Welcome to Hope Ranch 🥑

We bought a farm!

The same week we brought our fourth and last baby home from the hospital, we closed escrow on a 23-acre avocado and citrus orchard.

That was December 2022.

My word for 2022 was “fruitful,” but if you had asked me in January of last year what this word meant to me, I thought maybe I’d publish a few more blog posts. Never would I have come up with this: a perfect baby girl, Hannah Hope, and the serendipitous provision of acres of literal fruit.

For years, my husband and I have been talking and dreaming about one day owning a property big enough to house our entire extended family and treasured enough to be passed down to the next generation. In August, I even wrote an essay about it in my friend

Ashlee Gadd

’s workshop. The essay, grounded in Isaiah 54:2, was called Set Up Camp. It was an essay about both dreaming big dreams and living within the good boundaries of our actual circumstances, about how God is the God of both the promise—the dream—and the present—the reality. I wrote about my dream of a family retreat house and land that we would call Camp David (a nod to both the presidential retreat and my husband’s first name). 

“We can live frustrated that the dream is not the present and miss the present entirely. Or we can learn to look at where we are with renewed gratitude and pray expectantly with open hands for what could be.”

My husband sent me the Redfin link to the property—a house with a pool, barn, storage sheds, and hundreds of avocado and citrus trees—in October. He told me that it would meet warehousing needs of his business, be a place where we could potentially put guest units, and act as a home for his parents to move to that would allow them to be closer to our family. The avocados were a bonus. The property checked every single one of our boxes. Even with another all-cash offer, the sellers accepted ours. We would get the keys on my 36th birthday.

The setting of the essay I wrote—the place where we gathered last summer for cousin camp—were the mountains just behind our new property, the orchards we’re calling Hope Ranch.

“The biggest, wildest, scariest dreams to dream are the ones that require us to step out in faith beyond what we could ever accomplish on our own. Those dreams are the ones revealed, over time, to be infused with the Divine.”

It’s tradition for us to spend the first days of January dreaming, planning and praying as a family. We usually pack up and head to a local kid-friendly hotel where we roast marshmallows at the firepit, sip wine from the hotel’s happy hour beverage setup, and snuggle up on the hotel beds to watch a movie. 

This year, we drove down to the ranch. The afternoon of January 1, I packed up a slow cooker prepped with beef stew, the kids’ pajamas, baby’s dockatot. We slept at the main house we named Harvest House. The afternoon and evening were foggy, rainy, but the next morning, we woke up to clear, blue skies and rays of sunshine streaming through the windows. I watched the Rose Parade as I always do, this time sipping a coffee and eating a breakfast burrito that Dave had bought from down the hill. Dave took the boys for a ride in the Kubota and picked the ripened citrus. A new tradition.

“Can we live both radically attune to the present and alive to a vision for the future? How do we lean into both stewardship and surrender?”

It might be years before we can afford to get the pool rebuilt and all the guest units (tiny houses? airstreams?) —Camp David—added. In the meantime, we’re learning how to cultivate the land, learning about how to know when the avocados are ready for harvest, figuring out the best way to sell them and when, the new math. Farming, by necessity, is a business, and while we don’t have all the marketing collateral designed yet, I know for sure—because I love a good alliteration—that we’re branding the avocados Hope Hass.