About Us
Thanks for visiting the Stonelick Hollow Farm website! We are Kris and Karen Gilbert, and we’re glad you dropped by!
Kris is a teacher. Karen is a nurse. But when it’s nice out, you’ll find us in the garden, feeding chickens and ducks…or chasing the dog, who’s probably chasing chickens and ducks.
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Why We Grow
Our farming story began in 2007 in our little Ohio subdivision…if you can call a few patio plants “farming.” Those tomato and pepper plants that summer turned into a 4’x4’ garden bed the next year. That became three more garden beds the year after that. By the following year, our small garden took up more than half our backyard--a 500-square-foot growing space with eleven raised beds, fruit trees, and a modest homebrewing setup inside.
We were suburban homesteaders. Yard farmers. Blazing a trail to self-sufficiency. And we were having a blast!
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When we needed to grow even more than our quarter-acre allowed without pushing our luck with the neighborhood HOA, we packed up, left the subdivision, and settled on 5 acres in 2016.
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Our Values
In all that time we weren’t just growing veggies to upset the HOA (that was all bonus). A few family values made yard farming worth it for us and keep us growing now:
#1: Knowing where food comes from. As Joel Salatin says, there are few things we do that are more basic, more fundamental, or more intimate than eating the food that becomes part of our very DNA. That’s why knowing how our food is grown and where our food comes from is really important to us. On the other hand, it still floors me to see kids coming through school who have no idea where their food comes from…or in some cases, what real food is. That has begun to change in the last few years, but food illiteracy is still a reality. (On a field trip to a local farm, it was clear that some of our students had never seen vegetables growing before. One of our little guys saw green beans growing for the first time in his life. He yelled, “Those aren’t green beans! There’s no can!”).
We wanted something different for our daughters: food grown at home with traditional seeds and without chemicals.
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#2: Taking care of ourselves and each other. As a nurse, Karen has seen countless people come through the medical system with health ailments…diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, reproductive issues, allergies… You get the idea. And we know that a lot of these are directly related to consumption of the “Western Diet.” AKA, all the repurposed GMO corn syrup that fills up most of the shelves in the average grocery store. And what Western medicine offers for treatment quite often takes the form of the latest pill.
Now don’t get me wrong here. We’re not anti-medicine by any stretch. Seriously, if you’re sick, go to the doctor already. Take care of yourself and the people around you. The problem is that it’s just too easy to reach for a pill instead of dealing with the root issue, and that isn’t making our health better. Our own family health histories follow that pattern. Again, we wanted something better for ourselves, and for our kids.
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#3: Taking care of the land around us. It’s a biblical value, really, to be stewards of the earth. Or in Joel Salatin’s words, our lives are connected to a “fragile umbilical” that sustains us, and we’ve got to take care of it. In fact, soil health is directly related to our own health, right down to the soil microbes that, in turn, play a vital role in regulating human body systems. Our journey with growing things has been a journey into revitalizing the muddy clay soil we found ourselves in. From plants to insects, to the air and water, domestic animals and wild, there is room for all of them in the balance of nature. Our goal is to be good stewards of that balance, working with nature, using sustainable practices and without harmful chemicals, and to be ready for the abundance as it comes.
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And so here we are on our slightly larger homestead, cultivating veg, herbs, and flowers, as well as raising chickens for eggs and meat. We’re looking forward to seeing you…and to see how we can help you in your own journey toward sustainable living.