About

Welcome to Three Hearts Farm! We are a family who own a homestead on three acres on the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington.

Back in 2014 Ryan and Kathleen decided they needed a hobby, so they got married, joined the National Guard, had four kids, got a Master’s Degree, changed jobs, started home schooling, bought a farm and got to work setting the place up as a self-sufficient homestead.

Since Ryan’s brother Adam wants to farm too, and the house needs some remodeling before the six of us can move in, Adam currently lives in the actual farmhouse, along with his two kids about half the time. He does most of the day-to-day chores, owns and manages the bees by himself, and helps with all the planning.

Now we have plenty to do in our spare time. So that’s good!

All to the greater glory of God.

We try to do everything under the patronage of the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, symbolized by the Three Hearts on our logo.

How we Bought the Farm

Those who know us know that we have been trying to buy a homestead for years. One thing after another had fallen through, and we were getting tired of spinning up our real estate people and going out to see places. By the end of June 2022, we had decided to stop looking because the interest rates were climbing and the housing market in the area was just stupid expensive.

So there we were, sitting at home, working and saving and trying to garden and orchard on our little 1/4 acre, and somewhat desperately insisting on trying to raise chickens on it as well. One Wednesday night Kathleen found a property out past Olympia that was 29 acres for just over $600k. It had a house, and on paper looked really nice. Ryan was not super excited about it because, while it was a convenient drive for the jail job, and for Kathleen’s work, it was an hour and fifteen minutes to the family practice job, and two hours to Deedee and Papa’s house.

So Ryan kind of laughed and said, “Well, if I get to the jail tomorrow and my boss offers me 30 hours a week, we’ll go look at that property. Otherwise we hold what we’ve got and keep working on improving our position.”

The next day Ryan got to the jail and his boss called him into the office to offer 40 hours a week, starting in February.

Well, that got our attention. When God makes things obvious like that, it’s best to pay attention. We took it as a sign that the Holy Spirit was moving, so we contacted our friend Megan (the wife of the agent we had previously been using, funnily enough). She arranged a showing for us on a Friday, but since we had her on the phone, Kathleen wanted to see another property in Tacoma on the Thursday after work. Ryan was skeptical, because $750k seemed a lot to ask for three acres and a house, but we might as well.

Well, the Olympia property turned out to be a bit run down, and to need a lot of work and money before it would be move in ready. The mini-farm, on the other hand, turned out to be a funny, quirky farm house only four miles from our current house, with a large, new shop, a nice horse shelter, finished permanent paddocks, and two fields of about an acre each already complete with fences down the sides that had held up to 6 horses at a time for almost twenty years.

We were especially excited to find that the horse had been living on grass 9-10 months of the year, only going on hay in the hottest, driest part of the summer. More than that, satellite imagery and the evidence of our own eyes showed us that the fields stayed green months after all the surrounding fields were dry. Add on the large vegetable plot and berry orchard (now sadly overgrown as the couple who owned it have been getting older and starting to have health issues, but still sporting enormous, delicious, seedless berries) and we were interested.

We thought about it over the weekend, which was the First Saturday at Mass. Ryan was struck by the reading from the Mass for that day (we are still doing the First Saturdays at Cabrini parish), especially these verses from the book of Amos.

I will bring about the restoration of my people Israel;
they shall rebuild and inhabit their ruined cities,
Plant vineyards and drink the wine,
set out gardens and eat the fruits.

Amos 9:14.

Well, we still couldn’t afford it, so we crunched the numbers to figure out what we could afford, and we sent a letter to the sellers explaining exactly why we were offering a price so much lower than their asking price.

Hey, all you can do is ask, right?

To our surprise they didn’t reject our offer, they actually dropped their price by $40k!

So we said yes.

Then more things started falling in place. The timing worked out so that Adam’s lease on his apartment was up and he can now rent from us, so we can keep our old house. The interest rates dropped in mid-July so we got locked in almost a full point lower than we initially thought. All the inspections checked out the first time, and we even got to walk the property with the old owners. Turns out she was an army nurse for 28 years and he is an old rancher from Idaho, which explains why the fences are built to keep bison in. Or out.

So there you are. We went from having no intention even to look for a house at the end of June, to buying and closing by the beginning of August. We held the house warming/house blessing on August 6th 2022, the First Saturday of August (incidentally, the first time in my life I have made all five First Saturdays consecutively without interruption.)

The Dream

Since that day we have developed a few goals for our farm. The biggest is to produce 90% of our own food from our own land in 5 years. This is pretty ambitious. Even more so when we add on the goal to do this with minimal off-farm inputs. In other words, we want to be self-sustaining, though not necessarily self-sufficient (in any libertarian sense of the word).

Why?

Time.

Time in this life is our most precious resource. It is finite, and once spent or wasted it cannot be regained. Right now we spend a large chunk of our available time every week working in the world of corporate medicine for money that we then use to buy our food and pay our mortgage. Eventually we would like to have our mortgage paid off, and instead to spend that time on our farm with our family, directly growing, harvesting and preserving our food. We want the work of sustaining the family to be the work of the family, so that we can all be engaged in it together, at age appropriate capacities.

Ideally we will even produce an excess that we can barter, give or sell to our neighbors so that we will be building community as well.

How can we do this on a little three acre spread in the middle of a sprawling urban population center?

Check out “Our Soil” to learn more.