We spent the next few months revisiting the farm and having some very serious conversations about purchasing this property. The big question was, could we actually do this? This was so much more than buying a house. We would need to farm the land in some fashion. It is one thing to say “we can become farmers… no problem.” It is another thing to sit down and write a plan. Initially we were pretty scattered. We began looking at the farms around the Hudson valley, particularly the newer farms to see what they had done, and if they were successful. We knew we wanted bees, that was a given. But that was not going to be enough. We would need over 200 hives to become honey bee farmers right out of the gate. While beekeeping is something I truly love, and believe is essential to our planet, we were not ready for that. Raising any type of livestock for human consumption was COMPLETELY out of the question. I have gone to great lengths to save animals, raising them to be slaughtered wasn’t happening on my watch. (I once found a baby mouse that was close to death in one of our barns. I snuck him into my office for a week so I could feed him with a dropper every two hours) And yes, I am a vegetarian/vegan-ish (I eat honey) and I don’t buy leather. I have nothing against anyone who does consume meat or wear leather, you do you.
During my farm research I noticed that a new trend was to grow hops to be sold to breweries. That sounded interesting! I did a little research and I was able to find a class on that very topic not far from us in Delhi, New York. I excitedly registered us both to take this class. I was very excited, Egidio was skeptical. We both took a vacation day from work and attended the class. The class was very informative. So much so that two hours into it I leaned over to Egidio and whispered “There isn’t a chance in hell that we are doing this” He responded with “Nope, not a chance. Let’s make a run for it when we break for lunch.” We left class, found a place to have lunch, and agreed that we enjoyed the learning process from class, and that we were back to the drawing board on what we were going to do with the farm if we did decide to buy.
During this time we kept going back to the idea of producing maple syrup. We had just spent the winter months making syrup with Egidio’s mother. We had fun and the syrup was delicious. So we had that… However, we had no evaporator, no hydrometer, no reverse osmosis machine, (I had never even heard of a reverse osmosis machine) no actual knowledge on the “correct” way to make maple syrup. Egidio’s mother showed us how she knew when the syrup was ready… she took a large spoonful and held it up and watched how it poured… THAT WAS IT! There is a lot more than tapping a tree, collecting the sap and boiling it down on a pan outside to create actual maple syrup. We had a very long way to go.