A bit of background.

Hey! Welcome to the blog part of Respite Bee Farm! Here I hope to do updates about our farm house restoration, our small home stead, and of course all things bees.

A little background about how we came to be. Most of the time the blog posts will be written by me. (Lizzie Baecker) and most of the beekeeping work will be done by my Husband (Ben Baecker)

Let’s start at the beginning. In December 2019 a beekeeping hippy nurse met a florist city girl and if you don’t believe in love at first sight then look at us. Our first date was January 1, 2020 and we got married on July 3, 2020. If you’re counting, that’s six months of dating before we got married. To say it was a whirlwind is an understatement. But hey, when you know you know. And we have been madly in love the whole time.

Once we were FINALLY married, we lived in a lovely house in town in the middle central Texas. We tried our hardest to make a small homestead off the property. We had a small garden, and a couple of rabbits, and of course bees.

However, we knew that this was just temporary. So we talked about what we would do next. We talked about moving away from the promise land (a.k.a texas). We talked about doing travel nursing. We talked about working as missionaries. So many possibilities. That was until I was pregnant with our first baby.

I wanted so badly to stay in Texas to stay close to my family. But Ben didn’t want to raise his new family in town. He had grown up on a small homestead and had seen the work ethic and knowledge that came along with working the land. So that’s what he wanted for his family.

We started praying that the Lord would open up possibilities for what HE wanted for us. And in February of 2022 we found our farmhouse.

Here’s the thing.

We couldn’t live on the land that the house was on. If we wanted to live in that house we would need to move the whole house somewhere else. We didn’t have any land in mind nor knew of any for sale, but we wanted to rebuild that house.

Again we started praying that the Lord would show us what we would do next if this was something that he wanted for us.

Enter in the Cobb family…

We had just met a new couple that are regenerative sheep farmers and instantly created a close friendship. They saw what we were desiring to do with our family and believe it or not, they were currently needing to sell some land off. So they asked if we wanted to be neighbors.

In April of 2022 they offered us 10.5 acres of undeveloped land just outside of the town that we were currently living in. The Lord had provided for us, not only a house, but also land to put it on!

In May we had our baby and by June we bought our farmhouse for $1,000. That’s right. We bought our house in cash.

And that’s how we started our homestead. With a house in a completely different town and undeveloped land.

But hey… we’re still in the promise land.