A permanent home for our farm!

BIG NEWS!!!!!! …

Today we closed on the piece of farmland we’ve been hinting about all summer!!!!! Now that we no longer fear ‘jinxing’ it by posting details here, we want to officially introduce you to Oakhill Organics’s new permanent home:

The land is 17.5 acres of class-one soil (some of the best around!) with water rights. This is like a dream to us. It’s on Grand Island, just south of Dayton, which is actually an island in the middle of the Willamette River. For those of you who are wondering how this works, really it’s just river bottomland that the river ox-bows around (it’s accessible via a short bridge). Yes, sometimes in some winters the river does actually cross over the island, but how else did we get such good soil? We’re prepared to address flood waters when they come calling.

Anyhow, here’s a picture of the land so you can get a mental image of it for yourself:

Isn’t it pretty?

Sigh. We can’t really express how excited we are about this. Those of you who know us personally will remember that we’ve been trying to put down roots since we got married six years ago, but life throws young people about in unexpected ways. We dodged a lot of bullets in our looking for land, and in the end we are deeply grateful that we held out long enough to find this beauty. We hope to grow lots and lots of yummy vegetables for you all here for years to come.

Here are a few more pictures of the home site (no house yet, but it’s buildable):

So that’s our big news. We’ve been waiting months to tell you all about it—we’ve actually been ‘courting’ this farmland since January, but it takes awhile to figure these things out (financially and otherwise).

And for those of you in the CSA, don’t worry about having to drive the 15 minutes to Grand Island to get your veggies. We already have a pick-up site in town in the works—it will probably be in a nice shady parking lot near downtown, so it should be very convenient for everyone! But there will still be plenty of opportunities to come out to the farm for potlucks and such!

Thank you all for your support this year. Again, we can’t over emphasize how grateful we are to be here in this amazing community (and to know that we get to stay for a long, long time). We are also forever grateful to my parents who ultimately made this possible by buying the land with us!!!!! And also to Casey’s parents, for their constant support. And to a friend who helped give us a leg up financially. And to our realtor Jon Triest, and everyone else who helped along the way. It truly takes a village to have a farm. Hoorah!!!!!