Collegedale Camp Meeting 2023: Expanding His Kingdom

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Georgia-Cumberland Conference

Seth Shaffer

So You Want to Start a Garden?

All right, so here's a checklist for moving to the country.

I don't know if any of you guys are looking into moving to the country, or have you moved already?

I think it's important to think about think about it and pray about it a lot and Think about what you actually think about what you what you want because farming isn't It isn't like a nine-to-five kind of job So if you want to have holidays and weekends free, then probably farming isn't for you.

Because it's late nights, early mornings.

Do you have anything you wanted to add to that?

Yeah, I would say, you know, we're all used to seeing pictures like this 1 that are up on the screen.

We like to see the amounts of produce coming off, the animals, et cetera.

But places like that, they take a lot of work.

And I'm friends with the people that own the farm that's currently pictured there.

And yeah, I can promise you they did not start out like this.

They started off with a little backyard garden and then just continued scaling it up until they got the piece of property that they're on now.

But yeah, it's always a learning process.

It's something that you're never going to quit learning, excuse me, quit learning about.

When you get that big, you just about have to hire some part-time help or something, right?

Which these guys don't have any at the moment, and they're still managing.

They're a family of 2 adult kids, and mom and dad, and they're managing that.

Seth, I think it's a- So you're the extra helper.

Sometimes we just bail in, but it gets you involved in the community for sure.

I definitely wanted to highlight the starting small because I think it's, whenever you decide on your project, it's really, really easy to want to just go all out and get all the fancy stuff, you know, go and get a tractor.

You can't, surely you can't farm without a tractor, right?

And, you know, starting somewhere where you can have a success that is going to inspire you to keep going because if you start too big and you have a crop loss, it's actually going to possibly dampen your enthusiasm for the rest of your, you might never go back to it.

So start somewhere where you can manage, like tomatoes.

Even just start on the porch, and then start a raised bed after that, and then build on with your skills.

And if you are buying a property in the country, it's important to buy a place that you can sell again.

Don't buy somebody's, like, don't buy something just because it's cheap, because you might get stuck with it and no one's going to want to buy it.

Like, don't buy something that's ugly and doesn't have, you know, doesn't, no one's going to want it kind of thing.

And I know we said there, we talked about don't let going to debt stop you from moving to the country, but have a good money plan before you're moving into the country, because going to debt can really kill it as well.

Yeah, and the farm I was working, I was working in the farm in New Zealand and really awesome farm, it's 120 acres and they do sweet potatoes which are called kumaras in New Zealand.

And you know how he bought that place is he got 2 loans, He got a loan from his parents, he got a loan from a family friend, and that's how he was able to pay that all off within a very short period of time and not have a lot of debt.

Because yeah, you don't want to have a lot of debt.

My dad also, He got a double mortgage when we were moving into the country.

The guy who sold it to him lent him money to buy it.

And so you can have, God's going to provide.

You just have to take a step in faith as well.

And I know you guys have a lot of access to water, town water seems to be everywhere, but I think it's really important to look for a source of water on your property as well, because you need water, your plants need water to survive.

It's pretty affordable around here, a lot cheaper than in New Zealand.

And it's going to help you figure out what kind of soil you're going to deal with.

I know 1 guy here in this area, he has these rain barrels, he collects rain water.

Actually, plants don't really like the additives, and probably our bodies don't either.

In New Zealand, our water is amazing because a lot of us collect rainwater.

And obviously we don't have the problem with freezing pipes where I live.

But I definitely think it's good for drinking water to have rainwater.

And When you're first starting off with a farm or whatnot, I'm just going to touch quickly on the last point on the slide behind me, which is soil quality.

A lot of the soil, well, all soil has a certain amount of nutrients that are already in it.

As you, or maybe if you're buying a farm from somebody else as You're planting crops and harvesting those crops all those crops are taking out nutrients From the soil and If you don't do anything to replenish those nutrients, your nutrient pool is gonna go down very quickly.

And once it's gone, it's gonna take you years to replenish it.

It took you years to de-plenish it, the exact same, or the exact opposite is true for replenishing it.

So you wanna try to start off knowing what your baseline is before you get started and With a lot of the soil tests it takes the guesswork out you can Ask the people doing the soil test do the soil test tell me what I'm lacking what I have Too much of or what I have enough of and then give me specific Recommendations for what I can do to adjust what is there or needs to be there, so there's really no reason to Guess as you're going through this entire process But also thinking about what like rocks you know are you going to have to someone was saying that they have tons of rocks, so are you going to have to pull rocks out to even start the ground?

And Clay is another thing that you have to, it takes a lot of lime to fix clay soil.

So you might have to put a little bit out to get some decent soil.

Like just the normal nitrogen, phosphorus, potash?

When I'm sending off for a soil test, I just tell them, give me a standard soil test.

If I'm just starting off somewhere, I'm opening up a new plot of ground for growing.

I just want to know what's the basics there.

And then from there, I'll see what I have.

And then I can send in another sample and tell them, OK, I'm looking for specific blank, blank, blank.

But at least with Waters Agricultural Lab, which is the 1 we use, their base test, it checks for every type of nutrient or whatnot that could be in there.

1 other thing you need to do is know what's around you.

Because we had friends that were trying to grow everything certified organic, but their adjacent farmland wasn't.

And so they could never get the certification.

And Actually, if there was someone farming there before, you might have to wait 6 years before you can get a certification if they were spraying on that soil.

Like when we moved to the country, there was an apple orchard.

And they'd already cut the apples down, so all you could see was pasture but actually that would be heavy and like copper and things that they'd sprayed on it and there was probably a lot of spray so I mean all we had we just grazed sheep on there so it wasn't a problem but other areas of the farm had really good soil where the soil had washed down from the hills.

The soil was so good that we had worms that were like this long, big, thick, healthy worms and the soil was just beautiful and crumbly.

So you can look around and see what the different soils around the property as well So if you go out looking for property I can tell you Finding raw land is going to be a lot cheaper than buying a farm like this that farm Before they started adding to it a couple barns house out buildings is about 400 450 thousand dollars versus if you get raw land maybe about 200000 hundred and 50 just depends on where it's located and what's around it so check out your neighbors not just for what they may have done to the land but also for their property value, what they may bring to it, or take away from it.

I mean, if you're close to a city, I mean, that could be.

There was a house that got Refurbished and updated it has about 2 acres with it and that went for 400000 So the house was the main drawing point there, but yeah, it just depends.

I mean, the further out you go, like for those of you that are in the area, if you go out to like Polk, Reliance, that area of the country, yeah, you can find a hundred some acres for probably $200, 000.

So, but yeah, if you're looking in Hamilton, Cleveland, Tennessee, Bradley County, yeah, your prices are gonna go up.

So that's another thing to consider as well.

Yeah, and also trying to find a place that possibly they've even started planting fruit trees and just even a basic living area because it's going to be really hard to start up a farm without anywhere to live.

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So You Want to Start a Garden?

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