About



Hey there! I'm Staci.  My husband and I decided to change our lives completely in 2018 and try our hand at creating a simple, homemade life. Around here we enjoy a slower paced life where we grow (and preserve) much of our own produce, cook almost every single meal from scratch, hang our laundry on the line, and share a love of our home and land.

But our life wasn't always this way.

We were living the only life we'd known, knee-deep in debt and on the work-to-spend treadmill. It was a life of excess that was becoming very unfulfilling and overwhelming. I came across an article about the voluntary simplicity movement, and it immediately resonated with me. I didn't realize at the time that implementing it would take years, but I held it close to my heart as a lifestyle to continue to fight for and strive toward.

After some research I learned that by incorporating frugality and judicious money management into our life in addition to becoming much better stewards of what we had, we could spend less, work-to-save, and have a much greater quality of life. This was completely opposite than the way I'd been raised. My life until that point had been mindless consumerism with a focus on working to buy more and more. The idea of simple living coupled with a newfound term (for me) of contentedness was the game changer I needed. It became the perfect anecdote to our drive for material perfection.

Over the next couple of years, we learned to live below our means, do more with what we earned, desire less things, and, ultimately, become much healthier and happier in the process. 

And it's been a process.

A long story short, we started a soap & skincare business and within a couple years of beginning the business it took off and allowed my husband to leave his career first and then I joined him 2 years later. While working my corporate job I was incredibly stressed in such a toxic environment. I felt a bit lost and burned out but had been too scared of leaving the security of a regular paycheck to quit. Do you relate? And then one day I did just that. And you know what? I've truly never been happier. It can be scary at times, but our new life allows us to take time for ourselves, fosters lower stress and increased peace, and a mindset of gratitude.

Because we'd reduced our wants and needs and therefore our spending, and focused on changing our mindset, we now live a life that we love every single day.



We've learned a few things on this journey.  They include:
  1. that we need a lot less (money, things, etc.) than we'd previously thought, 
  2. that homemade is almost always a better choice, 
  3. that eating unprocessed "real food" is delicious, nutritious, AND pretty easy once you acquire a handful of recipes and learn a bit about food preservation, 
  4. and that choosing to earn less has allowed us to live more
While we choose to live at the outskirts of town on just under an acre, you can live anywhere and achieve a similar lifestyle.  

Our hope is that this blog provides you some information and inspiration to create a simple homemade life of your own!


P.S. We are the Cobble Hill Farm in upstate NY, not in Canada 😊


Wondering where to start?  Here are links to a few of the most popular non-recipe posts: