Five Apple Farm

All spring and summer and early fall of 2013 Larrapin Garden has been without a home. We knew we were going to move for many months so as the time approached I didn’t put in a spring garden, mostly for lack of time but also lack of heart with the weight of leaving another place I loved so much. Eight years before we had made the difficult decision to leave our home in the South Toe Valley of the Black Mountain range of North Carolina due to an intractable neighbor situation. If all our things are going on a truck, we reasoned, wouldn’t it be a good chance to spend time closer to parents in Arkansas? So we rambled off to the Arkansas Ozarks for a life season. It turned out to be one of my favorite life seasons so far.

Home has a way of calling you back though. Even though we were each born in other states, the highest mountains of Southern Appalachia had drawn us both like a magnet. After I spent a summer as a farm intern in the South Toe Valley of the Black Mountain Range I knew I had found home and planned to be in that place forever.  Sometimes when you fall in love, you know you are signing on for life. So at first, the sojourn to the Ozarks felt like a disorienting twist in the life I had imagined. Once there however, I discovered the most delightful community of friends and farmers I’d ever known. I learned more about all things garden and farm than ever before working with stony soil of my land and the challenging Ozark climate. There were a couple of severe droughts, a grasshopper plague, a killer heat-dome summer and a negative 18 winter that tested my mettle and proved that Ozarkers have a toughness that I probably don’t! But it built up some resilience I didn’t have before. Summers could be brutal.  But how I loved that sunlight every other season! I love the time I spent there with the land and with the people. There is amazing energy in Fayetteville, Arkansas and I found there dear friends I’ll keep for life.

Then life shuffles things around again and the call of home is strong. We finally made the decision to return to the Blue Ridge and look for a home somewhere within four counties in Western North Carolina or maybe even Southwest Virginia. I packed a new roll of prayer flags I’d received as a gift and my seedling-cup maker as talismans to help remind me that at the end of all the dreaded leaving and moving, there would be need for both at some new homeplace and new garden site. The moving was harder even than I remembered and the leaving the hardest of all.

We settled in a funky rent house with a great view for the long search for an affordable little farm. That search was often depressing. There was right house-wrong land. Level or gently sloping land with southern exposure is very hard to find here and considered quite dear. Then there was right land-totally wrong house. And of course a lot of right land + right house but totally wrong price!

Then there’s that moment when you step out of the car with the real estate agent and your breath catches to see it. It took Mendy and I only a few minutes of walking around to realize we’d found what we were looking for: a sturdy brick rancher on five acres of mixed open field and forest, south facing. All good, even before counting the lovely little creek, the old apple orchard, chesnut and walnut trees, and the full-gravy bonus of a tiny old guesthouse for visiting friends and family. Pure joy followed by several grueling weeks of post-housing-crash bank loan process. My filing cabinet has never been thoroughly interrogated and tortured. I had set up a card table to find and sort all the obscure documents the bank requested. But finally, buyers, sellers, bankers and lawyers sat around a table and we signed over and over and over and happily.

We have a home back home. Really back home – the new place is only about a mile as the crow flies from the home we left eight years ago in the South Toe Valley of the Black Mountain Range of these old, old Appalachian mountains. We have named the new homeplace Five Apple Farm in honor of the little orchard as well as my lifelong connection to apple trees. With my tree planting habits there will likely be many more apple trees in the future..but the name feels perfect.

Thank you for stopping by this blog and I hope you’ll visit often and see what happens from the simple start of putting a shovel into the soil of former back lawn and envisioning a garden there — as well as a landscape surrounding it that is larrapin to the birds, butterflies, bees and wildlife and gardeners alike. We’ve been here since mid-October and it’s been a slow start to nesting, but we are starting that process now. Welcome to the new Larrapin Garden, beginning all over again.