Polyface Farm

One last post about our trip to Virginia. My favorite stop of the whole trip was to a "beyond organic" farm called Polyface Farm (The Farm of Many Faces).

This farm is owned by Joel Salatin. You may have heard of him. He's been featured in TIME magazine, Mother Earth News, Food Inc, and others. He manages his farm "beyond organically". An organic farm can still treat animals horribly, because organic only signifies that no "non-organic" pesticides and chemicals haven't been fed to the animals. At Polyface, Joel and his interns make sure the animals eat the food that is right for the animal (no corn for cows, for example), and they make sure their lifestyle is also as natural as possible. It's more healthy and fulfilling for all parties involved.

Here's their tour if you're interested: http://www.polyfacefarms.com/. The farm is open to visitors most of the year, so we gave ourselves a tour.

They were super helpful. We didn't burden them with many questions, but they were quick to offer explanations.

Coolest chicken coop ever! It's a trailer, so you can move it around easily.

The chickens (and all of the animals, for that matter), were very comfortable with human contact. They always came running in fact, which is refreshing.

The laying hens paired up with rabbits. He had a lot of symbiotic relationships around the farm. I learned so much.

The pigs...oh the pigs. I just love pigs. I can't wait to have some someday. These pigs were digging through compost as "pigaerators". They aid in the composting of manure and mulch while digging for fermented corn. They love it.

The other pigs were out in the woods foraging. They can clear a wood patch of all underbrush like nothing else. They were having so much fun.

There were several totally covered in mud. They excitedly ran over when we arrived, and shook their mud all over us. It was hilarious.

It was such a fun visit. I learned so much, and I plan to go back every season so that I can learn even more. Someday I want a farm like this one (but on a smaller scale probably).

Rural America

While we were visiting Shenandoah National Park, we made some other stops. We spent a good amount of time in the countryside of western Virginia (not West Virginia, just the western side of Virginia).

I fell in love with the area right away. It's very rural, but with an old-timey flare. All of the houses were old; the farms picturesque, and the animals happy. I could definitely handle more of that.

These people have it made. This little homestead was beautiful, separated by a beautiful creek from the road. This is the best depiction of my dream homestead I've ever found.

Here's the bridge and creek in front of their house.

Isn't this beautiful?!

We passed several small businesses selling "Antique" tables, made today! I still haven't figured out how to make an antique table today...

Anyway, we both fell in love with this area. We will definitely be back.

Shendandoah

Recently, Brian and I took a road trip to Virginia (the Shenandoah area). It was an amazing trip, and I very literally fell in love with the western side of Virginia. The trip would require a huge post, so I've decided to split it up into 3 parts. the first part is Shenandoah National Park. I had no idea, first of all, that there was a National Park so close to us. I thought Acadia was the closest park and it's 12 hours away. This park is only 5 hours away, so we decided to check it out. It's awesome! It's got several different kinds of hikes, from waterfalls to bouldering. We had a blast.

The first hike we did was Old Rag (we never figured out why it's called that). It's an intensive hike with lots of bouldering (so much fun!) to an overlook.

The hike started out more gradual, like above. It was beautiful. Spring was full-blown there, so it was a nice change to the every other day freeze in NY this Spring.

Then the rocks got bigger...

and bigger!

There were beautiful overlooks. I loved the hills there...well, I guess there aren't technically hills. They're the appalachian mountains, but they're hills compared to the Mountains in the west. But they were beautiful.

Then the bouldering began. This is something Brian and I both enjoy. The constant obstacles are such a fun challenge.

We followed the blue blazes as we scaled the boulders.

This was the coolest rock we ran into. We could of gotten on top, but geologic time includes now, so I wasn't going to risk it.

We reached the top, and a beautiful overlook of the valley in all directions.

We camped in the backcountry among these boulders. It was fun; such a cool spot.

There were so many hikes to do in the park that we didn't even scratch the surface, but we did do the White Oak Canyon trail, which followed a creek down a gorge, so there were several waterfalls.

Lots of photo ops.

At any rate, we just fell in love with Shenandoah National Park. Who knew such a great park was so close to home? We'll definitely be back!