TLDR version: We are in the midst of selling our 3 acres here in Pasadena to a private investor and we are relocating our family to an 18 acre farm in Southern PA in order to scale our farm business and pivot our farm/homesteading ministries.
To get on our list for future purchases of dairy, eggs, poultry, pork, and seasonal veggies/fruits/flowers, go to the newsletter sign up in our page bio. Or if you’d simply like to stay connected with what God is going to do next in our lives. Our business plan is to provide hand-delivered, weekly drop off points in both Glen Burnie and Annapolis on Sunday afternoons. As well as providing small farm/homestead/backyard consulting services to “work ourselves out of a job” by teaching you how to grow and raise your own foods to feed your family. We are taking 2026 primarily as a Sabbath year (We need it! Plus, our 14 year wedding anniversary is coming Jan 7th 🫶) but will do a soft pilot launch of some farm products next year, with a fully scaled model in January 2027.
Thanks in advance for your amazing love and support for the Shiloh family in this huge transition! We plan on attending the 12PM service at LH every Sunday, with CJ continuing to serve on the LH worship team and remotely running Annapolis Music Therapy Services. The Shiloh gals will be staying local Sun-Wed to finish out the current school year.
Fuller story: I (CJ) love meditating on spiritual metaphors in the garden and tend to view most things in life through this lens. There are four different ways to establish new plants. Germinating by seed, propagating stems, grafting branches and transplanting all or part of a plant’s root system. All four systems are what Jim and I are currently experiencing in our personal, professional and social lives, but see it most clearly in the spiritual realm that runs between all of these embedded life layers.
Transplanting:
There’s a big difference between taproot and rhizome root systems. My mind’s eye continually wanders over to my current asparagus bed (which by the way, takes a full seven years to produce its first crop if planted by seed) where its rhizome roots are part of a huge interconnected network of underground, horizontal stems. In April/May, mature asparagus stalks will appear overnight and straight out of the ground, ready to harvest within 1-2 days. When praying with Ms Vick after a LH service recently, she thought of the impact our lives have in the community as tributaries, which is another really beautiful way to think about it all. But seeing all the wonderful people who came to Nostalgia Worship Night last weekend, many we’d never even met but with way less than six degrees of separation, it really drove home the metaphor of with asparagus bed. Looking over at the fire pit and seeing someone receiving hands-on prayer, all unfamiliar faces. It’s where the true spiritual fruit, or vegetable in the case of my asparagus bed, can be recognized in what God has done through us on this property over the past 12 years.
Then my mind wanders over to the lone Butterfly Weed nearby in our fruit tree orchard. The taproot of this particular Butterfly Weed established itself way back in 2015, when we planted the first two apple trees. We had envisioned a field of wild flowers in our new orchard, so we wouldn’t have to mow between all the trees. But the only flower that managed to establish itself was this one particular Butterfly Weed. Now a decade later, I dig it up in the early spring, thinking surely I dug out the main taproot. I cut the massive root ball into 3-4 pieces with a very sharp, clean knife, then plunge them into different places around the property to see what will take. I know the Monarchs are thankful for my efforts. But every year in late spring I see the same Butterfly Weed coming back again in the very same spot. Its main taproot must be several feet deep by now…
With a huge, upcoming move for our family and livestock, so many metaphors align with how we’ve grown horizontally within our community (police dept, small business and nonprofit sectors, local church outreach, homeschool community) but also deeply into the taproot of our faith in Christ and the teachings from the churches we’ve been part of here (for me, stemming way back to childhood in the EP churches, all the way forward to our community at Lighthouse.Church). Also, we never saw ourselves ever moving from these 3 acres in Pasadena. In some ways, the process of being transplanted is as painful as being chopped into several thick gnarly pieces of root ball and plunged into the ground in early spring just to see what happens. We are feeling all the upheaval, yet believing that our TRUE, deepest root in Christ will never change. We are so ready for these new chapters! It needs to be understood that the Lord told us very clearly in August 2013 when we bought this property in Pasadena, that we are only stewarding this property, for God’s glory and for our joy. And it has brought us infinite amounts of joy in the 12 years we’ve been here. We are now so excited for whatever the Lord has for us next. We believe this is not just providing daily “fish” to our communities here, but empowering our farm members to fish for themselves and their families for the long term.
