This is the very first blog post for Borderlands Farm, so I decided to write it about “firsts”.
This past month we had our first lamb back from the abattoir. Brody made our first meals featuring our own lamb and it was honestly delicious. After figuring out how to make a website with a store (a first), we sold our first sampler boxes last week. We had customers both picking up at the farm and we took deliveries into Thunder Bay for the first time which was really cool. We got copies of my first magazine cover: an image I took of our very first lamb is on the April/May 2022 issue of Small Farm Canada. Brody and I also made our first batches of homemade sausage using our lamb – the first of many more to come!
There are probably more firsts that I am forgetting but really most things on the farm are new to me and so there will be many more “firsts”. On Instagram, I sometimes use the hashtag #farmingafter40 and part of the reason for that is to emphasize the learning that Brody and I need to do every day. We are lucky that our partners in this venture (and my parents) have almost twenty years of farming under their belts, but they actually started #farmingafter50 so they went through (and continue to go through) something similar. I think there are benefits to coming to farming later in life. We definitely have a very clear reason for why we are farming – and we have deliberately chosen farming and its lifestyle!
I have already forgotten my “first” time doing chores. I wish I remembered it, because chores have now turned into one of my favorite times of the day. Although I know that the reason the sheep come running up to me is because they associate me with food, it turns out I really like sheep. That is a first that doesn’t really have a really clear starting point, but is a first nonetheless. I hope to use this blog to share many more firsts with you.
Peanut, Bert and I in pen #7.