MI FARMacy Market

In the beginning, I just wanted to see if I could make a pizza.

This would be an experiment to see what it would take to grow and raise every element that went on that pizza. I underestimated that it would take the summer to grow a garden and raise a few chickens and that by fall I’d be making a pizza. Really, it would be 3 years before I could make that pizza.
I NEVER anticipated that my little “pizza garden” would turn into a decade + long food and farming journey. Or that I’d end up having a whole host of adventures in that time. From starting a homestead right after my kids were born, running a 70 family CSA, helping friends design and build a local Farm to Table restaurant, learning to make cheese and hard cider, selling produce to local schools, markets and restaurants, speaking at various agricultural events, and running a door-to-door produce delivery program… to say the least, I was busy. It was no wonder that eventually I got sick. Really sick.

All that time I spent studying and learning about our food system, how to grow more for longer, healthy eating, the meaning and science behind buzz words like organic, GMO and non-GMO, the benefits of eating local and in season…. I wasn’t practicing what I had learned or what I was preaching. I’d let the stress of trying to be a mom who was running a house and farm while trying to run a business(s) get to me. I wasn’t eating right when I remembered to eat, and I sure as heck wasn’t sleeping.

3 years… the same amount of time it took me to learn to grow and make the elements of my pizza, is how long I spent bouncing back and forth between different doctors. Most telling me I’d probably not work anymore and I was most definitely done farming. I decided I couldn’t let that happen. Farming is the closest thing I can think of to a true and proper calling and I wasn’t ready to let that go. I needed to get better for my kids and for myself. I found a different doctor, changed my diet, started doing yoga, meditating, working out and I became a Reiki practitioner. Little by little, things got better. Looking back, there is one thing that is very apparent, Food Is Medicine. Hence the play on words in the farms’ name.