Grafting:
Why Southern PA you ask? The answer is grafted in below. ;) Arboriculture is what I have the least amount of knowledge or experience with. We currently have five apples, three cherries, and two peach trees. We’ve only ever had one really big harvest of peaches (last summer, probably 200 peaches on each tree, it was epic) but otherwise I feel a little guilty every time I walk through our poorly neglected orchard. There are just so many thousand other farm tasks to do around here. But at least the apple and peach trees look healthy (not so sure the cherry trees will make it) and we prune them every spring as best we can.
But here’s the metaphor about grafting that will blow your mind, and it has to do with how we chose those 18 acres in southern PA. (We will be slow to reveal our new location, our privacy is important to us as well as the privacy of the community we can clearly see God grafting us into, but I will say that it is not the Lancaster area.) Three years ago, we headed to our favorite beach in the world, Lewes, Delaware. Part of why it’s our favorite is because it’s only 2 hours from home (in case anything goes wrong on the farm while we’re away). We have access to renting a precious little townhouse condo which is walking distance to the beach, has a private fishing pier, and only a short bike ride to Cape Henlopen State Park. There is very little tourism, Lewes is just a super family-friendly little beach town and we love it. Well, it seems many Amish families from PA like Lewes, DE for the same reasons. Three years ago, we made friends with part of a large Amish family on the beach. The kids started playing together, I started chatting with the sister-in-laws about canning, and Jim started chatting with the two brothers about raising livestock. We spent the entire week together and both couples and their children have become some of our dearest friends. When we move to PA, Jim will be working part-time for one of the brothers, both as driver and manual labor for his company doing custom-built homes and remodeling. We are purchasing the 18-acre farm from a family who actually left the Amish church last year and is looking to downsize. Now before you jump to conclusions, no we are not trying to join the Amish church. Like I said in the short version, our plan is to continue serving at LH and attending the 12pm every Sunday. But wow God’s Provision over our lives and all of our current needs is astounding, is it not? Here’s just one example - when we load up all our animals in the livestock trailer and head north, we’ll literally be turning them out onto much, MUCH greener pastures. Just like my experience with arboriculture, I really don’t have enough knowledge about how our lives are going to look in the region we’re moving to. It will be very different, that is for sure. And the fact that we’ve dreamed of living off-grid since we were newlyweds in 2012, it just goes to show that the Lord truly hears the deepest desires of our hearts, and blesses His children beyond their wildest dreams.
Propagation:
Propagating stems (or gathering seeds for that matter) are much less “painful” to the parent plant, but also takes much longer to produce fruit (or flowers, as the case may be) than the first two processes I’ve already described in transplanting or grafting.
Many people have experience with propagating houseplants, though they may not realize that’s what it’s called. Take for example easy-to-grow houseplants like pothos or spider plants, you simply cut a decent length of vine and put it in a glass of water. Within a few weeks it will have developed roots and you just pop that into some good potting soil in a new pot and you’ve got yourself a new plant. Many houseplant enthusiasts like myself (though my sister is even greater than I in this topic) prefer to keep only houseplants that came from cuttings from friends.
But other plants, like my beloved lavender, are much more difficult to propagate. Well worth the effort though because it takes exponentially longer to start lavender by seed. All the French lavender on our farm in Pasadena came from seed that I’d planted once, the first spring after we moved here in 2014. It took a few years to get established, but by 2017 I was able to cut back deeply into 20 or so of its healthiest stems. I then stripped off the bottom 2/3 of its leaves, took a paring knife, and gently scraped off all of its woody stem, then I dipped it in rooting hormone. (More traditional methods use honey, the wisdom of our ancestors intrinsically knowing this coating would help keep the raw stem from exposure to any bad bacteria in the soil.) I then took a deep pot and pressed some healthy soil firmly but gently down. Then I took a pencil and made several holes, all the way down to the eraser. Voila, the propagated stem could then be gently tucked into its new, deep little hole. After waiting around 6 weeks, I gently tugged on the tops of each stem, already being able to see which ones took by the greenness of its top leaves. Some stems I had to leave in a few extra weeks, but eventually I had about a dozen new lavender plants out of those originally twenty. Survival of the fittest I suppose.
