Hello! We’re Norm & Jamie, former GenX long-distance high school sweethearts that drifted apart after HS but came back together through Facebook 20 years later. We have 2 sons, Drake & Garrett who are now teens.
Norm is originally from Kalamazoo and Jamie from Muskegon. Early on after we got back together, Jamie was working in Grand Rapids and Norm in Sturgis while living in Kalamazoo. We were both driving an hour in opposite directions with Norm bringing both boys to daycare in Sturgis.
After Norm and the boys were in an accident on the way to Sturgis with both boys still in car seats and Garrett not yet even crawling, we started considering our lifestyle choices and decided that Jamie would leave her job and we would buy a home in/near Sturgis.
Thankfully, the housing market was not as insane as it is today and we were able to find a beautiful 10A property on the MI/IN state line just 15 minutes outside of Sturgis.
With all that land, we couldn’t let ourselves just leave it be. Dreams began to take hold…. Although both of us were primarily city kids, we are both Michigan kids and joke that our 1st date was duck hunting. (Which is where Drake got his name and yes, there is a much longer story that goes along with that.)
We floundered around a bit in our would-be farming endeavors, accidentally killing many fruit trees, blueberry bushes and even almost a dozen chickens in one stupid swoop but we eventually started to learn.
Fruit is our main goal with a small orchard full of apples, pears, peaches, cherries, and plums. We also have small patches of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, currants, elderberries, etc. We also keep bees and chickens and have run pastured pigs in the past and may again in the future.
Now, much of our focus is on helping other would-be and up-and-coming farmers get their names out there and for our fellow local consumers to get more access to their products by helping out in managing our local Sturgis Farmers Market.