Hello Everyone,
My name is Tyler, and I’m a father of four. I have one son and three daughters. My son is the oldest; he was seven at the time of this blog post. My girls are six, four, and two, respectively. My wife will also be posting here from time to time. She is, of course, the love of my life. We’ve been married for 10 years this April, and we both just turned 31.
I worked in Texas for most of my adult life. I’ve had many jobs, including valet, personal trainer, fast food worker, and my longest profession was landscaping. So why would someone who has never been a farmer decide to go farm in one of the wildest places in America? Well, it’s a story, and I hope you can gain something from it—whether you want to farm, go to Alaska, or chase a dream you’re not sure you can accomplish.
When I married my wife, I was a lead landscaper and we were, of course, poor. We lived on a college campus and didn’t do much other than go to the gym and watch TV at home. Eventually, after I graduated, we moved to Fort Worth into a small one-bedroom apartment. We loved it, even though we didn’t have much.
Then we began preparing for our firstborn son. After he was born, we moved into a bigger apartment. With each child, we moved again. After our third child, we moved into a duplex that my father-in-law rented to us at a great price for our low-income, growing family. When our fourth child came along, we knew we were done having kids and started to settle into our lives.
However, everything got more expensive while my salary stayed pretty much the same. We began looking for something that would allow me to make a little more money and, more importantly, spend more time with my kids. During the year, I would leave the house at 4 a.m. and wouldn’t get back until anywhere between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. I also lived about an hour away from work, which didn’t help. It was a great job, though, and I got a lot of the winter off.
My wife and I talked a lot about what type of job I should look for and what kind of career I wanted. During those months, we also talked about my father-in-law’s farm that he had started. My brother- and sister-in-law were involved in it, so one day while on vacation, we asked my father-in-law about it. He told us he had bought the property four years earlier and that his dream was to have a peony farm in Homer, Alaska. He also explained that the project was at a standstill because my brother-in-law was in school and my sister-in-law was newly married and about to have her first child.
After that conversation, my wife and I discussed the idea of going up to Alaska to run the farm and get it up and running. We knew it would be hard and that we would be stepping into an environment we had never experienced before. But my wife is an adventurous woman, and she thought it would be a great idea.
So we talked it over and decided to start this dream. Even though we wouldn’t be making money while we were there and would have to return to Texas to work during the winters, we knew we could do it. It was a great opportunity to build a life that we could all enjoy.
Over the past three years, we’ve accomplished more than we ever thought we would. Not having farming experience just means things take a little longer, but we learn as we go—and each step allows us to do more than we could before.
So why Alaska?
Because we had a dream, and we are pursuing it.