet of main veggie garden, a small orchard (about 8 trees), we inherited five haggard chickens, a huge workshop that is NOT safe (we use it anyways), and a front garden of about 500 sq ft. We're on .34 acres of south facing land in the PNW, a walk from the ocean, and it's a dream.

It almost like we're turning straw into gold and as we hit the one year mark here, we finally feel like we don't grimace everytime we look at our property! Follow along our journey of growing and preserving produce, saving money and the environment by using skills from generations past, learning about native biodiversity and foraging skills, digging into (pun intended) permaculture concepts and soil health, building and renovating everything, and learning how to heal our bodies with plants! We're happy you're here, please follow along on instagram and other socials for the shenanigans, we love hearing and learning from the great wide community of like minded folks!

(here, have some progress pics!)

The first new bed is going in!

No more palm trees You can walk through this iteration of the front garden!