Hi! I’m Michele.
Some stories start with a grand plan. Mine started with a chicken.
Actually, it started with chicken pot pie — and then the chickens and bigger garden followed, the way things do when you start paying attention to where your food comes from. One thing led to another, and somewhere between learning to put up tomatoes and figuring out what to do with too many peaches, I fell in love with something I didn’t have a name for yet. It was the knowledge. The old knowledge – the kind that used to pass from grandmother to granddaughter over a kitchen table, the kind that kept families fed through hard winters and dry summers, the kind that’s been slipping away so quietly most people haven’t noticed it’s gone.
Missouri farming is in my family’s bones – five generations deep. We’ve been working this particular 500 acre stretch of Ozark land since the 1960s, and when I began acquiring the historic homes on the property in 2015, something shifted. What had always been a cattle farm started revealing itself as something more: a place worth preserving, and a story worth telling. That’s how Ozark Farms Heritage & Nature Preserve came to be — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to keeping Missouri’s land, traditions, and stories alive. (If you’ve never heard of Camp Sigel, the Union encampment that operated right here during the Civil War — well, that’s exactly the kind of thing this blog exists for.)
This blog is where I bring all of it together.
You’ll find posts about the land itself — trail building, stewardship, what 500 Ozark acres teach you when you slow down long enough to listen. You’ll find heritage skills: composting and soil health, growing and preserving food, the practical knowledge our great-grandparents considered basic and we’ve somehow turned into a lost art. You’ll find Missouri history told the way I like history told — with real names, real dates, and the kind of details that make you say wait, I never knew that. And you’ll find the story of building something from scratch: the events, the programs, the moments that reminded me why this all matters.
I write for women like me — curious, busy, rooted in family and place, and hungry for something real. Whether you found me through the Strawberry Festival, the Girls Guide to Homesteading, or just a random search about sourdough or manure composting (it happens more than you’d think), I’m glad you’re here.
Missouri has a story worth telling. Pull up a chair.
— Michele