If you ever came over here between 2019 and 2024, you might remember the long beautiful hedgerow of French and Spanish lavender along the driveway. Last year, we decided to rip it all out so that we could make the “parking lot” for the homeschool tutorial we host here a little bit safer when it comes to traffic safety, complete with entrance and exit lanes. I was sad to rip it all out, but I was also looking forward to propagating as much lavender as I could in order to establish a NEW hedgerow along the preschool yard fence. I wasn’t able to start that process this Spring because the soil in this new bed was still not composted down enough. About this time last year we had filled the 8 x 50 foot bed with the contents of our barn during our biannual barn clean out. And let it be known chicken manure takes 2-3 times longer than other more wonderful manures, like from cows. But I digress, the composting metaphors are for another day.
The lavender propagation metaphor has to do with the past 3 years of hosting an incredible homeschool tutorial on our farm. Like most stories of major growth and expansion in business or nonprofit sectors, some parts of the story are as painful as being continually scraped by a paring knife, other parts like ripping out my beloved hedgerow and throwing it all into the fire pit, save all the healthiest stems to propagate and winter over in pots, until the new bed was finished composting. But when it comes to the interactions we’ve had with all the families who come here twice a week, Sept through May, it’s as delightful as holding armfuls of lavender blooms to my face and breathing deeply, or making sachets and other fun/useful crafts with its tiny buds. And the excitement over the thought of future growth and expansion of the homeschool tutorial (reminder, this the third nonprofit I’ve started, I love this kind of stuff with strategic growth planning) is exactly the same as I feel toward the thought of a new hedge row of lavender that is properly placed and practically guaranteed to explode with beauty over time.
Seed Germination:
The morning after we told our daughters that we are going to move, our eldest said she woke up from a dream that she thinks came directly from God. In that dream, we were on our new farm and she asked me where her daddy was. I said, “he just finished putting wire fencing back into the wood line in order to expand the animal pasture. Now he’s sprinkling fruit tree seeds into the woods.” I find it fascinating that I’d just gotten into a great conversation the day before with a friend whose husband is a permaculturalist and food forest designer. I’d already had wonderful visions of these friends coming up to visit and giving us guidance on our woods, so to me, her dream seems quite prophetic. The metaphor here is in the lives of our daughters. We pray that the small seeds we plant in them today will grow to be strong trees bearing much spiritual fruit, just as the seeds my mom planted in me have grown into all of this that you are currently witnessing.
Last of my Musing Thoughts for today:
Jim and I have always known that the Lord was only asking us to steward this 3 acres in Pasadena. My husband’s leadership in our household is the truest metaphor of Christ’s love for us. The day we closed on the house in August 2013, Jim did not want to move in a single box until we raised a cross on the back of the property. My beloved organized some of his strongest friends to come over and help pull a huge dead standing tree out the woods. They chainsawed off a section about 20 feet high, with the cross beam about 8 feet wide. You could see it all the way from the road, as well as from our living room couch, a continual reminder of our vow to the Lord to steward this property to the best of our abilities. This past spring, we decided it was finally time to bring the cross down. After nearly 12 years of it sitting in a very deep hole, the base was starting to rot and it didn’t seem safe, especially with around 45 children back there during recess four days a week. So Easter weekend, I organized a big community Egg Hunt and invited our community out. At the end of the event we gathered a few friends and made some remarks, praising God for all that He has done on this property since we moved in. Then Jim pushed it over, and honestly it was pretty anticlimactic, it actually made me quite sad. I now realize six months later that it’s because God is calling us away from this property, and has a new mission for us that we can’t even fully grasp. We’re just being obedient and making the wisest life choices we possibly can. Praise God for James 1:5 “But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him.” We are blown away by all God has done here over the past 12 years, including the totally epic Nostalgia Worship Night last weekend. Now you know, throughout that entire event, I was feeling that deep and bittersweet kind of nostalgia that keeps unfolding in the moment. We do not know what else God has in store for us next but we are sooo ready for it!
