There’s no doubt about it. We’re living in the country now. Don’t believe me? Check out our latest acquisition.

Okay, I know buying a book about living in the country doesn’t necessarily mean you live in the country, just like we weren’t actually homesteading just because we used to read books about homesteading (from the comfort of our suburban Burlington house.)  But this time I mean it: we’re living in the country now, and boy do we have a bit of learnin’ to do.

I’ve already mentioned some of the things I love about country life (like stargazing, waking up to the birds, and beautiful landscapes). Of course there’s also the fresh air, wide open spaces, quiet solitude, and amazing wildlife. But there are also some challenging things about country living, as we’ve been learning these past few weeks. Here are two of the most recent lessons I’ve learned:

#1 Making Friends in the Country is Hard

Not only are we living on a farm so far from the neighboring properties that you can’t see them from our cottage, but we haven’t yet had many opportunities for meeting new people in the area (other than the awesome Local Food Hub staff). All that will change in about two weeks when the local farmers’ market starts up and we get to interact with more people on a more regular basis. Given that I am occasionally a social butterfly, I’ll admit that I’m chomping at the bit for this day to come!

In the meantime, here are some of our recent friends wary acquaintances:

Though I don’t have good photos of them to include, it’s worth a mention that there are also plenty of spiders, wasps, and mice in our everyday lives. It’s hard to accept them as friends, but I know I do need to accept them as part of country life.

On the cute and cuddly end of the friend spectrum, last month we met one-week-old goats. This is me feeding baby Lucy:

Unfortunately the goats aren’t on our farm so there’s no long-term friend potential there. But we do get to spend a good portion of time each day playing with (and getting jumped on/knocked over/licked by) Sully, the resident farm dog and my new best friend in the making.

(You can learn more about Sully and see more fun photos of him over here on the farm blog.)

#2 We have to Drive Everywhere

Every grocery trip, pizza dinner, farm purchase, plant sale, or night out on the town means a minimum of 6 miles of driving if we’re going to the small town nearby. Most of the time it’s more like 32+ miles because Charlottesville is usually our destination of choice for shops and where we will deliver plants/produce throughout the season.

In Burlington we would often go a week or two without using a car. We walked to the shopping center nearby, biked downtown, and took the bus to work or school. When we did need the car (for a shopping trip to Lowes, for instance, for one of our many home renovation projects), we always made sure to combine errands to save on gas and time. Thankfully this means we’re no strangers to strategically planning our car trips to be as efficient as possible. But it is still strange to me that if I want to go anywhere off-farm, I have no transportation options other than my fuel-inefficient truck, Jenny. My poor (unnamed?) bike is sitting in the corner of our kitchen, quietly weeping.  (While I would love to get out for a bike ride for fun one of these days, not only will it will necessitate some advanced planning to find a trail or country roads that are safe for cycling, it will mean leaving behind long farm to-do lists: seedlings that need watering, rows that need weeding, crops that need harvesting. AKA not gonna happen.)

I could have called this lesson “it takes a lot of fuel to get food from farm to table“, because really, that’s one of the bigger lessons we’re learning – not jut about country living, but about agriculture specifically. The fuel use in agriculture is not just on the transportation end – like when I deliver vegetable plants to a natural food store in Charlottesville in the back of Jenny’s cab (above) – but the farm production end as well.

We’ve both logged a lot of time on the farm tractors recently – tilling fields to prepare for planting, transporting things around the farm, random joyrides. Okay, I’m only kidding with that last one. Tractor business is serious business. We’re not super comfortable using all this fuel in the name of food production – something we’re going to continue to question this season as we challenge ourselves to grow with minimal negative impact on the environment. But the one thing I know right now is that the tractors sure provide for some great farm photos:

These two lessons only scratch the surface of what we’ve learned already in our ~6 weeks living in the country, and I have no doubt that there’s plenty more to learn… If only I could find time to write about it all!