We Didn't Plan to Be Farmers. We Just Chose to Be.
I didn't grow up thinking about land. I grew up thinking about getting somewhere… moving fast, building something, making things happen. Los Angeles will do that to you. It gives you ambition before it gives you roots.
My husband Dennis grew up on the Southside of Chicago, which will do the exact same thing in a completely different way.
Between the two of us, we had drive in abundance. What we didn't have and what we hadn't yet thought to want, was soil under our feet and time to breathe.
We were living in Silver Spring when the search started. It began when the woman we were renting a house from decided she wanted to move back in… Abruptly.
We started looking at properties the way you look at a menu when you're hungry but don't know what you want… Changing the filter, looking to see what else is available, and then something shifted.
We jokingly said, “What if we bought a house with a lot of land?” We expanded the filters, and Dennis stumbled across a place called Welcome, Maryland. I was 5 months pregnant at the time, but we made the hour and a half drive and our jaws dropped immediately. I remember saying, “This is for us.”
When we bought the property, we thought we were just buying a home. We didn't fully understand that we were choosing a different kind of life. At least not in the beginning.
Today, Eighty-Five Fifty-Five Farms is very real and very alive, and we all tend to it.
Dennis handles the operations side of the farm. He is, in the truest sense of the word, the one who makes things hapens. He's the reason the beds get built, the systems get set up, and the animals are cared for before the sun fully rises. He approaches farming the way he approaches everything: methodically, seriously, and with more patience than I probably deserve credit for understanding.
Then there's our two-year-old, who has no idea that most children don't grow up watching food grow from the grown or collecting eggs to make his favorite dishes. To our little one, this is just life.
Normal and good.
And watching that unfold; watching him grow up with dirt on his hands and open sky overhead with eagles flying around, is one of the quiet reasons this whole thing matters so much to me.
Our Cane Corso keeps watch over all of it with the quiet authority of someone who has decided this land is his to protect. Our mini poodle mix, on the other hand, has decided the farm is simply a larger, more interesting place to play. He’s been with us the longest (10 years!!!!) and this is also very new and different for him. Last, our chickens, our free-ranging, unbothered, opinionated chickens, have their own ideas about the schedule every single morning in what we call Cluck Cluck City.
This is our family. This is our farm.
I think a lot about why this matters.
Not just to us, but in the larger sense; what it means for two Black entrepreneurs from major cities to put down roots in Charles County, to build an agritourism destination from the ground up, to grow food and open our gates to families who need somewhere to exhale.
We didn't inherit this land. We didn't come from farming families who passed down the knowledge. We learned. We're still learning. And I think that's actually part of what makes this place what it is; it was built on a choice, made deliberately, by two people who decided that slow and intentional was worth more than fast and impressive.
That choice is the foundation of everything we're planting here.
This blog, Notes from 8555, is where I'll document all of it. The harvests and the hard days. The lessons the land keeps teaching us. The community we're building, one visit at a time. The real story of what it looks like to build something from nothing but intention and a whole lot of faith in God, in self and in land.
Welcome to the farm. We're glad you're here.
— Nicole from 8555 Farms
