Growing a Farmer Post 1

I'll admit that I was very uninterested in reading this book since farming doesn't really appeal to me or most college students for that matter. I was, however, able to find a few points of interest in this book so far. I like that the author, Kurt Timmereister, included the financial aspects of his adventures. He highlights the difficulties associated with acquiring and growing his farms. I also enjoyed his happy-go-lucky nature he had when he first started his quest for self sufficiency. He admitted that he knew nothing to begin with and that he wished he grew up as a farm boy to have the information on the plants and land plots. Although his gut instinct appears to be treating him well. When he was acquiring his first plot of land on Vashon Island, I found it funny that he let the real estate agent take him around to various properties even though after seeing the one from the ad listing he immediately knew he would be picking that one. He even pretended to be interested in other properties and ask questions, as any informative buyer would.

            While I do think the author is being earnest, I don’t quite appreciate his encouragement to everyone to buy a plot of land, start growing foods, and to become self sufficient. I think that Kurt gives himself less credit than he deserves. He is obviously a very intelligent person with a good intuition and perception, perhaps even a little lucky. He was able to grow a successful business in Seattle, starting out with a small café and eventually growing the number of seats and size of the place. He does give partial credit to the coffee boom that they experienced in the 1990s in America. Still, for his blissful nature, he’s very capable of making the right decisions. He was able to turn around an abandoned property that I’m sure the agent thought they were lucky to sell to him. He was able to educate himself about the various plants and food he wanted to grow and able to clear out one of the most invasive species at the time, the blackberry plants. I do think that the average person is less capable of making all this happen than this author, so I don’t really recommend anyone to take on the ventures that he chose to.