About Ariana

How does a suburban girl from Connecticut end up in the hills and hollows of rural Kentucky?  Nope, I wasn't kidnapped, brainwashed, paid, or tricked.  But to be brutally honest, I had no idea what I was getting into.  My journey has been a gradual and somewhat roundabout one; but like so much in life it appears to make complete sense in hindsight.  If nothing else it makes for a good story.

My childhood in the wooded suburbs of Connecticut outside New York City was anything but cookie-cutter. It yielded a wide worldview, a variety of experiences, cultural diversity, and fed my naturally inquisitive mind and can-do spirit. My college and young adult years were where I really started asking questions, increasing my awareness, and making small everyday changes in how I looked at things, where I spent my dollars, and what I ate.  In December 2007, I moved to Kentucky to help my mother launch a farmstay bed & breakfast.  It took eighteen months of team effort bulldozing through a crash course in construction, agriculture, and inn-keeping, but the business opened successfully in 2009.  In the mean time, I had cultivated an insatiable passion for sustainable, self-reliant, and simple living.  So...then what?

I broke one of my own cardinal (though "silly") rules -- I fell in love with and married a southerner.  This, of course, had everything to do with the fact that he was my match made in heaven, a peas and carrots kind of mate for me, and my best friend.  His charming wit, dashing good looks, and recent retirement from the corporate world to start a sustainable, farming life on his family's farm in my same Kentucky county didn't hurt, either.  Needless to say, I now had a partner in crime..I mean, life.

Until 2010, I'd never owned land, a cow, sheep, pig, or turkey.  I'd never made yogurt, seeded plants for a garden, sewed a quilt, crafted a wood cutting board, or processed a chicken. But these things and more jumped on my bucket list as I revolutionized my lifestyle and gave in to my love affair with the soil-to-table process of local, homegrown food and a made-from-scratch life. My husband Weldon and I have about run ragged trying to keep up with the exponential growth of our pastured retail farming operation, but our hearts are ultimately focused first on homesteading. We've made major adjustments in the business as our lives, health, and well-being required more balance and a renewed effort to simplify.  Each year, each season, each month, each week, we set out to keep learning, trying, doing, creating.  My bucket list keeps getting longer, but I suppose that's a good problem to have. I'm crossing things off the list, incorporating them into my lifestyle to stay, and blazing an exciting, winding, and fulfilling trail along the way.

No resource has been more valuable to me than other people embarking on the same journey in their own way and in their own space (be it rural, suburban, or urban).  So if recipes, methods of gardening, money matters, lifestyle musing, animal husbandry, or salvaged material home-building is what we're into at the moment, then surely there are other folks out there with questions or insight about these same topics. I'm happy to pay it forward.