We Bought A Ranch!

Now what? We have some good ideas, but now it’s time to start mapping them out and setting up a project plan to get us started. What comes first? Ah, the proverbial question – what came first, the chicken or the egg? Seriously, this is our first time doing this, I really don’t know.

Let me take a step back real quick. My name is Neil and along with my wife Julie and our daughter Luna, we left the craziness of the city of Austin for a little slice of Heaven out here in the hill country and more specifically, wine country. There are wineries all around us. In fact, on our road alone, there are 2 with another being built and possibly a 4th on the way just across the road. More about this in a minute.

We lived about 5 minutes north of downtown Austin to put things in perspective to where we are coming from. When I met Julie, one of the questions in courting that generally comes up is do you want kids and if so how many. I told her absolutely, I want 12. We can get a farm and then all of the kids can pitch in and we can grow something beautiful. I was joking. Kind of. I wanted 4 children but always had a desire to get some land so that we can do our own thing. Nothing serious with a plan, but it was always in the back of my mind. Fortunately, Julie loved that idea too as we love being out in nature. Even if it was to live in Austin (we really didn’t ever think we would leave) and then have land that we could go out to. Flash forward, our lives evolved. Julie became an herbalist, I started working remote and we started a food forest in our front yard. I can’t say we were ever successful as the squirrels and birds took what little we grew, but we enjoyed tending to the land (by the time we left, the soil health was amazing and whoever lives there now will have fertile land to grow on). We started learning more about agriculture to grow our own medicine and food. We also started looking into getting chickens and went so far as to get a bunch of reclaimed wood from one of our neighbors to build a coop. We also had a small deep freeze which we would continue to fill with pickings from the farmers market every Sunday. Then, the pandemic hit. With the stay-at-home directive, this enabled us to really focus on the “what if we scaled” questions. Our home was a 1940’s 740 sq ft bungalow, we had 2 dogs, 2 cats a baby and soon to be another on the way. We idealized the minimalist philosophy but couldn’t adhere to it in practice. We love to cook, we have a lot of books and I love my tools. With these three sets of hoarding possibilities alone that just didn’t leave our home very spacious. Anyhow, after a couple months, we really got serious and said let’s do it. Let’s sell our home, find some land and become stewards of the land a-la Joel Salatin (one of my agricultural and ecological heroes) build a ranch, become nutritiously self-sustainable and provide to our community as well and have an agritourism destination. I put the vibrations out there for what I wanted, 15-20 acres and Julie found it. Our white buffalo. We came out to visit it and fell in love right away. It was the perfect little piece of land. We also had no idea what was around it. Wineries galore! We were looking to move to wine country! Seriously, we had no clue about this perk. There are over 100 wineries, and growing (no pun intended), within 45 minutes of us. Done. We’re doing it. We’ll figure out how to make it happen as we go.

There was no way we would be able to sell our home and live in it at the same time. The realtor we used, Mathias Thiele, who we met on the same day we went to visit the property the first time also helped us list our home. We did it without knowing if we would get this property but knew that we wanted to live out here. So, we got a POD, filled it to the brim, staged the home and moved into our RV in my parent’s driveway in San Antonio. The plan was to stay there for a short duration and then migrate to wine country to be closer to the land in the area we desired. Julie and I decided that we would make that happen in the coming weeks, then, someone stole our generator in the middle of the night while Julie was sleeping. There was a pregnant lady and baby in that trailer!!! Who would do this?!?! I was in Austin working on the home. We had chained the generator to the RV and the brazen thieves cut the locks and drove away with the generator still plugged in ripping the plug out from the generator and the RV at the same time. Jokes on them, it was almost out of gas. Anyways, my parent’s home couldn’t run the RV as the power needed to run the AC was too much of a pull. This forced us to move on that day. With a hot Texas summer upon us, there was no way we could live without the AC, let alone keep the animals in a hot box. Julie found an amazing boutique motor lodge in Stonewall, TX called the Stonewall Motor Lodge. It’s a refurbished 1960’s motor lodge that would make the Hotel San Jose in Austin jealous. They have 4 RV spots and we asked about staying there long term and they were good with it. Tim and Errica, who manage the motor lodge, have since become friends and we couldn’t have met any better people on our journey to moving to the area. If you are coming to the area, we recommend staying there for sure. While staying there, we sold our home! Awesome. We still didn’t have a new home to move into yet. All good, we still loved the area. We enrolled Luna into daycare and started to really plant our roots here. We have met a lot of great people we are proud to call friends and neighbors. We have explored the area extensively, but still have a lot more to discover. Flash forward, after some ups and downs, we have a ranch!

We look forward to sharing our journey with you as we learn how to be stewards of the land and real-life Texas ranchers.

Welcome to Mother Luck Ranch!