This dream didn't start with a farm. It started with a husband, a mountain, and a longing for something more real than what we had.
My husband and I always wanted to live in the mountains. That was the dream — land, open sky, food growing from the ground, a life that meant something. We made our way through Golden, Colorado, then Fruita. Beautiful places. But no land. Then a few years in Las Vegas, which is its own kind of story. All the while, the dream of a homestead stayed alive. We kept looking. We kept believing it was out there somewhere.
What we didn't know was that the road to that land would be paved with more loss than either of us had imagined.
"The land doesn't care about your past. It just asks what you're willing to tend to today."
The losses that shaped everything
I lost my dad in a boat accident. I lost my father-in-law to colon cancer.
And then there was Starr — taken by scleroderma, a disease that came slowly and relentlessly, and left a hole in my life that I still feel every single day.
In the summer of 2012, I knew she wasn't doing well. I could feel it — the way you feel things about the people you love before anyone says the words out loud. I needed to go to her. So I went.
We had the hard conversations. The ones you're never ready for. She wanted to live. We prayed together. We cried together. I held her hands and I tried to memorize everything about her — the way she sounded, the way she looked at me, the way it felt to be her daughter.
A month later, she was gone.
The week we found Montana
That same summer — the summer before she passed — my husband and I visited Northwest Montana the week of the Fourth of July. We drove through the valley, looked out at the mountains, felt something shift inside us both.
This was it. This was the place.
After my mom passed, buying land wasn't just a dream anymore. It was the next step. It was the thing we had to do — not just for us, but as an answer to everything we had been through. A homestead. A small farm. A place where real food was a necessity, not a luxury. A place where life made sense in a way that loss had made it stop making.
We moved to Northwest Montana and we never looked back.
"Growing whole food was my heart. I wanted to live better, eat better — and share that with the world."
Where Elizabeth's Farm Table really began
Looking back, I can see now that Elizabeth's Farm Table started in that season of grief. I just didn't know it yet. The passion for holistic, natural living — for food as medicine, for growing things with your own hands — it was becoming something in me that needed a place to go.
I wondered if people would follow. If they would believe in this journey with me. If a girl from Colorado with dirt under her fingernails and grief in her chest could actually build something meaningful out of all of it.
And then more loss came. People I loved deeply — loss that continued to find me, that didn't stop just because I had already been through enough. And each loss made this mission more urgent. More necessary. More soul-level serious.
This stopped being a hobby. It became a soul project.
What the land keeps teaching me
The land has taught me that there is no perfect day. No perfect season of grief. No moment when everything is lined up just right and healing becomes easy. You just keep going. You keep growing.
Every year I add and change things in the gardens. I try new varieties, move things around, let some things go and plant new things in their place. Just like we adjust our sails. Just like grief asks us to — again and again, for as long as we are living.
We continue to grow, die, rest, repeat. The garden knows this rhythm better than we do. And when you spend enough time in it, you start to know it too.
Food became medicine — inside and out
Growing real food changed the way I understood my own body. I dove deep — into nutrition research, whole food eating, anti-inflammatory living, the science of what food actually does inside us at a cellular level. I thought about the ones I had lost. About what their bodies went through. About what they might have had access to if someone had told them sooner.
Food became medicine for me — both internally and externally. What I eat. What I put on my skin. What I choose to bring into my home and my life. All of it connected. All of it intentional.
I became a Licensed Massage Therapist because I wanted to understand the body even more deeply. I ran half marathons because I needed to prove — to myself and to the people I'd lost — that this body was still here, still capable, still worth taking care of.
The horses came. The subterranean greenhouse came. The community grew. And with every season, this place became more of what it was always meant to be — a homestead built on love, loss, and the stubborn belief that real food and honest living can heal us in ways nothing else can.
To my dad, to Starr, to my mom — and to everyone else I've carried through these years — this is for you. You are why this exists. You are why I keep going. And wherever you are, I hope you know it.
If you're in the middle of something hard right now — if you're grieving, or exhausted, or just desperately looking for a way back to yourself — you are in the right place. Start small. Go outside if you can. Put your hands in the dirt. Eat something real.
The rest will follow. It always does.
With love from the homestead,
Elizabeth