The Beauty of a Family Farm

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a family to make a farm. We definitely know how true that is, and moving to a new farm this past year has broadened and deepened our understanding of what family really means.

Arcadia Hollow could not exist without the love and support we feel from our parents. If you don't believe it, ask them! Ashley’s parents, Pete & Paige, live down south, but we feel their presence all the time in Ashley’s gifts and strengths, just as we feel in them the presence of her dearest grandmother, Lib. Ashley’s skills at medicine and her gifts of healing are matched only by her skills at animal husbandry. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is the very difficult art of managing animals and a husband at the same time. Ashley can charm any stranger into becoming our friend, and her quintessential southern genius at turning an ordinary conversation into places of laughter, humanity, and grace, are what really holds our farm together and keeps it happy.

We are lucky that Chuck’s parents, Charlie & Val, can travel down so often from Bucks County, PA to help and to hold us. Chuck had the audacity to believe that with his dad’s skills as a carpenter and designer, and the brawn of our dear friend Mark, we could build a 24x24 foot barn ourselves over the summer of 2003, and he was right. Charlie’s resourcefulness, his constant delight in finding new and better ways to solve vexing little practical problems with nails and screws and saws and measurements is exactly the stuff you need to keep farms and families going.

Chuck's mom Val has a love of cooking and Italian feasts that gave him what we can only call a legendary love of food. Unless there is the promise of a nice meal in the very near future, with real peace and relaxation afterwards, Chuck cannot even think of starting a difficult job. (Sometimes we have to just skip the job and go straight for the food and relaxation, but that's another matter.) But Val is much more than the world's best Italian cook or mom. Like Ashley’s grandmother, a prominent business woman in Columbia, South Carolina, Val is a natural business woman. Her common sense, her instinctive, sure judgment, her passion, her honesty and so many other virtues are matched only by her courage and the inner fire that is superb at fueling love, laughter, loyalty--and from time to time--incredible guilt if you don’t call home often enough.

We mentioned this guy named Mark, poor fellow. He never knew, growing up on a farm in western Iowa, that his prayers to be delivered from the drudgery of farm work were never going to be answered. Nor could he have known, at the age of 7, that his new skill at milking cows would one day be put to milking alpacas and getting brand new baby crias to nurse. We are so lucky that living in Washington has not deprived him of the real love of hard work, whether that meant clearing trees for pasture, putting up split rail, or hammering through some hot, humid weekends with a couple of crazy guys who think they can build a barn. It also meant learning, with two more of our dearest friends from college, Gus and Hayley, that our decision to move ourselves from one farm to another meant breaking it down into hundreds of pieces and packing them one by one!

Just like Ashley's dear friend Lil never thought when she bought her cars that one day they would become emergency loaners to us when one or another of ours died. If you love cars, like Lil does, this is not a small matter. We are just lucky that she loves Ash and our wonderful little pooches, Lady & Dixie, almost as much as she loves those hot cars. Chuck and Mark’s friend, Gus, also saved us all a lot of therapy bills by coming up to mow our lawns and keeping the farm looking spiffy in the heart of barn construction time. You may think that mowing a lawn is a small thing. But nothing is small when you’re building a barn or a farm, and nothing seems to help Chuck’s sanity more (but please don’t tell this to any psychologists) than a nice clean yard, a beautiful lawn, a well-ordered home, and our best friends and family together after a hard days’ work, unless it is doing all of that at the side of his beautiful wife. Isn't that just the weirdest thing?

But wait, we have even more friends and neighbors to thank. Rick, Dwayne and Bill keep digging us out when the deep, deep snows completely block our lane, and it’s Rick’s generosity in sharing the costs of our new fence together which makes driving down that lane so nice. Jim & Pete from Kennedy Krieger helped us to rip out the old fence, and taught us that if you drink enough beer while you're doing it, you don’t even mind it that you didn’t really “volunteer” for the job. While all of this was going on, Chris and Jess Armstrong from Calico Moon boarded our animals at their own farm for almost year, while we prepared ours. Thank you, Chris and Jess. Your love of animals, patience, and generosity gave us the peace mind to do what we needed to do to get done to bring our animals back home.

Finally, we would remiss if we did not thank Ruth Inglefield of Alpacaria for inspiring us to take on this alpaca adventure and providing us with our first wonderful alpaca - Stardust. Ruth has invaluable knowledge about breeding, raising, and caring for alpacas, and she was essential to our current success. We would also like to thank a number of folks at Ameripaca that have also provided us with some great advice about alpacas and some really great Alpacas. Thank you Kim, Angel, Kathy, Kelly, and Gail.

To all of you who make our little piece of western Maryland a home and share in the pride of our farm and our lives as family, please accept this little tribute as our heartfelt thanks. Anyone who visits Arcadia Hollow is going to enjoy it because of what you have done, and what you continue to do, to make our farm a beautiful and productive place.