Welcome to the farm

Hi! I'm Sam Beechler. I am SO happy you found your way to our site & this blog. My husband AJ & I run Beechler Farms which is really just our little homestead that we try to share bits & pieces of with our community. Usually, I come up with the ideas & say something like "hey babe, don't you think it would be a great idea if we.... "- and my WONDERFUL husband makes it happen.

So how did we get here? We bought our house in October of 2024 & after living in several different rentals over the past few years, the first thing we did was get chickens and start our garden. It hasn't even been a year, and we have grown to a family of the two of us, our two labs- Stella & Bank, our "pet" pig- Penny, 15 ducks, 20 chickens, 10 guineas, 7 rabbits, and lots of bees!

Although neither of us grew up on a farm, it's not much of a surprise that we ended up on one. I come from a long line of green- thumbed women. I was lucky enough to have my great- grandmother in my life for 26 years. She was a French woman who moved to America when she met my great- grandfather during World War II. They lived out very traditional roles where he provided & she was a homemaker. Looking back- a lot of my homesteading practices and ideals are based off lessons I learned from her during my childhood. There wasn't any fancy water filters or red-light therapy, but we ate homecooked meals, spent a lot of time at their kitchen table, played on the tire swing by the tomato garden, fed the birds, and visited with each other while we were there. Things were kept simple.

COVID was a shit show to say the least, but I was very fortunate to have had the best-case scenario. My last year of college was virtual so I would get my classwork done in the mornings and spend the rest of the day in my garden. I went to school in the Mountains of North Carolina at Appalachian State and I still dream of how rich that soil was. My garden was in a very small town called Creston, NC. Nobody new really moved to Creston, it was a town of what you would call "old- timers". I learned more that year in the garden than I did in any Business Law or Stats class. The sense of community I built was unlike anything I had ever experienced. An old man down the street disced & tilled the land with his tractor for me (which I repaid with pounds and pounds of tomato's a few months later). There was an older lady who owned a ranch down the street from my garden, and she taught me how to can veggies and make homemade cornbread. We would work in the garden and take a basket of the produce to her house and cook dinner to enjoy on the porch. Moving away was the hardest thing I ever did but I decided that I would bring that lifestyle with me wherever I went.

My hopes for Beechler Farms is to make living simply feel a little more accessible. The world we live in is so rushed and fast paced and convenience has overtaken to the detriment of our traditions. Being able to share this lifestyle with my community and family is the greatest reward. For me- sometimes that looks like enjoying a cup of coffee with my mom as she plucks seeds from my Zinnia's for next season's garden or listening to my grandma go on and on about her sourdough and the starter that she named.

I hope whoever finds themselves reading this can take a little piece back to their everyday lives. Or maybe this blog will never be read and end up just being my publicized diary of our sweet little life- but that's ok with me.

Yours Truly,

Samantha

Philippians 4:12-13

“I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation…”