If you’ve been following along, you know what “it” refers to … the land, the farm, the place John loved most.

This week, it became official: Hannah and Joey are the owners of the land.

Five years ago, the lease-to-own agreement was initiated, and this week we finally signed the last of the paperwork. It’s a strange thing, watching a deal like that finally close – five years of Friday CSA share pickups, five years of watching the fields change hands a little more each season, and then one signature and it’s done. The land is theirs. Truly, on paper, theirs.

I keep coming back to 2013, when John and I first moved out here. We wanted more space. We wanted to be closer to the land – closer to Mother Nature, in whatever small, unglamorous, dirt-under-your-fingernails way two people can be. We didn’t know yet what that would turn into. We just knew we wanted room to grow something, and quiet, and woods.

John found all of it here. He was never happier than when he had his hands in the soil – he grew vegetables the old-fashioned way, organic before it was a marketing word, just because that’s how he believed food should be grown. He kept a garden that fed us and friends, with plenty left to freeze for winter. And when he wasn’t gardening, he was tearing around the property on his dirt bikes. He carved out a track through the fields and into the woods – John grinning and whooping it up under his helmet, completely in his element.

He loved this land in a way that was total and unshowy. He just loved being on it.

John passed away in February 2021. That loss reshaped everything for so many who loved him – it’s not something you get over, it’s something you carry, and some days it’s heavier than others. I won’t pretend this milestone doesn’t come with an ache. Bittersweet …

But I also thought about what he’d say if he could see this place now.

Because this land isn’t sitting fallow. It isn’t a stupid uniform green lawn. It’s a working organic farm – Hannah and Joey’s farm, Ramblin’ Sol – and it is more alive than it has ever been. There are rows of plants where John’s garden used to be, hoop houses standing where hay once grew, a CSA feeding hundreds of families, a farm that’s become a real gathering place for the community. There are kids running around the fields now, too – new life, new noise, new reasons for this soil to matter to somebody. John would be thrilled. Woo-hoo, he would yell! This was exactly the kind of thing he wanted for this place – not preserved under glass or ripped up to build a mcmansion, but used, worked, loved by someone else the way he loved it.

I got to know Hannah and Joey as a CSA member before any of this was ever discussed. What struck me, picking up my share week after week, was how much they reminded me of John – the same total, unshowy devotion to good food and good land. The property was listed for sale after John’s death – he was very clear that he wanted me to move to be closer to friends and family. Two deals fell through and I took a step back to reflect on the how/why of that.

Hannah and Joey came over one day because I broke something on the tractor and had absolutely no idea how to fix it. We chatted and a light bulb went off for me: why not sell to these amazing people? I brought up the idea and I’ll never forget their response: “We didn’t know how or when to ask you about this”.

We ran numbers, built spreadsheets, shared them back and forth – good thing that both Hannah and I love a detailed spreadsheet! I remember feeling an actual physical weight lift off my shoulders the day we shook hands on it. I knew the land was going to someone who would keep it exactly what it was always meant to be.

It’s worth saying explicitly: this is not how it usually goes. Land access is one of the biggest barriers facing young farmers in this country, especially organic growers, especially women, especially anyone without family money or inherited acreage behind them. Hannah and Joey did the hard way what most people can’t do at all – they farmed leased land for years, without the security to invest in the soil the way they wanted to, until this lease-to-own arrangement finally gave them a foothold. Multiply that story by thousands of young farmers around the country, all trying to grow good food on land they don’t own and can’t afford, and you start to see how fragile our food system really is. We talk a lot about food deserts and supply chains and the price of groceries, but underneath all of it is this simpler, older problem: the people who know how to grow real food often can’t get their hands on the dirt to do it.

So this closing, small as it is in the grand scheme, matters so much to me. It’s proof that it can work – that a family who loves land can pass it to a family who will love it just as hard, and that the food system doesn’t have to keep getting more distant and more corporate and more disconnected from soil. Sometimes it can go the other way. Sometimes eight acres in Cream Ridge can stay exactly what they were always meant to be: a place where things grow, where people gather, where good food starts.

Congratulations to Hannah and Joey. This land is yours now, truly, and I couldn’t be happier about where it landed.

And John – I know you’re out there somewhere, wishing you could be digging in that dirt and teaching their girls how to ride dirt bikes. But I think you’d take one look at those rows of vegetables and just be glad the tomatoes came back.