When I was a kid of about 8 or 9, we had family friends that lived on a small farm in Baltimore. I was born in Baltimore City and raised in the suburbs of Baltimore. One weekend we went to visit the Kurpecks, who owned a 5 – 10-acre farm. It wasn’t a working farm. He was a plumber and she was a homemaker, but it had a barn and an old farmhouse which they were redoing. I thought it was great. All this land and it was all theirs. That was the birth of my love of farms.
My wife was also born in Baltimore, but grew up on a small farm in Pennsylvania. They had large vegetable gardens, a yearly steer or pig, and canned vegetables in the fall. For my wife her farm was her childhood and she loved it.
We met and married in medical school. Trained and served in the military and moved to Baltimore after completing our military service. I loved growing my own produce and at our home in the city we converted a good bit of our backyard into raised beds and a small chicken coop. But I was never really happy in Baltimore. I just wasn’t cut out for life in the city or even the suburbs.
We had a small vacation place in the mountains of Taos, NM which we moved to after I had surgery. We sold our home in the city and moved to the southwest. Once I recovered from my surgery, I was ready to go back to work, but the small hospital in Taos couldn’t afford to hire a surgeon, so we moved back east to be near our family.
I was interviewing in a number of places and told all the realtors the same thing. Show me every property over 20 acres which had fields, outbuildings, and if possible, a pond. When my realtor showed me our present home, I knew it was the place driving down the 1/3 mile drive. The property was drop dead beautiful. I told him this is the place and he said, “but you haven’t seen the house!” I told him, I could make the house the way we wanted it, but there was nothing I had seen in property that was just this unique and so stunning. I knew it was home. And when I showed Bobbi, she said the same exact thing. I guess that’s what you get for being married for 27 years at the time.
The name we took from a science fiction show that our whole family loved and watched together. And that is how Farscape Farm was born.
