Send me $5 and I’ll mail you plans on how to build a raised bed just like this one!

Throughout 2019, we will be celebrating 20 years of life at Winged Elm Farm. For those who can stomach social media, I have begun by posting a series of weekly photos on Facebook documenting the journey. You can find them on the Winged Elm Farm page. Looking back at my journal and flipping through boxes of photos (thereby avoiding my chores) has put me in a nostalgic mood and gotten me thinking about what I’ve learned these past two decades.

People who want to live the farm life approach me for advice surprisingly often. Being the shy, retiring, completely nonjudgmental sort that I am, I usually refrain from thinking I have anything to offer. But, today I’m feeling generous with my accumulated wisdom. So here it is, a distillation of just a few things you would need to know were you, too, to pursue the joys and challenges of owning a small, diversified farm.

• Gloves: Knitted winter gloves keep your hands nice and toasty if you do no work. The same for insulated gloves. But try and manage fence repairs, stretching barbed wire for hours on end, and you will find your knitted gloves in tatters, bits and pieces stuck along the fenceline. Get yourself some proper leather and canvas work gloves, or put them on your Christmas list. They come in bundles and are dirt cheap.

• Footwear (a favorite topic): It should go without saying that flip-flops, sandals, and fancy-pants boots don’t cut it on an East Tennessee farm. Get yourself some proper rubber boots, specifically Wellingtons. The cost is $28 at Tractor Supply, and they will last you about one and a half years. You will wear them 90 percent of the time. The remaining time, on those rare dry days, a solid pair of work boots will do the job. Think clay, mud, and 1,500-pound animals when making your selection.

• Be a cook: You are raising your own meat, growing your own vegetables, and maintaining a few fruit trees, right? Then stop buying that food from the grocery. Learn how to cook something other than steak and pork chops. Your kids won’t eat yucky eggs that came from a chicken instead of a store? Do as the Spartans did: leave them (the kids) weak and exposed out on a hillside. Then try again.

• Be a neighbor: Build a fence, mend a fence, borrow equipment, lend equipment, and show up with a chainsaw when a tree comes down. Attend a funeral and a wedding, help castrate a calf, drop off some surplus vegetables (especially armfuls of zucchini), and give lots of unsolicited advice. Show up with a shotgun when you see lights on where they shouldn’t be in the middle of the night — just shout a careful you-who first.

• Don’t be a snowflake. Do your chickens really need a retirement plan? The stewing hen is now the thing in fine cooking circles; build a savory pot of chicken and dumplings around her carcass. Likewise old sows and cantankerous rams; there are an endless variety of uses for whole hog or “lamb” sausage. You are on the farm now, not at a petting zoo, and you’re going to need to make some hard choices. Animals will die, one way or the other. Treat them well, feed them well, and when the time is right, eat them well.

• Start young: Even just this past week, I had The Conversation. Someone I know well who is 60 years old is preparing to buy land and start ranching. My advice: Don’t. You no longer have the physical strength. Your muscle memory tells you that you are a teenager. Your back uses a different calendar. Use your remaining years to read entertaining stories of farm life to your still-healthy vertebrae.

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Reading this weekend: Why Liberalism Failed (Deneen) and Boswell’s Journey to the Hebrides.