Introducing Your Bloggers

A little post about your crazy, independent farmer and the woman beside him.

Welcome to our new blog! Rose and I wanted to create this blog as a way to share our story and connect with our friends, family and customers about our life on and off the farm. We hope to bring you relevant content surrounding the homestead lifestyle in the central Wyoming area. This may range from farm enterprises, gardens and livestock to more lifestyle centered posts about how we manage day-to-day affairs or tips, tricks and/or products we may find make life a little easier out here.

We would like to take this first post as an opportunity to introduce ourselves and give some backstory as to how we got here and became who we are today.

I'll start with myself here: My name is Devon Olsen, as I write I am currently 25 years old, a few years into bootstrapping a small, direct-to-consumer farm in the Casper, Wyoming area. If you'd like to learn more about that endeavor I'll be sure to add a link to the business website at the bottom of my introduction. I was born in Salt Lake City, UT in January of 1994, my earliest memories are a little further south, however. Up to the age of 10 or so I was raised in southern Utah, mostly in the Hurricane/St. George area of the state. At that time my family enjoyed much of the outdoors with trips to nearby lakes, streams and waterfalls, excursions into the desert to chase snakes and lizards, catch turtles and frogs, collect cacti and much more. At home I enjoyed friendships with local neighborhood kids and probably far too much Pokémon while my mother tended a small backyard garden and my father worked to pay the bills and gain the weekends of freedom we were blessed to utilize. Without going into any unnecessary detail, my parents divorced around the time I turned 8 shortly after we had moved to a tiny little hamlet by the name of Virgin, UT. This eventually led to my father, my sister and myself relocating to Cheyenne, Wyoming to be near family that could help with this transition in my father's life. I didn't spend really any time in or near gardens for the next few years until we eventually moved up to another tiny little town near the Montana/Wyoming border by the name of Lovell, Wyoming. While living here I can't say that I was the most interested young man when it came to the subject of growing plants, or agriculture in general, though we were most fortunate to have a wonderful neighbor next door who grew quite a large garden every year by the name of Mary Jane. She became a close family friend and was probably about as good of a neighbor as one could ask for. Still not enough to spark interest in my stubborn little head, but enough to leave a good memory to lean on later in life.

Moving onto the meat 'n' potatoes so to speak, life eventually had me back in Cheyenne, Wyoming. While there for high school I continued into what I would say is a somewhat typical, though certainly not normal, lifestyle for a teenager attending a government school, mostly being ungrateful for what my family provided me while simultaneously developing an interest in some things that my family, I'm sure, would have preferred I'd stayed away from. These interests motivated a self study of gardening and specifically doing so without drawing a significant amount of attention. Without realizing it at first, what I was really studying was permaculture and ecosystem management and development, a can of worms that would eventually draw my interest far more than any one plant a teenager once favored ever could. As time went on I became fascinated with some of the big permaculture figures of the time present and past, figures who took degraded ecosystems and transformed them into healthy ecologies, often while making a decent living for their endeavors. Men like Masanabu Fukuoka of Japan, Sepp Holzer in Austria, Geoff Lawton in Australia, successor to Bill Mollison, Joel Salatin in Virginia, Mark Sheppard in Wisconsin, Gabe Brown of North Dakota, Allan Savory in Zimbabwe, and so many more who may or may not have flown the permaculture flag but certainly in their own way healed the land and built their own legacies. Study of men like this yielded a dream to build my own path to liberty while healing Wyoming land, and eating good while doing so. Implementation of that dream certainly does not happen overnight, so through my writing on this blog I hope to bring you along as I trip, stumble and fall my way down my own path to healthy land, healthy community and a healthy personal economy.

My name is Rose Stanislawski. I was one of three children born to a couple in Redford Michigan. My older brother and sister were thrilled to have a new baby girl in the family! Ok, so maybe just my sister. My brother was praying for a boy. Oops!

Not long after, my parents moved us to Linden Michigan. A small town not far from Flint Michigan. We lived and grew on a small plot of land gaining many friends and memories along the way. We would have cold winters full of snow days and hot chocolates and summers of traveling and gardening. It seemed like we have a big garden each year. My mother always seemed to be canning tomatoes every year!

After high school, I went straight to work at a café and bakery. Eventually, I added in courses at the local community college. It took a while but I obtained an associate's degree in business. Soon after graduating, I moved to Casper Wyoming. I served at a restaurant in town for quite awhile. It's here that I met Devon and our paths in life merged together. Now, I'm more interested in healthy living, gardening, and having a more sustainable home.

If you made it this far, we want to sincerely thank you for reading our first blog post! We look forward to providing more valuable content in the posts to come. As promised, here is a link to the local farm website if you're in the Casper, Wyoming area: https://www.cackleberryfg.com

And if you'd like to support us in other ways or are not local to the area, your welcome to follow our links in the menu bar at the top of the page to our amazon link, redbubble, or zazzle stores, until next time, Grow Your Freedom.